Zhong Yuan Qigong: real or fake?

[Maribelle.Mar]

Hi there everyone!

I need your knowledge, facts and information to share.

I came up with some doubts of the qigong practice I do and under certain circumstances I started to raise a question whether Zhong Yuan Qigong is real at all?

What amazed me that after I started to construct an "information puzzle" the picture I get is rather blurry than clear.

* no one can explain me the lineage (origins) of it - but in other hand one repeats the mantra of "7000 years old? how come?

* i practiced karate once upon and i know at least four worldwide recognized masters of the lineage (regarding history and evolution). How come that the only known master of ZYQ is Xu Mingtang?

* how come that the "legend" of mentioned master and his ZYQ starts only at 90' and exclusively in post-soviet countries (I'm one of them) where people have no ideas about east and might believe to anything they are told.

* how come google provides me so little information about it and the one I get is so limited, and seems is well organized "copy-paste" from only one origin. Seems as propaganda. No forum discussions, no constructive critics, no cons vs pros, no comparison. Only books in ebay...This is too weird in such information age.

* I know that nothing is for free, but in my case mine instructor is focused more on money collection, obligations of weekly attendance and on the repeating mantra "you should prove you can belong to this school". Seems as "pyramid marketing" rather directing one to self-experience.

* I dont know how about others but in mine case many times the Shaolin monastery has been mentioned as a keyword. Frankly, I got lost over explanations why and whether ZYQ is some secret teachings from Shaolin, whether only some principles been taken from it, whether is has something to do with Xu Mingtang family and succession, whether whether .... In result I contacted Shaolin (unless I got the wrong ones!) and they told : "shaolin temple have never originated any Shaolin's teachings what we have seen from http://www.qigong.ru/beginners/index.php?fl=1&num=6&lng=e‍, . The master Xu Mingtang‍ must have certificate or authorize‍d letter from shaolin temple, otherwise we can not prove that he have something to do with Shaolin monastery‍.". Probably with my doubts I would never meet Xu Mingtang to ask has he any certification or whats the real story behind the "keyword of Shaolin".

 

Despice my experience and my doubts - I dont say ZYQ is bad or good. If one finds it suitable - I'm happy for him/ her, but at this moment I'm confused about it and not sure if it is a trusted and reliable way I go. I'm afraid to end up in the wrong direction. Therefore I ask you to share - WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ZYQ?

 

ps. Im not interesting in ebay books or information solely found on few main websites. Thank you.

[ChiDragon]

After all that said, if you know what is the true definition of Qigong, then you should be able to determine it is real or not....!!!

Edited June 25, 2014 by ChiDragon

[Ish]

ignore my previous comment , i am incorrect.

Edited June 27, 2014 by Ish

[soaring crane]

Xu Mintan's story about his family and lineage is a fantasy. I've attended a few seminars with him, level one only, and felt good about the material and the energetics, but I believe he's personna non grata in Germany now.

 

Without dwelling on the claims, how do you feel with the exercises and methods? How far are you? The further levels become quite risky, not the kind of thing to do without a lot of experience and knowledge. I think he might bring people through his system too quickly.

 

There were quite a few Russian females hanging onto him, btw. And they were extremely esoteric.

 

PS - great av pic you have there

Edited June 25, 2014 by soaring crane

[Andrei]

It may be a branch of Zhong Gong which started the Qigong movement in China. They were more numerous than Falun Gong and many masters immigrated all over Europe. I started Qigong in my country with students of these masters that founded their own Qigong styles. So basically this is what happened, even Zhang Hong Bao founder of Zhong Gong or Li Hong Zhi founder of Falun Gong, they invented their own styles.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhong_Gong

 

I bet all Chinese immigrants like Chun Yi Lin (Spring Forest Qigong) or Robert Peng or Jenny Lamb (Yi Gong) they all started studying Qigong because of or as Zhong Gong practicants.

[NotVoid]

Hi Maribelle.Mar. Xu Mingtang has said what he is teaching comes from a tradition which was passed on through many generations in his family. The connection to the Shaolin temple is that Xu Mingtang says one of his ancestors a long time ago served as a temple guardian at Shaolin temple, and there is a statue in Shaolin temple which pays homage to that ancestor. There is no connection in his system to zhong gong. Xu Mingtang also runs a qigong therapy healing clinic and school in China, in which his medical qigong healing method called 'image medicine' is taught and practiced. As with many qigong and martial arts traditions, it can be hard to know if claims made about their origins are valid or not, as many such traditions were not ever made public until very recent times, and some traditions no doubt still are not made known publicly. Whether there is any info on the origins which can be found on Google or not is therefore really not an indication of anything. Also, it is not uncommon for various traditional qigong and martial arts lineages to claim a lineage that goes back for thousands of years, because many traditional practices are claimed to have originated in the very beginnings of Chinese civilization, and carried on from there. There is often no way to prove or disprove whether there is any truth to such claims however, but in my experience it is not uncommon to hear such claims in martial arts and cultivation traditions from China. As always with any qigong or martial arts system, it really boils down to what resonates with each individual person. If you are finding some system good for you, then great. If not, then you can simply move on. All the best.

