Wudang Shan West

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This morning I was back in the fog of my old quarry with the ravens and the peregrine falcon.  I'm back in San Francisco but I still have a few posts to organize about my trip to Taiwan.

San Francisco is Wudang Shan West.  Wudang Shan is the legendary birthplace of Taijiquan, the sacred Daoist mountain from which many of the extraordinary methods are said to have arisen.  It is also the home of Quanzhen, the Perfect Realization tradition of monastic Daoism.

Cities are generally considered bad places to cultivate Dao, because they are noisy, dusty and crowded.  Ritual traditions of cultivating Dao are of course based in communities, but development of specialized techniques and skills are often thought to require fresh cool air and quiet.

San Francisco, rarely has a hot day and never has a hot morning, yet it never snows either.  It is possible to practice in pristine ocean fog 3 out of 5 days all year round.  At 6am, a spot sheltered from the wind will be as quiet as a mountain retreat.

It took me three days of being back here to re-regulate my breathing.  If I can lose it temporarily on a one month trip, after 22 years of standing meditation, how could those with an irresolute will even stand a chance of weaving the golden thread?

Without the right environment, practicing martial arts is a struggle.  On this trip, the heat made me resistant to practice.  I got a sense of what it might be like for some students who tell me practicing consistantly is difficult.  Daily practice has always seemed natural too me, even in my rebelious teens, everyday at 6am I got up and danced around my room for a few hours, or went skateboarding, or sailing.  I was born at Wudang Shan West.

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George Xu has been using the vocabulary of two bodies.  He says we need to have both a Jing body and a Qi body.  These two bodies must be clearly differentiated.  One way to recognize this differentiation is by exploring how these two bodies respond differently in different environments. Here are some musings on that topic from the last days of my trip which you may find helpful on your own journey inward.

Think of Jing as the mass, as the reproducible essential substance --as the puppet.  Think of Qi as energy (in the most vernacular sense of the word, “I feel energized,” or “I’ve got no more energy,”), as direction, style, and dynamics --as the puppeteer.

Cold causes qi to go interior and consolidate.
Heat causes the qi to release and disperse.

In the cold we tend to “stagnate” we want to be still to sink into the couch.

In the heat it is very hard to exercise, particularly damp heat, we get tired very easily.
Meditation is easy in the cold, particularly early morning or late at night when other people aren’t moving.  Meditation and stillness are easy in the cold because the qi consolidates.
In the heat, meditation is truly difficult because ones qi is so easily dispersed.
Simple enough.
JIng is harder to understand.
Jing is more easily injured in the cold where muscles strain and resist movement.

In the heat, jing is soft, loose and relaxed, structural injures are rare, but exhaustion can set in within minutes, the qi is just too easily dispersed.  Over time our qi can become “depleted.”  As there is no 'motor' to drive the Jing, it too can become depleted.

Qi is easier to store in the cold.  Of course not everybody eats well and gets enough sleep, and the right kind of exercise, but assuming that base, qi is easy to store.
In the heat most exercise is out of the question because it would simply disperse the qi before the exercise had a chance to do any good.

In the old days, damp heat caused food to spoil and people to get sick.
In the old days, in the cold, people sometimes ran out of food.

Without proper nutrition, jing will become depleted, but qi usually gets depleted first.  In the heat, jing is easy to mobilize but the qi isn’t there to push it.

Of course in extreme cold, circulation stops and the lungs start to freeze.  In extreme heat the brain starts to cook.
Wind is a problem in either situation because it disperses the weiqi, the protective qi on the surface of the body.  In the cold, wind causes the to muscles cramp and seize, and the lungs to be vulnerable to colds and flu.  In the heat wind leads to head aches, fever, and loss of appetite.

I’m starting to think that the great deal of art and poetry produced to described the elixir practice is mostly just a way of saying, "look at my unique experience of differentiating jing and qi."  If you cultivate dao, and differentiate jing and qi, you will likely have a unique experience and you may recognized that cultivation in other people.  It is said that there are lists of ways to recognized another immortal (xian).  I have to go look for one of those lists but I know that one of the things on that list is long earlobes.  You can recognize an immortal by their earlobes!  When jing and qi differentiate, the Jing body becomes like free floating earlobes.

Puppet Museum

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After getting way too hot climbing the steaming mountain of Yangming Shan, I spent a whole night and day just trying to get cool, I got so hot I stopped sweating.  Whenever I tried to cool myself down I’d start shivering, which creates more heat.  I don’t know how much of it was just time or patience, but I finally figured out that my limbs had to be covered to stop me from shivering and I needed to use a cloth dipped in ice water on my forehead while I sat underneath a fan.  Once I figured that out it still took hours before I had a coherent thought.

I remembered that I wanted to buy a drum and some gongs.  I had seen a great store in Tainan, but I figured carrying them around wouldn’t be necessary because Taipei would have a store too since there are lots of people using drums everywhere there is a temple, which is everywhere.  But after making some inquiries I discovered that most of the instruments are made in the south and when people want ritual drums they special order them.  That’s cool but it didn’t help me.  Any way, people thought it was still possible but no one knew where.

