contextualizing MCO and pre birth jing qi shen

[sillybearhappyhoneyeater]

When we do MCO or He Che training, we need to be aware of its relationship with pre natal jing qi and shen.

Remember that in the Dao De Jing, Laozi uses the terms xi, yi, and wei to describe something very subtle, something minute and hard to sense, and something that exists but is so subtle it can't be noticed.

Many early Daoist texts such as Ling Bao Jing used the idea of xi yi and wei to talk about jing qi and shen, and the is especially applicable to the pre natal state, which is very hard to sense in a tangible way.

 

When our MCO opens, we want it to happen naturally, and not by force of intention.

If you just randomly cycle your intention through the MCO, it is usually called "Kong Zhuan He Che," or "empty circulation of the MCO."   I made another thread about this a while ago, so you can check it if you need reference.

 

The correct way to work with the MCO is subtle, and can be achieved by entering the pre heaven state.   While I am aware that there is some disagreement here about what the pre heaven state is, I think that a very good description for it is summed up in various Daoist classics (including Ling Bao jing, and yuan shi tian zun liao shen jing) as "not see, not hear, not listen, not speak," (bu shi, bu wen, bu ting, bu yan).  this means that when you enter the pre heaven state you will be in "Hun Dun," or the chaotic state and you will forget your sense of self (Chen Yingning called this "Wu wo," or "no me.").

This sense of losing self has two important stages:

 

- the mind becomes calm and you stop paying attention to your thoughts,

- the mind enters a turbid, distant, and chaotic state where it is no longer aware of the pressence of the body (Chen called this "forgetting the meat body").

 

This is when xi, yi, and wei are doing their work, or another way of saying it is this is the time that the pre birth jing qi and shen are being cultivated subtly and without the interference of your post heaven mind.

 

Zhang Boduan said "the three familes meet to see the baby... the baby is one genuine yuan qi,"

so when pre heaven jing qi and shen meet, then the mind naturally cultivates yuan qi, or the genuine qi.

 

This goes much deeper, but basically, when this process is ocurring, you may not notice very much, actually it may seem like something has been taken away.  The way to guage this is what Laozi called "Dao ji," or "the trace of the Dao," which in the context of opening your energy body is the feeling of post heaven qi moving through the various meridians.

 

This movement of Qi often manifests first in the du mai and later ren mai meridians up the back and down the front of the body.    It can also occur in the central meridian, yin qiao, or anywhere else, but what we usually refer to as MCO or He Che is the connection of du and ren mai.

 

Having said all this, this type of practice is not Qi gong, and the Qi gong approach to cultivating the MCO is radically different.   Many qi Gong styles such as Zhineng Gong will ignore the complete rotation of He Che in favour of gradually opening it by indirectly working with other parts of the energy anatomy such as accupoints in the appendages, and the external energy field around the body.

 

While I recognize that different schools contextualize this practice slightly differently, they moslty point to the same concepts, which are that getting the mind to enter the pre heaven state is how to give birth to useful post heaven energy, and that the conncetion of the MCO is something which shouldn't be done through active visualization ("Cun Xiang").

 

I hope this is useful, and naturally, all are welcome to chime in and correct me if you think I made some mistakes   :) :)

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Good post, it should be required reading.  Can you give some quotes that illustrate how Laozi uses "xi, yi, and wei" in the Dao De JIng as you mention here:
 

When we do MCO or He Che training, we need to be aware of its relationship with pre natal jing qi and shen.
Remember that in the Dao De Jing, Laozi uses the terms xi, yi, and wei to describe something very subtle, something minute and hard to sense, and something that exists but is so subtle it can't be noticed.

 
I find these things seem also to be in the Neiye, in what becomes the later terminology of jing, qi and shen, so the connections are clearer, but there are people who deny that Laozi intends this type of meditation at all, it would be good to have some quotes to throw at them.
 
I liked this so much I posted it here:

storing up energy in your consciousness
 
I hope you don't mind.

 

 

 

 

Edit: Corrected some spelling.