Edited June 27, 2014 by NotVoid

[Fazeng]

About "Zhongyuan Qigong" name.

Zhongyuan (中原) - (Central Plain or Midland) - refers to the area on the lower reaches of the Yellow River which formed the cradle of Chinese civilization.

In a broader context, the term Zhongyuan refers to Chinese civilization and China proper, regions directly governed by centralized Chinese governments and dynasties.

Also Henan province is often referred to as Zhongyuan.

[Walker]

I do not know Xu Mingtang personally, but I know two of his close, long-term students who are in Beijing. I also have a friend who went on one of their month-long summer retreats at Shaolin and another friend who is a TCM doctor who received some training at Kundawell. There are numerous members of this forum who staunchly insist that Xu Mingtang's teachings are fake, but without question some of his students have developed real healing abilities. I can say this because I have witnessed their work firsthand on myself and on one of my own patients. I also have a friend,a TCM doctor who has learned from many famous and accomplished teachers, who was treated by one of the healers who helped me (she helped both of us for free, by the way), and his experience was very positive.

 

Nevertheless, according to the closest of my aforementioned friends (who has been involved with the system for over a decade), most of the system's powerful techniques are its most simple ones, whereas their more complex qigong is not very useful. Another of my friends who studied at Kundawell, who is a doctor, has pointed out to me that Xu Mingtang's teachings place a lot of emphasis on opening up spiritual abilities without first providing practitioners with a strong foundation in terms of physical and mental health, leading to imbalances of various types amongst practitioners, and the unfortunate realit that many Kundawell students are simply not healthy. Although most of the students at Kundawell apparently do not develop abilities even approaching Xu's, that does not mean that the teachings are fake.

 

As for the rest, I think that NotVoid's post is excellent. It is very hard to know what is real and what is false when talking about lineage in China. However, the notion that something could have been passed down for hundreds or even thousands of years without changing so vastly as to be nearly unrecognizable to its creators is probably unrealistic. Look at baguazhang. It is less than 200 years old and already the differences between styles are so vast as to make it impossible for the proliferation of masters in China and around the world to agree on much of anything. I have encountered the same reality in, for example, the Dragon Gate tradition, which is not yet 1000 years old.

[soaring crane]

It is very hard to know what is real and what is false when talking about lineage in China. However, the notion that something could have been passed down for hundreds or even thousands of years without changing so vastly as to be nearly unrecognizable to its creators is probably unrealistic.

 

 

i just want to make clear that this is the only thing I was criticising in my previous post. The problem for me is, Xumingtang talks about this ancient lineage all the time. So it becomes a question of character. I also, as I mentioned previously, and Walker also brought up, believe he can be reckless in his teachings i.e. introducing advanced techniques to complete novices, without any mention of problems that can occur.

 

Example: his introductory seminars started (and I mean right in the first minutes) with 30 minutes standing followed by intense qi-ball building (between the hands - bigger, smaller, etc), and then an aggressive and fast form of microcosmic orbit, also for about half an hour. And this with relatively large groups of complete strangers.

Edited July 6, 2014 by soaring crane

[Chang]

I am not familiar Zhong Yuan Qigong and so cannot comment on the practice. However so far as lineage goes we must be mindful that a great deal of rubbish is spoken as regards this by persons seeking to give authority and provenance to their practice.

 

It is a basic tenet of taoism that change is constant. It would be impossible for a system of Qigong to remain unchanged over long periods of time as improvements or misunderstandings made by practitioners would come into play.

 

As regards Soaring Cranes suggestion that students may be pushed along too fast in this system. Well that is always a danger in energy work and it will always come back to the fact that practitioners must take responsibility for their own practice and its results.

 

What about the esoteric Russian females hanging around Mingtang? Well that is another question isn't it?

[Maribelle.Mar]

First of all - thank you for the discussion.

And yes, these issues bothering me also. And from the discussion above i still dont get it :

1. why the majority is Russians? even the Canadian (as example) or other country ZYQ association consist mainly of Russian surnames...

