Weakening into the Void

Weakness is a door for returning to our true, unconditioned, baby-like nature (zhende 真德, yuande).  But weakness itself is not a type of fruition we seek.  The idea of nurturing weakness arose because aggressive intentions preclude subtlety, cover up sensitivity, and obscure awareness.  Focus is aggressive.  Focus limits responsiveness.  Weakness is a way of keeping options open.  

In the early debates between Buddhists and Daoists, both advocated for a kind of potency.  Buddhists argued that a focused mind could be used to break through to clarity, and Daoists countered that clarity was self-arising.  

Daoists also argue that strength is self-arising.  In fact, I have become an advocate of self-arising strength. The problems with strength all come from putting intent into the muscles.  If strength is limited to the physical body, the power of the void will be less accessible.  If this sounds mystical, bring it up with Rory Miller, he is saying similar things.  It isn't mystical, it is the way our bodies work when we drop aggression.  

In order to develop coordination and self-healing, many people find it beneficial to develop the ability to feel every part of the inside of their body.  This is okay, as long as those senses do not become hardened.  The reality is that the inside of our bodies cannot be felt directly, the true feelings are defuse and confusing.  That's why babies need to wiggle their arms and legs for many months before they actually gain control of them.  It is a process of linking up the imagination with felt experience and visual perception.  All that is a function of the imagination, and it should stay imagination, flexible and dynamic.  The interior of the body should not become some hardened notion of truth.  When our imagination becomes hardened truth, Daoists call that death (or the birth of a ghost).    

A key concept of internal martial arts is the idea that the body can feel hollowed out.  This is called tong, sometimes translated "through."  It is the type of emptiness that allows a flute to produce sound, a hollowness that goes all the way through.  I am an advocate of any type of strength which supports the experience of tong. 

At some point, I noticed that students who do not have much tone in their biceps have trouble keeping their shoulders tong.  This led to my own experiments, and now I advocate keeping the biceps toned all the time as a way of keeping the shoulders tong.  Relaxation is fine as long as the biceps remain toned.  Another way people lose tong, is by pushing their shoulders down, this destroys the open space and commits the arms to a line of power.  This is probably the biggest structural error in the world of martial arts.  It is very common. People with this training will have to pass through a period of feeling weak before they can establish actual strength with tong.  I used to think this period of weakness needed to last months or years, but that was a hook without a worm for most people.   I have since figured out that students can replace strength with shapes of empty vanity by flexing their biceps all the time.  By this method one can drastically cut the time it takes to develop tong shoulders. The key is that strength must stay in the imagination, the biceps must not be used to carry.  If a student picks up a weapon, they must imagine that it is part of their body, not something they are carrying.

So weakening into the void means recognizing the emptiness of all strength, and cultivating it.  The mind does not go into the muscles.  The mind must remain unfocussed and without limitation.  Plastic.  The mind goes into the void.

Naturally, acting skill works the same way.  Strength or image which is committed to the body becomes permanent character.  Theatricality can be built either around a profound change in a person's character, or around a character who refuses to change even while everything around them is changing.  In either case, the actor does not want to become a permanent character, acting skill is the ability to take on new characters and imagine dynamic worlds for them...  Acting requires being weak and unconditioned enough to allow strength to be self-arising.  Daoists call this pacing the void (步虛 buxu).  

 Here is a diagram for the ritual from Michael Saso's website:

What is Power?

People ask me, "Scott, why do you hate power so much?"

I don't actually hate power, but every type of power obscures access to other types of power.  Readers may respond that certain types of power can be added together to create composite powers, so it isn't necessarily true that one type of power obscures access to another.  But even with composite powers, it is smart to separate them into distinct forces, so they can be perfected individually. 

The primary method of Daoist martial arts is to reduce power, or to discard as many types of power as possible.  What is left when power is discarded?  Mass, structure, perception, awareness, balance, the capacity to change, density, fluidity, mobility, pliancy, and expression.  

Daoist martial-theater uses expression to imitate the appearance of power, both as patterns of movement, and as techniques for moving other people's bodies.  But power is not necessary, the techniques and appearances are all illusions of the theater.  I may look tough but I'm actually empty.  My toughness is fake.  I my look wimpy, but my wimpiness is an illusion, I'm actually tough.  (Fake things can still have real world effects.)