Edited December 8, 2015 by Zhongyongdaoist

[sillybearhappyhoneyeater]

視之不見，名曰夷；

shi bu jian, ming yue yi,

 

see and not notice, its name is yi (razed)

 

聽之不聞，名曰希；

ting bu wen, ming yue xi,

 

listen and don't hear, its name is xi (subtle)

 

搏之不得，名曰微。

bo bu de, ming yue wei,

 

grasp but can't hold, its name is wei (minute)

此三者不可致詰，故混而為一。

ci san zhe bu ke zhi jie, gu hun er wei yi,

 

these three things can't be separated,  they are mixed as one.

其上不皦，其下不昧。

qi shang bu jiao, qi xia bu mei,

 

its rise is not bright, its fall is not murky.

繩繩不可名，復歸於無物。

sheng sheng bu ke ming, fu gui yu wu wu,

 

tied down it cannot be named, it returns to a state of emptiness.

是謂無狀之狀，無物之象，是謂惚恍。

shi wei wu zhuang zhi zhuang, wu wu zhi xiang, shi we hu huang,

 

it is known as the shape without shape, the image of empty nature, it is remote and distant.

迎之不見其首，隨之不見其後。

ying zhi bu jian qi shou, sui zhi bu jian qi hou,

 

at its front, not meeting the head, following and not meeting its back.

 

執古之道，以御今之有。

zhi gu zhi dao, yi yu jin zhi you.

 

grasping this ancient Dao, you can govern today.

能知古始，是謂道紀。

neng zhi gu shi, shi wei dao ji.

 

if you can know the ancient way, it is the trace of the Dao.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Thanks, I appreciate your response.  Definitely an interesting take on Chapter 14 and I will review your original post in its light.  Though I like the idea of tracing these things back to the Dao De Jing, I can't see this quote convincing someone who is not already open to the idea.  Are their any others like this?

[sillybearhappyhoneyeater]

That is the main one in Dao De jing, but you can go to other texts too, especially ling Bao Jing, Yu Huang Xin Miao Jing, Lie Zi, and many many more.  They all have very similar ideas.   Yi, Xi, Hui is a very common idea in early Daoism, but sometime in the medieval period, the terms got changed to jing qi and shen.

most people believe these terms to be totally interchangeable with each other, although in my opinion, yi, xi, and hui are much more beautiful linguistically.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Thanks again for your original post and responses.

 

That is the main one in Dao De jing, but you can go to other texts too, especially ling Bao Jing, Yu Huang Xin Miao Jing, Lie Zi, and many many more.  They all have very similar ideas.   Yi, Xi, Hui is a very common idea in early Daoism, but sometime in the medieval period, the terms got changed to jing qi and shen.

most people believe these terms to be totally interchangeable with each other, although in my opinion, yi, xi, and hui are much more beautiful linguistically. (Emphasis mine, ZYD)

 

I am very interested in the historical aspects of this, aside from any practical aspects.  I am intrigued by your observation that the terminology changed in the the Medieval period, as I have mentioned the Neiye terminology is jing, qi and shen and I am tempted to postulate a possible connection to the change and the Neiye.  I am too busy now to do more, but I hope to return to the topic at some point and explore it in more depth, in particular because I see it as having possible correlations with Confucian self-cultivation and the Mencian branch of Confucianism which was revived from the Song dynasty on.

[sillybearhappyhoneyeater]

I think it is related to Chinese medicine to be honest.

Confucianism never had meditation until Zhu Xi, which was at the end of the Song, as you say.  Zhu Xi's idea of using Confucian documents to meditate was discredited in Confucian circles, since it was basically taken verbotten from Daoist practice and has no historical merit in Confucianism.   It wasn't until Yang Ming that Confucianism got a practice that took hold (xin xue).

 

The use of the terms Jing Qi Shen in Daoism must be as old as the Tang dynasty, if not even older.   Many early documents use those terms, actually, so does Laozi, but he uses them differently, and not together.

