Asceticism in Ch' an-chen Taoism

[YMWong]

Edited November 2, 2008 by YMWong

[YMWong]

[宁]

Thanx a lot, it's good reading.

 

L1

 

PS: I hope more of the taobums have the patience to read it.

[sheng zhen]

Thanx a lot, it's good reading.

 

L1

 

PS: I hope more of the taobums have the patience to read it.

I got through the other one. Great reading! Where do you get these articles YMWong?

 

Will plough my way through this text at an other time...

[sheng zhen]

The shallow-minded, however, cling to popular beliefs and preserve the ordinary ways: They merely say that because they see no genii in their world it is not possible that such things exist. But what is so special about what our eyes have seen? Why should there be any limit to the number of marvelous things that exist between the sky and earth, within the vastness of Unbounded? All of our lives we have a sky over our heads but never know what is above it; to the end of our days we walk the earth without ever knowing what is below it. Our bodies are our very own, but we never come to understand how our hearts and will become what they are. An allotment of life is ours, but we never understand how its actual measure is achieved. And this is even more true in the case of the more abstruse patterns governing gods and genii, and the dark mystery surrounding God and the natural life. Isn't it a sad spectacle to rely on the surface perceptions of eyes and ears in judging the existence of the subtle and the marvelous?" (25)

So this kind of discussion is an historical phenomena, and not just on internet forums

Edited November 5, 2008 by sheng zhen

[Apech]

Thanks - very interesting.

[sheng zhen]

Yeah!! Lets go and suffer and be immortal!!! No problem!

[Upfromtheashes]

Yeah!! Lets go and suffer and be immortal!!! No problem!

 

Great read

Thanks for that

[autopoetic]

Thanks. Another great article. These continue to shift my understanding of the daoist tradition.

 

This bit struck me as funny:

 

The quest for Perfection or Immortalhood was understood as a process in which points (tabulated by certain gods in the heavenly bureaucracy) for "merit" and "deeds" had to be earned. Through a diligent accumulation of these points, it was hoped that an Immortal such as Lu Ch'un-yang or Liu Hai-ch'an would be moved to come to the aid and instruction of the monk; and that as result of further cultivation based on the Immortal's instruction, the monk could eventually be summoned to the Immortal ranks himself. The number of points required for Immortalhood was believed to be 3000 merit points and 800 deeds points.

 

Someone ought to make a video game out of this. Once you pass the not-ejaculating and begging-for-food levels, you move on to the kneeling-in-gravel level. In the end, you have to fight the big boss - yourself!

[Stigweard]

[宁]

bump

 

*waiting for more*

[Ormus]

Good text and here we actualy see who was Wang Chongayng,Tiranical man who die ill in agony in his 58 year.It is sad to read how Qiu Chuji and partialy Ma Danyang suffered with him.People often like to make ideal profiles of old masters and refuse to see their ordinary look.We see here how all his students dispersed and started their own school and all have diferent teachings.There are realy many strange facts about early years of Quanzhen and later Longmen,about their lineages and who survive and who not.

I doubt that he realy meet Zhongly Quan,Lu Dong Bin and Liu Haichan.But we have clues that he studied with Mahayana Buddhist and this is clear in his teachings.For sure he was not even Ren Xian beacuse he die ill so young.He also didnt have full transmision and not all his students recive his full transmission.As Monica Esposito confirm in her writings much of Longmen Pai and Quanzhen history and genealogy is made up much later in XVII century.

I advise people to read Stephen Eskildsen and Louis Komjathy to read what they translated from original Chinese sources about him and other Masters in this tradition.

 

Ormus