A pattern of toughness which is held as stored power, even if it is just a mental strategy, will limit the range of one's expression.   The key is to stop carrying around strategies for domination.  The simple effort of carrying around ideas about power, obscures access to the purest, most innate forms of power.  

Thus, the daily project of Daoist martial-theater becomes the practice of cleaning or clearing out power from the body.  To do this one must fully comprehend each type of power.  At first this seems like a paradox, because one will not be able to fully comprehend any type of power unless he or she practices using it.  In the Taijiquan Classics, this practice is actually called dongjin, literally: comprehending power.

The implication is that once power is fully comprehended it is no longer needed.  This needs further explanation.  

There are countless types of power used in Chinese martial arts, some of them obvious, some hidden. Generally the term jin is used to denote all these types of power, while the term jing is used to denote just the physical body without intent.  So jin are all the ways intent is used to move jing.  

Daoism's golden elixir practice (called jindan) has been a constant of Chinese culture for a couple thousand years.  It uses the idea of qi as the intermediary between shen (the spatial mind) and jing (the physical body). Shen moves jing, but only in directly, qi is like a buffer which is released from jing whenever intent in the body is reduced.

For example, if I slap a student in the face, qi will float off of the student's face.  Whether he or she associates the slap with love, or hate, or a comedy routine, is a process of the imagination, we call that shen.  Theatrical content is created by simultaneously linking the experience of the qi (we call it heat or "a stinging sensation") to the location of the slap and the imagination.  Qi is the intermediary between jing and shen (the "sting" is the intermediary between the physical body and the imagination).  

That is what we call in Daoism jindan, the golden elixir of immortality.  

To develop this, one has to re-learn how to move.   Although cosmo-physiologically speaking, this is our original state, our self-empowered predator state (before we became appendages of our tools).  

The process is different for everyone because we each come to the practice with different types of developed power.

Each type of jin (by definition: using intent within the body) will make the body more dense in some way or other-- if it is practiced as power.   But if a type of jin is simply practiced as a pattern of movement expression, without attempting to accumulate power, it has a cleansing or purifying effect.

So one could say that every type of imaginable power fixes or cleans the physical body in some way, as long as it isn't used as power.

The cleaner the body (jing) becomes, the more readily qi is available as an intermediary.   And thus, the more readily, and expressively, the imagination can move the body. (Rory Miller's crowd is now calling this effect "plastic mind.")  

All those types of power become underlying integrity. This is most obvious with structure training, but is true for all type of power. This is very simple to explain in the case of "good" structure.  Once it is established it simply supports other movement, it does not need to be used in any direct way.

This is why, for instance, I teach the four basic taijiquan powers (peng, ji, lu and an) until students can move with them in a continuous flow; and then I have students drop them. They represent interior structure and efficiency. What I don't do is encourage students to perfect these powers as techniques past the point of being able to simply do them and identify them in themselves and others.

Once a type of power is established it can be used to clean the jing, to purify one's form. This is done by practicing power as movement patterns using only the spatial mind, with no intent in the body.

Actually, the body can be cleaned by simpler movements, like shrinking and expanding.  The golden elixir of immortality (jindan) practice does not consider martial power development essential.  However, students of martial arts who fail to develop power(s) will likely lack the ability to apply advanced spatial mind connections to fighting games or against tricky opponents.

So go ahead and develop power, just practice not using it.  

_________

For reference, see the Daodejing, chapter 28, The Uncarved Block.

Snake Daoyin

This is Daoyin from Vietnam.  Elsewhere I have explained that the Daoyin Paulie Zink does has about twenty animals, it was a Daoist religious theatrical martial training system for animal role specialists.  Paulie Zink was explicitly being taught monkey kungfu (or Tai Sheng, which means Great Sage which is another name for the Monkey King).  All the animals were at times framed as being supportive training for learning the difficult parts of the various monkey roles (there are five of them).  Another way to understand it is that monkey is just the most developed role of the twenty animal roles.  That's how he explained it to me one afternoon, but I don't have that in writing or anything.