2. linage is important. so far I dig solely up to 90'. does it mean ZYG is only 20 years old ( as they state 7000!)? how come there is no more information? no more discussions??? I say - imposible!

3. and I can confirm - from the first seminar minute we (complete novices) went in to long (up to one hour) practiced and yes I saw many people fainting (and the explanations "these people wasn't ready" or "had incompatibility with qigong" didnt sound right for me).

 

That's why I raised a question - what is this? real of fake? what do you really know about it (excluding information from the few main "copy-pasted" websites).

 

Sadly I dont have any chinese friends. Would be interesting to know what they do speak in they local language about it - I guess there must be more discussions on that topic than in english.

 

We ("Complete novices") lack of such independent information to make a clear puzzle picture!!!!!!

Edited July 6, 2014 by Maribelle.Mar

[Gerard]

I came up with some doubts of the qigong practice

 

Stay away from anything that has got the tag of Qigong. It's just a watered down version of real practice. Chinese Cultural Revolution popcorn.

 

Stick to either of the following two or both:

 

1. Internal Martial Arts

2. Buddhist Vipassana

 

Make sure you move a lot, a lot. Here's an interesting account of how much some practitioners are able to move:

Walking meditation in the Thai Forest Tradition

Balance your practice with seated meditation but your main focus ought to be 'mindful' moving.

[goldisheavy]

It's fake, but then so is this Earth and your human body. Choose your fakeness carefully.

[soaring crane]

goldisheavy is back. Haha!

 

weird, huh?

[NotVoid]

Stay away from anything that has got the tag of Qigong. It's just a watered down version of real practice. Chinese Cultural Revolution popcorn.

I do not believe that this is necessarily true at all. I have encountered teachers from Hong Kong who fled mainland China to Hong Kong when the cultural revolution was starting, and they used the term 'hay gong' (the Cantonese equivalent of the Mandarin 'qi gong') to describe traditional qi cultivation practices as well. It therefore seems it is actually not correct at all to assume that the term 'qi gong', or 'hay gong', is a term that was adopted by the post cultural revolution China to describe watered down practices. The term actually does seem to predate this time period in China, and is often used to describe various traditional cultivation practices. In my experience anyway, the suggestion that the term 'qigong' only applies to inferior or recently derived practices does not seem to have any real basis in reality.

 

Edited July 9, 2014 by NotVoid

[NotVoid]

When some people talk about the 'history' of their practices, there may be an unspoken understanding that they are not necessarily only talking only about specific practices that trace back through one specific line of teachers. They may assume that it is understood that certain practices may have passed through different lineages and outwardly gone through various changes throughout history, but it is the essence of the practices that remains constant through the different lineages and outward changes, and it is the common essence of the practices which they are referring to as the 'history' of their practice. A practice can even disappear for several generations and then be revived at some point although perhaps outwardly somewhat different than earlier practices may have been, but if the essence is the same, then it is really the same sort of practice.

 

Also, whether anyone believes the following or not is neither here nor there to me, but it is not such an uncommon notion in various cultivation systems that when a person reaches a certain level of attainment they are able to view the 'history' of their system or other things with a different form of cognition, and thus when they are commenting on the 'history' of something they may not be referring to history in the normal sense of the word.

 

Regarding how some students of a teacher may teach or act, I have personally found that it is not so uncommon for students to take a certain set of teachings from a teacher and modify it somewhat over time to fit their own preferences and point of view and cultural perspective, and when these students are teaching that system they may often be adding their own personal interpretations and preferences and views onto the teachings, and it can end up being not really how the head teacher teaches it, or intends it to be presented. Do not confuse what some students may do as being necessarily close to what the teacher is trying to teach. Before passing judgment on the teacher, IMO it would be better to get to know the teacher in person first.

 

Maribelle.Mar, Mingtang Xu apparently first started teaching to westerners in the Ukraine or Russia for a number of years, so it should not be surprising that many of his more senior students come from the Ukraine or Russsia region.

 

I will say it again, if a particular system is proving beneficial to a person, then good, if not, then you can move on. The reality is you will be hard pressed to find any system out there that can not be questioned in one way or another. If the affinity is there, you may wish to pursue something. If the affinity is not there, then you can move on. Rational analysis is good to a certain extent, but one can only go so far with such things in regards to certain things.

 

[soaring crane]

I do not believe that this is necessarily true at all.

 

neither do most people here, but we're all entitled to our opinions

[NotVoid]

neither do most people here, but we're all entitled to our opinions

Sure, but, no one said that people are not entitled to their opinions. I have just added my own views to the thread.