So I decide to go to the Puppet museum, take a look and ask there.  I had read that the museum also has a puppet making workshop.  I figured-- puppet troops use drums, and crafts people are likely to know each other.  When I got there, the workshop was right next to the entrance, they said they weren’t sure about buying drums, things were changing, but they drew a map for me.

Meanwhile they told me that the older puppeteer and puppet-maker, who seemed delighted by my request, was a master of a particular marionette god who does exorcisms (I forgot to write down the name of the puppet).  This god is a popular character from legends, which is what puppet shows are often about, but remember, in Chinese culture legends are in fact based on actual history to some degree, and the majority of gods were actually real people with real biographies at some point.

After they drew the map for me I asked about the music playing in the background.  The younger puppeteer got very animated and started telling me about his grandfather’s contribution to the art.  Originally the puppets spoke mainly Taiwanese (I believe I read that they also speak something local people would hear as classical Chinese when certain characters enter the stage).  The puppeteer’s grandfather was visiting Shanghai in the late 1940’s and he spent a month just listening and imitating Chinese Opera there.  At the end of the month he had to flee back to Taiwan with the KMT (the Nationalists).  But in that time he discovered that the fast pace of Chinese Opera vocals were better for fight scenes.  Then my story teller picked up two puppets, dropped into a well trained horse stance, and made the two puppets posture and fight for me!  I didn’t get that on video, but here is a little taste of the museum, barely edited in it’s youtube glory (sorry the quality could be better).

Oh, and the map worked, they sent me to a god carver who had some drums for sale and I bought two.

Flowers

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Lantern Flowers Lantern Flowers

Every altar has two candles, an incense burner and two vases full of flowers.

Last time I was in Japan I was talking to my Japanese friend about flowers.  Consider these three contexts:

1.  There is a lantern flower day in Tokyo in which on an annual basis people gather around a specific temple and party while buying, carrying and displaying orange lantern flowers.  These flowers have some medicinal function and it appears that they are being displayed for or offered to the Gods of the temple.

2.  At funerals and a few other solemn occasions, big colorful bouquets of mixed flowers are displayed in large vases on tables.  Are these for the ancestors? For the newly dead?  For the living families of the dead? (To cheer them up?)  For the gods of the underworld in hope that they will be lenient with the newly dead?

3.  The art of Ikebana is a profoundly aesthetic presence in Japan.  It is taught more or less as a pure exploration of aesthetics of seasonal change, space, spontaneity and craft.  I might even venture that it is a ‘high art’ with Modern notions of universality.

My friend insisted that these are fundamentally different categories.  The only commonality being flowers.  Coming from my knowledge of Daoism, which uses flowers on every altar, and sometimes uses a specific species of flowers as an offering to a specific deity (like Purple Myrtle for Ziwei); the difference between the first two contexts seemed to be simply a temple altar to a god, verses a family altar to the dead.  The context of the example of Ikebana seemed like an attempt to take the experience of the reciprocity between the living and the dead,* characteristic of ritual altars, and apply it in an abstract cosmology.  In other words it’s the same thing without any mention of the gods or the underworld; the cosmology is the same but abstract.  (Like with Aikido, in Ikebana they think of squares, circles and triangles; as categories of information about esthetic uses of space, color, shape, texture, etc...)

Well, my Japanese friend said I was wrong, these categories have nothing to do with each other.

It seems I may be up against the same thing in Taiwan with the relationship between martial arts and the dance performances of the demon generals who escort gods on procession.  (Bajiajiang I have been mentioning is just one type of escort used here.)  They are thought of as distinctly different categories.  However, it is obvious to someone like me who has studied marital arts all his life, that they are doing martial arts.  Which presents the question, does experience trump culture?  In any event, it’s not so simple, most people will admit they don’t really know what happened in the past.  They have no way of knowing if martial arts and dance performances were the same thing at some time in the past.

At least I now have loads of video and images to demonstrate my various points.  More posts to come.

(*Gods are the dead in Asia. I wonder if that would have exploded Nietzsche’s mind.
We are, in fact, our ancestors.  Offerings to ancestors must be done by a relative, because we access our ancestors through ourselves.)

Tea and Sex

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I’m really embarrassed that I have come to Taiwan and I just haven’t gotten into tea that much. People who knew me 10 years ago knew me as among other things, a tea fanatic. I find that many people drink tea when they go to the mountains or the country side. Otherwise they drink coffee. I’m really digging the flavor of Ikari blend coffee. It is like a single shot Americano which keeps its foam (coffee creme) on top for as long as it takes me to drink it slowly; not bitter, not sour, not grainy, not burnt, not too strong, not acidic. The machine puts it out the same every time, and the tall skinny kid behind the counter has a squeaky voice that makes me laugh every time I hear it.