That is why I was delighted to find this video on Youtube.  It is almost certainly the same system, the snake movements are the same, but this woman has the full blown snake role.  I would love to know if she has little bits of all the other animals or if she just learned this one?  In any event, if this type of Animal Role Specialist Daoyin is old, like 500 years old, I'm betting there were at one time experts for every single animal.  Are there any other high quality masters of animal daoyin out there?  Experts in an animal other than snake or monkey?  I know there are dog kungfu experts but that appears to be a lesser amateur style.  Are there any pig masters for instance? How about crab masters?  Or frog masters?  Send me the links if you find them!  Please.  Also I'm taking a break from Facebook so if you comment there, please comment here too.  Thanks.

Shadow Yoga

Shandor Remete, Shadow Yoga, Chaya Yoga : The Principles of Hatha Yoga. North Atlantic Books, 2011.

I'm taking a greater interest in yoga lately, especially since I started my, Daoist Circus Yoga for Kids, the funnest yoga class for kids ever. (Scroll to the bottom of the link.)

This book is small, elegant and I got a lot out of it.  That surprised me because frankly, most books are just personal spin, and reiteration, especially books about movement and spirituality.

This quote in the introductions shows his commitment:

“I have also studied other disciplines: martial arts and the ancient Kathakali and Bharatanatyam dance forms of southern India.  What has become apparent to me is that there is a common basis in the  preparatory forms of all of these disciplines.” 

Zander (as his students call him) often recommends his students study martial arts because they are too WEAK!  And as irony would have it, quite a few talented and dedicated students of his have come to me to study or exchange ideas.  I really should have read this book a few years ago, but better late than never.

On the primary goal of yoga he has this to say:

“Yoga is a spiritual system that deals practically with the process of enlightenment.  The final goal is to differentiate the soul from everything that is not the soul.  The method of yoga teaches the individual to discriminate, or to see the differences between these two things.”

I find that a bit troubling, mostly because he doesn't define soul and the word is so loaded with meaning in English.  He doesn't even translate it back into Sanskrit as atman, although I think that is what he means.  After thinking more deeply about the totality of the text, I started to think that when he says soul he means what we call in Chinese the three Hun, and this would be differentiated from the seven Pö.  But more on that below.

He explains the the process is about skillfully reducing fixed patterns, and that if this end goal is kept in mind, the steps on the path will be self-revealing.  

This was probably my favorite quote from the book:

“It is little understood that flexibility of the whole body can be achieved through the proper manipulation of the ankles, wrists, and neck.  When these five regions are flexible the entire system softens and gains elasticity.”

By stating this he is suggesting that flexibility is always available and that mostly people practicing yoga are profoundly misunderstanding the subject.  His biggest complaint is that people do not practice, nor do they comprehend the importance of, the preliminaries.

He has quite a bit of stuff about out-side the body perception and practice.  This seems a bit rigid and formulaic to me, but else where he explains that the order and content of learning is not inherent and can be skipped by some people.  Micro-macrocosm stuff like this planet is connected to your liver, can be read as jindan (golden elixir) instructions, but in the modern era I think we can skip right to talking about these visualizations as having a function in the perception action chain of motivations for movement.  We agree on the importance of this kind of content but disagree on how to present it.

Zander describes a three body system which is like the Chinese one:  the Causal Body karana sharira, the Subtle Body sukshama sharira, the Gross/Physical Body sthula sharira. I think this corrisponds to shen, qi and jing.

He describes kosha which are traps (or perhaps cavities?) which interweave the three bodies together, there are 7 of them according to a yoga text he references.  These are what hold the 7 shadow bodies together.

Zander explains the very complex relationship between breathing and posture, but then says that all of this is preliminary to breathing without any fixed pattern.  

There is a chapter on Nauli kriya which was outside my knowledge base. On further consideration I noticed it looks a lot like the chair pose in Paulie Zink's daoyin, and a lot like one of the basic movements of Tibetan trulkhor. I hadn't considered this type of yoga before but it might prove very useful for people differentiating the dantian from the kua.  

The title of the book comes from this quote:

"The appearance of the body is nothing but frozen shadows.” --  Allama Prabhudeva.