 

Actually, DDJ He shang gong uses those terms.  It talks about the five organs and their spiritual relationship, with

shen being the heart, jing the kidneys, zhi/yi the spleen, hun the liver, and po as the lungs, although there is also a reverse order of that where zhen po is the heart and so on.   Kind of complicated.

Remember that Qi is the product of jing and shen mixing.

But also, in the medieval period, it was believed that shen was the last part of the body to be received before birth.

Foestuses start out as jing, later receive qi, and then before they are born, receive a mind (shen).

That goes back to well before Zhang San Feng, although the textual citation I'm thinking of is from sanfeng wenji.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

I'm afraid that I have to disagree with you on the history because I have made a special study of Confucian cultivation and it goes back at least to Mencius, and many people think even earlier to Confucius disciple Yan hui, and possibly to Confucius himself.  Mencian Confucianism was marginalized by a version dominated by Xunzi's interpretation from the time of Hanwudi on until the early Song when its revival resulted in what is now called Neo-Confucinism.  In second chapter of his PHD thesis Daniel Burton-Rose traces the early developments of this type of cultivation in the Song.  You can download it here:

 

Daniel Burton-Rose Phd thesis

 

Throughout the second chapter he refers to the Neo-Confucians as "Song Classicists", but if you know your Neo-Confucians you know that this means Confucians.  These people went so far as to not consider Xunzi a real Confucian.  The repudiation of Confucian cultivation took place in the early Qing Dynasty when scapegoats had to be found for the fall of the MIng.

 

You might find my posts in Confucian Qi gong interesting.

 

This is obviously a very abbreviated account, but all that I have time for now.

[sillybearhappyhoneyeater]

What you are talking about is very different from what Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming were doing.

I mean if you want to really look for early Confucian self clutivation material, you need look no farther than Liji, which has tonnes of the following:

 

若夫，坐如尸，立如齊。

the cultivated person sould sit as if a corpse, upright and even.

 

禮從宜，使從俗。

propriety comes from what is correct, action comes from custom.

 

But the thing is that early Confucian ideas about self cultivation are based on establishment of propriety and to some extent ceremony.  Those kinds of ceremony existed well before the time of Confucius himself, but can't be considered in the same category of Laozi's Dao De Jing in terms of actually providing materials through which to gain enlightenment.

Mencius certainly advanced Confuciuses idea, but Confucianism into the medieval era was mainly concerned with using propriety and ceremony as a way to instill moral character.

 

We can't find anything even marginally close to Yu Huang Tai Xi Jing in early confucian history.

Also, the phrases Neo Confucian and Neo Daoist are words applied by English language scholars, not Chinese.

The term Neo Daoism to describe Wang Bi is just a way for people to claim that Wang Bi wasn't a Daoist, because it doesn't fit in with the currently accepted model that only religious Daoism has proprietorial rights to the Daoism system.

The same is true of Neo Confucianism.

 

Actually,even withing Zhu Xi, he never suggests seated meditation, he simply provides materials by which his disciples developed a type of meditation.

 

We have to be very careful about not Confusing Confucian and Daoist methods, since they were and are very different.

 

I think the easiest way to understand it is to recognize that confucians use the idea of "Li," (propriety) while Daoists use "De," (observation) as central methods of practice.

The Confucian is not explicitly trying to cultivate emptiness, they are trying to cultivate "Hao Ran Zheng Qi," the upright energy of the universe.  This is a dramtically different approach.

[Taoist Texts]

I'm afraid that I have to disagree with you on the history because I have made a special study of Confucian cultivation and it goes back at least to Mencius, and many people think even earlier to Confucius disciple Yan hui, and possibly to Confucius himself.   

It does indeed. My fav quote in this regard:

 

子曰：「賜也，女以予為多學而識之者與？」

對曰：「然，非與？」曰：「非也，予一以貫之。」

 

The Master said, "Ci, you think, I suppose, that I am one who learns many things and keeps them in memory?"

Zi Gong replied, "Yes - but perhaps it is not so?"

"No," was the answer; "I seek a unity all pervading.

 

《衛靈公 - Wei Ling Gong》