“The shadows are seven in number: the shadow of joy, the shadow of the intellect, the shadow of the mundane mind, the power of principle, the gross structure, the luster of the skin, and the shadow on the ground.  Each shadow is a blockage of light.”  

Elsewhere he describes them differently, so I don’t think he intended this list to pin it down.  They are all obstacles, but they are the obstacles we happen to have to work with.  I could plumb these further: luster of the skin is probably radiance, shadow on the ground is probably pure earth power, the power of principle is probably bio-mechanics and jin or ground-path power, intellect is probably having preferences, the shadow of joy has me a bit stumped but I'm guessing it is unconsciously obscuring our animal nature with nice-ness.

I thought of hun and pö as a translation of soul and shadow bodies into Chinese. In Chinese cosmology, the hun and pö exist as a form of polarity holding us together during our life, and they disperse at death.  The hun are said to disperse within the first three days (they go up!), but even in a normal death the pö can take up to seven years to disperse (they go down!).  This is why proper funerals are so important in Chinese culture, there is a danger of creating a ghost if the pö don't fully disperse.  In a sense we can think of the pö as unresolved conflicting emotions and weak or desperate desires.  If a grandparent dies really wanting a cigarette, there is a chance they can pass on that conflicted emotion to a child as some quirky behavior.  That is a psychological "ghost" but there are other types.  A desire for power or revenge would tend to be more demonic than ghostly, but essentially made of the same ephemeral stuff.

An immoral, or xian, in Daoist cosmology is a person who has a complete death at the moment of death. That is, their hun and pö completely disperse instantly because they have already completely differentiated them (like Zander is suggesting is the goal of yoga: to differentiate the souls from the shadow bodies).  Thus great immortals like Zhang Daoling rose up in broad daylight with their dogs and chickens at the moment of death.  

Zander offers a translation of the term samadhi as “absorption."  I think that is exactly the way to translate it if we are talking about a movement tradition like daoyin, theater, or martial arts.

Anyway it is a small elegant book and I recommend it!

Water Yoga

I went to an Acro-Yoga class the other day.  It was fun, lots of young people excited about learning movement.  The funny thing is everything we did in the class was actually the same as the acrobatics I learned in my 20's.  They have just tacked the word yoga on the end.  Cool?

So that got me thinking about Paulie Zink's comment to Paul Grilley that ended up inventing Yin Yoga.  Zink basically said something to the effect that yoga is too yang and it needs to be balanced by yin.  Practically speaking from the five element theory that frames Daoyin, most yoga is heavy on the wood element (naturally extending and growing) and also on the metal element (strength and holding poses or shapes).  He suggested adding the earth element which is very relaxed stillness for extended periods of time.  Earth practice is good for meditation and goes deep into the ligaments.  It is a very individual practice because at that level of relaxation we are all structurally diverse.  That is what modern Yin Yoga adds to the practice.  

So I was looking at the Yoga calenders for various local studios in Boulder and I noticed that some of them were having like one or two days of Yin Yoga a week.  That makes a lot of sense to me.

Then I noticed that they had Kundalini Yoga one or two days a week too.  (My wife went to a Kundalini class and loved it so I think we are going to be a mixed household for the near future.)  Kundalini is the fire element that the standard Yoga class is missing.  Smart.

I know that there is Yoga and then there is Yoga!  Like people are doing all sorts of experiments and I think that is great.

But that still leaves out the element of water.  Modern Yoga is still weak on the water element.

The basic partner acrobatics we were doing has one person being the "base" supporting the other person being the "flyer."  Learning the role of "base" involves strenght and range of power exercises while weighted.  That is the metal element again.  Being the "flyer" means having a very relaxed fluid body so that one can balance in the air on the "base." That is the water element.

But as the "flyer" gets better he/she actually becomes very strong and able to hold powerful shapes in the air, while the "base" becomes more fluid and able to do the balancing for the "flyer," dynamically moving the "flyer"  around to different positions.  They switch back and forth between metal and water, metal and water--or in Daoist alchemical terms between cinnabar, mercury and gold.  This type of theater is, after all, an enlightenment teaching tradition.

So anyway, I'm thinking about trying to teach straight Daoyin to the Yoga world and perhaps I can explain it via the metaphor of adding more of the water element to practice.  As I'm fond of saying, "Your downward dog needs to wiggle its tail and scamper around the room!"

How I became Enlightened

So if you have some time for entertainment watch the video of this 11 year old kid's TED talk.  His story is here! and worth a quick read too.  He is not actually a kid, he is an emanation of the Dao!  The take away from his talk is very simple, STOP LEARNING!

Of course the obvious corollary to this kid's video is: stop teaching.

The common response to someone who says, I'm not interested in learning, is, you're so arrogant everyone can benefit from learning.  Not true.  In learning, as in fighting, time is damage.

Particularly when it comes to meeting new experts or masters, everyone will tell you to show up with an empty cup. How can you learn if your cup is already full? they say.  The propagators of upright conduct will tell you that if you show up with an agenda it will obscure your ability to see what is there.

But I say nay! show up with a full cup and if you are lucky it will get spilled! The purpose of a class is to compare what is in your cup to what is in the cups of other people in the class, including the teacher.  It is a place to compare notes, to test your experiences against the experiences of others.  Who wants to teach people with empty cups?  That's boring.

I've spent the last three months working on a book while staying and clearing brush at a Buddhist Retreat Center.  There is a substantial library here and I've had a chance to interact with lots of people on the subject of enlightenment.  But actually I already had incredible resources among my friends and family.  

One of the many arguments spinning around is whether one needs to be subordinate to a teacher in order to pick up enlightenment skills.  The best argument is that the default relationship in our society is equality and friendship.  But to become enlightened your teacher may need to tell you that you are an idiot, a blind fool and a moral disgrace, for example.  In our cultural milieu of equality as a default, those kinds of words would end the relationship, so you need to be subordinate to the teacher.  Interestingly however, all of these enlightenment traditions come from Asia where hierarchy is the default relationship.  This creates all kinds of confusion.  They obviously have to overcome the hierarchy thing to become enlightened.  So my conclusion is that whatever ones default relationship to a teacher or a teaching is, has to be overcome.  It has to be overcome because it is an illusion and illusions take an enormous amount of effort to maintain.  However, if it is a default illusion, one everyone else in your culture shares, than that effort is a BLIND SPOT, and you won't even know you are exerting that effort!

The other interesting argument spinning around is about how you might know if someone is enlightened.

Here is a talk by the Buddhist Geek Society about the science of enlightenment:

http://www.buddhistgeeks.org/audio/Episode266_Mindful_Binge_Drinking_and_Blobology.mp3

What a mess!  What a mess!  Here is my take.  The only test we have for enlightenment that has any meaning has to do with how a person handles change.  Particularly changes to ones identity.  So to test for enlightenment we have to confront a person with a direct challenge to their world view.  We push them past their limits and see how they adapt.  Facing death head on would be good but perhaps impractical.  We could perhaps have them talk to a rapist who not only loves raping but thinks it is the funniest thing he has ever done or will ever do in his life.  It kind of depends on the person, I can think of a lot of things that would shock other people into an identity coma, but it's much harder to think of such a thing for myself.  Anyway, once we solve the sampling problem (from the mp3 talk) and the control problem (also from the mp3) then we can come up with a list of things likely to knock someone's identity into next Thursday and see if they react differently then people who have not had 5+ years of enlightenment hazing.

That's all folks!  

Dantian Disease

One of the most interesting discussions from Internal Martial Arts Summer Camp was about Dantian* Disease.  Now, at first blush one is likely to surmise this is a euphemism for being fat.  But actually it was about the specific types of work related injuries internal martial artists get.  

Some weird image from the internet demonstrating a bulging dantianFirst we need to put aside the over eating issue.  Any athlete who trains very hard when they are young is going to consume large amounts of food.  Most athletes who fail to improve the efficiency of their movement before age 30, get too injured to continue.  An athlete who succeeds at improving the efficiency of his movement, must significantly reduce the amount of food he eats by the age of 35 or he will begin gaining a lot of weight.  While reducing food intake is certainly an act of will, it does not require an act of will power.  As movement becomes more efficient, appetite naturally diminishes.  It is quite simply the result of paying attention.

We are also not discussing body type here.  All the various body types have intrinsic beauty.

As a person develops internal power (neijin), several changes take place in the body.  First of all, the legs do more of the work and the arms do less.  Secondly the muscles that run up and down the back closest to the spine become stronger.  These muscles are balanced by the iliopsoas muscles which travel in front of the pelvis from the mid- and lower back to the insides of the legs. The softer, and more relaxed one is in the upper body the more efficiently, and effectively internal power is expressed through these muscles and other adjacent muscles as well.  

The problem arises because the particular quality of muscle that develops is very dense, it becomes progressively more tendon like.  The thicker and denser a tendon is, the more elastic power it stores.  Like a strong bow that is very difficult to draw, once it is fully drawn it has immense shooting power.  His type of muscle must be lengthened everyday otherwise it will put pressure on the lower back.

Of course the lower back can actually handle an enormous amount of pressure.  But over long periods of time, or after some minor injury temporarily makes whole body lengthening difficult, the spinal discs can become compressed.  This compression causes the belly, casually referred to as “the lower dantian,” to stick out!

Compression almost always produces some pain, but we have wildly different sensitivities to pain, as well as mechanisms for coping with it.  Most people can ignore minor pain for years on end with out any trouble at all.  Especially in a case like this where there can be substantial benefits in the way of power.

So, how does one fix this problem? this internal occupational hazard? How does one reduce a bulging dantian?  By simply and completely conforming to Daoist precepts; cultivate weakness and emptiness. 

*Note: The term dantian, is literally cinnabar field.  It refers simultaneously to a long list of concepts.  In external alchemy (early chemistry), the composite substance cinnabar was supposed to be refined into mercury and then into gold and other rare elements.  In internal alchemy, mixed qi and jing are distilled and then refined into shen (spirit?) which is then refined into xu (emptiness).  The term could metaphorically refer simply to a place where change takes place.  Tian by itself simply means a field, but the pairing of cinnabar with a field implies a large outdoor space where ritual transformation or rectification takes place.  In martial arts the dantian most often refers to the lower third of the torso simultaneously as a location and a function of centralized organization or coordination for the storing and releasing of force.  There are other areas occasionally referred to as dantians, for instance the head is sometimes called the upper dantian in reference to its role in inner alchemy.  Three dantians an upper lower and middle is also conventional, and some would even venture that the whole body is a dantian.

Are Martial Arts Taoist?

One of the reasons I started this blog was to answer the question, how can a martial art be Taoist?  Over the six years I’ve been writing I’ve attempted to answer that question. The question actually comes in many different forms.  For instance: Are some martial arts part of Taoism?  How did martial arts influence Taoism? Is there a reason why a Taoist can not practice martial arts?  Are there specific Taoist practices which are embedded in the martial arts?

In this post I will attempt to offer a grand summary of the issue.

First off, let us look at Daoism* on a 3D grid.  John Lagerwey went to Taiwan in the early 1970’s where he became a Daoist priest and wrote a book called, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History, in it he describes Daoist Orthodoxy as a continuity of “view” passing back in time for 2000 years and permeating music, movement, mythology, individual conduct, life, death and social institutions.  At the same time, Michael Saso, and Kristofer Schipper  did the same thing.  They each went to different communities in Taiwan and became Daoist priests and they each wrote books making the same point about Orthodoxy and continuity.  Except the content of those books is actually quite different.  The expression of that “view” in each community was profoundly unique.  In one community the main job of Daoist priests is to perform funerals, and in another community Daoist priests performed many different rituals but were forbidden to perform funerals.  Was Orthodoxy an illusion?

John Lagerwey went on to publish in Chinese, a thirty volume encyclopedic record of the incredible variety of Orthodox Daoist traditions concentrated exclusively among the Hakka ethnic group in Northern Taiwan.  In his most recent book in English, China: A Religious State, “Daoism” is conspicuously left out of the title.  That is because it puts Daoism in a historic context where it played many different roles over a long period of time within a much larger culture of state ritual.  And then in the second half of the book he looks at the role of Daoism in local ritual culture as an ethnologist and finds enormous diversity of expression.  This diversity had elements of continuity like the use of talisman or the Daodejing, but single defining signifiers are almost meaningless because talisman and the Daodejing are not exclusive to Daoism.

So that is the first axis of our 3D grid, call it infinite orthodox diversity.  

Many books and articles on Daoism start out by explaining that the English term “Daoism” doesn’t actually exist in Chinese, that there are three or more terms which are conflated:  Daoshi (official of the Dao), Daojiao (religion of the dao), and Daoren (a person of the Dao).  But these terms are themselves quite mushy.  Daoshi most often means “priest” but it can mean “monk” or “hermit” and in some regions it is more likely to be understood as “traveling magician.”  Daojiao, is mainly used to distinguish other religions like Buddhism, state ritual, or Islam--it seems to have developed as a default category rather than a self-identifier.

Daoren has come to mean a person who tries to live a life consistent with the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, which, because of those book’s centrality in Chinese culture have remained readable and in print for 2300 years.  But Daoren can be used more generally to mean an artist or artisan whose work is modeled on the natural world.  Or even someone who appears to accomplish tasks in an effortless way.  

So that is the next axis of our 3D grid, the infinite influence of the Laozi and Zhuangzi spreading out into every aspect of “normal” peoples lives.  We’ll call it the Daoren axis.

The third axis of our grid is equally difficult to pin down, it concerns the identity of the practitioner.  Because of things like political intrigue and ethnic conflict, at various points in history, people practicing Daoism suddenly decided to start calling what they do Buddhism.  And likewise various sorts of shaman, trance-mediums or Buddhists decided to call themselves Daoists.  

The same goes for magicians, hermits, poets, artists, performers, and urban eccentrics, sometimes they decided to call themselves Daoist when they really weren’t, and other times they decided to hide the fact that they were Daoist by calling themselves something else.  So this category is all the different ways one can be a Daoist, including the better known categories of priests, hermits, and monastics, but also including poets (the most famous poet in Chinese history Li Po, was a Daoist initiate), performers and the super unique like urban-hermit-insect-eating-exorcists.    

As you can see, Daoist 3D space is a little bent.  With one end of the Daoren axis meeting up with the identity of practitioner axis.  And just to show how outside the box one needs to be to even have this discussion, our 3D grid actually has a 4th axis!  A fourth dimension we will call the Methods axis.

At one time I would have simply defined methods as either orthodox or unorthodox, with the orthodox methods being zouwang (sitting and forgetting), jindan (the elixir practice), ritual/liturgy, dream practice, and daoyin (exploring the outer limits of movement and stillness); with the unorthodox encompassing all other methods. But now I’m more likely to avoid the orthodox category and think in terms of the transmission or discovery of daoist “view.”  I want to avoid sounding cryptic so let me offer some examples.  Someone who practices Buddhist meditation can discover the kinesthetic experience of stillness being infinitely and constantly available everywhere.  A person practicing the zouwang method of sitting could just as likely not have that experience.  The transmission of the experience from teacher to student also does not guarantee that the student has the experience.  Even the experience itself does not guarantee that it will be valued or cultivated in different contexts.  

So this 4th axis is made up of any method which attempts to transmit or accidentally transmits daoist “view.”  This axis is also infinite and simply bends down as the ‘view’ within the method becomes more defuse.  Take for example this website explaining daoist talisman.  Go ahead and read about the talisman which attracts beautiful women to you.  It transmits Daoist “view” in a sneaky way.  While most young men want to have the power to attract women to them, this talisman works in the opposite way, it gives the power to the women to see you as attractive.  All you have to do is wear the talisman and wait.  It doesn’t require any male assertive action.  You don’t even have to believe in it!  If you see a beautiful woman you can just stop and see if it works.  No crude one liners, no posturing, you don’t need to offer to buy her a drink, nothing.  Just wait and see what happens!  This talisman tricks guys into not doing!  Also known as wuwei or non-aggression, the most central of all daoist precepts.  

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Alright, now that we have a 3D grid for Daoism, let's make a grid for martial arts. On the first axis we have all the possible reasons and ways someone might optimize training the skill of fighting.  This axis includes dueling, banditry, militia, assistants of the courts (police, bailiff, guard etc..), body guard, crop guarding, home defense, child self-defense, rebellion, military weapons, drilling with gong and drum, competitions, merchant escort services, etc... 

The second axis of the martial arts grid is all the ways we can optimize training for performance, display and ritual.  Think everything from staged fights, to martial opera, to exorcism, to games, to militia displays, to self-mortification performances, to shows put on for the gods, to trance possession by fighting gods.

The third axis of the martial arts grid is self-cultivation.  This includes all types of personal ritual, the most common being health, fitness and prowess.  But it also includes practices for the purpose of instilling virtue, naturalness, kindness, or any of the darker types of attributes like cruelty, invincibility, or to see the future.  This particular axis can easily be applied directly to daoism because it can incorporate daoists methods or daoist precepts.  For example here are the Xiang’er Daoist precepts from the 200 CE:

Lack falseness or pretense (be honest)

Cultivate weakness and flexibility

Practice being like the feminine

Do not seek fame

Participate in meritorious actions

Cultivate clarity and stillness

Cultivate emptiness and desirelessness

Practice stopping when a thing is complete

Discover wuwei, yield to others

Any activity, including martial arts, can be practiced to express or nurture one or all of these precepts.  Would that make a martial art daoist?  Hold on, you don’t need to answer that question, we’ll get to it in a minute.  But consider here that if following these precepts were the only measure of whether or not a martial artist is Daoist, then not many martial artist would fit the bill.  

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So now we have a 4 dimensional grid encompassing Daoism, and a 3 dimensional grid encompassing martial arts.  All we have to do is put them together and see what lights up!  Wherever there is an overlap we have a magical confluence of Daoism and Martial Arts!  

We can also look at the spots that don’t light up, like Daoist priests that have specifically taken a precept to never practice martial arts.  Or women who read the Daodejing and like to knit.  Or hermits who never leave their cave. Oh, but we have a problem there.  See there are hermit practices of internal ritual alchemy that involve kinesthetically visualizing demon troops doing battle, or martial deities dancing with a sword.  

See the academic question we posed, “Is a given martial art Daoist?” is tied up in answering questions of authenticity and authority.  So take note if you are academically inclined, I have just answered all the questions about authenticity and authority for the general case of the question.  It is one gigantic infinite multi-dimensional light show.  Now the question remains, how do we deal with authenticity and authority in any individual or particular case?

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My own experience is that the apophatic kinesthetic revelations of practicing daoyin are totally integrated into my martial arts practice, both internal (Tai Chi, xinyi, bagua) and external (Northern Shaolin, Lanshou).  Then again, integration is the name of the game.  Jindan, the differentiation of jing, qi and shen in stillness is practiced inside of zouwang, sitting and forgetting, and daoyin.  The words of the Daodejing are the source of Daoist precepts, years of chanting them has embedded them in my movement and my dreams.  It is as if the sacred texts of Daoism are written on my bones.  

The ritual practice of visualizing a deity and his attributes before me, and then floating him up and around and then inside of me, and then moving him to a specific location in my body and then inviting him into action while leaving emptiness behind--this practice is to me the same as practicing taijiquan or baguazhang or xinyiquan.  The visualization part of the method itself is not essential, but the changes in perception are how the internal martial arts function.  There is an order of action.  A procession of jing, qi and shen.  

Even the external arts, when practiced as empty forms, are identical to the effortless intrinsic tonifying structural flow of daoyin.

This is true whether the art is "identified" as a Muslim art, like Liuhe Xinyiquan, or a Buddhist art, like Shaolin Quan. 

Another way one could ask the question is, can martial arts have daoist fruition?  Does practice result in spontaneity (ziran)? effortlessness? healing? a return to baby-like simplicity? potency? awareness? 

Lastly, as a teacher looking at what I teach, if I am encouraging students to hold a specific type of intent or intention then I am teaching trance, not wuwei.  Likewise, if I am teaching students to assert themselves or improve themselves, then I am teaching pretense; not things as they actually are, not the discovery of constant virtue (daode). 

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*Note: I inelegantly use Taoism in the title and in the first paragraph to be searchable on Google and then I use Daoism in the rest of the article to be consistent with contemporary scholarly standards.