It’s pouring rain.

A lot of old women here have kinky hair.

Condoms are the easiest thing to grab in the entire supermarket. They are right at the cash register. Love hotels are everywhere. A love hotel is a place for couples to have sex away from their families, they charge by the hour. These hotels allow you to pay with little or no contact with the staff. However, they are flexible. You can also pay for just the night, which is 6 hours, or stay there like you would at a regular hotel. I’ve been told this is often a good way to get a deal. However, I’ve found that almost every place I’ve stayed was willing to lower the price when I asked for a discount. I suspect that doesn’t work during lantern festival or dragon boat festival when the hotels are packed.

Men and women show a lot of affection to each other in public, but I suspect it’s only certain kinds of people and I just can’t tell the difference. Sex is simply not talked about. While the PRC is having a tantrum about all the kids who would rather look at porn than get stuck in a government job; Taiwan is showing its independence by making Prostitution legal.

500th Post!

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Wow, this is it, my 500th post.  I started about 2 years ago with the modest proposal that I would blog everyday and that I would gradually put my book up as a blog.  The book had way too many ideas for a book anyway.  It was always a blog, I just didn't know it because when I started blogs had not been invented yet.

If you've got something to say, start a blog!

And though I oscillate between Shostakovitch, Hard Rock and my own bad singing, this seems like an AC/DC moment:

Tangki

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In Tainan I saw a Tangki (Mandarin: Jitong) at the Tian Tan Gong (Alter to Heaven Temple).  He was wearing shoes, and all yellow cotton clothing.  He was doing a treatment/exorcism on a man in a wheel chair whose legs looked a little swollen, they both looked to be in their late 40’s.  They were directly in front of the gods, in the center of the temple in a small space between a giant incense burning and an altar table.  For the Tangki to dance around the man he had to wheel himself forward and backwards about a foot, which kept him involved while he sat there.

I don’t know what God was possessing the Tangki, or even if he was possessed, perhaps not, or only a little bit (I did not see him “fall” out of trance at the end).  He did a martial arts like dance holding a bunch of incense in one hand.  It was already going when I entered the temple and continued for about 10 minutes.  Using the incense, at times he appeared to be writing Chinese characters in the air around the body of the guy in the wheelchair while making sword fingers with the other hand.  Sometimes he held a posture while pointing his sword fingers at his own abdomen.  Sometimes he touched the man, at one point he pushed vigorously on the back of his head.  He shook and did fajing (explosive power release) a lot.  His breathing was somewhat erratic and audible.

Toward the end, the Tangki had someone bring him a paper cup of something, probably water, and he pointed  at it (concentrating his qi into it?) and danced with it for a while before giving it to the guy and having him spill it and spread it around on his legs.

When he was done he went over to the side and sat down on a bench, he was pouring sweat.  Then the guy in the wheelchair jumped up and started dancing.  Just kidding.  During the ritual I talked to one of several people who were watching, a young man who seemed upset and said the man in the wheelchair was his uncle.

There are many similarities between the Qigong master I saw the other night and the Tangki.  Both are self taught.  Both are called.  Both discover their gift.  Both poke and prod.  Both are doing mysterious healing on someone else.  I believe Tangki’s will accept trivial donations of money, but they essentially, accept a life of poverty along with the job/role of being Tangki, they both express the importance of keeping money out of the ritual.

Frankly, the gongfu performance I saw in the park the morning in between the two had some similarities to the Tangki exorcism too.  The dancing around in martial postures, the importance given to breathing, and the fajing.

The blended ritual I saw is not in these two videos, but a lot of other Tangki stuff is, and Youtube is amazing:





Also, to continue with my stating the obvious jag; There is an enormous wealth of video about Chinese ritual on youtube or google video search if you use Chinese Characters. ?? (Tangki)

Burning Money

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The word-processing icon on my laptop is a pen with a cup of coffee.  Do you really think the archaeologists and historians are going to be able to figure that one out in 800 years?

In many ways my project is about stating the obvious.  Obvious to me that is.  Unfortunately what is obvious to me is sometimes my imagination.  And sometimes, it’s just hard to know.

In my first week here, late at night across the street form my hostel, I saw a group of well dressed women standing out on the sidewalk burning large amounts of hell money in a big metal burner that looked a bit like a burned out trash can with holes.  I asked what was going on and a woman said, “ We are burning money so that we will do well in business, we always do this at the end of the day.  We want to make a lot of money!”  I noticed that their business was a beauty parlor.

I thought to myself, they are ritually and symbolically paying off emotional “debts” they have accumulated from dealing all day with people who vainly wish they looked better that they do.  That night I saw a few other small groups of people burning stuff in front of their businesses, and evidence of many others.

I brought this up with a local in Kaohsiung and she said, “No, no, they don’t do it all the time, only on the new moon and the full moon.”  “Why are they doing it,” I asked.  “Every business does it.”  “Really?”  “Yes,they do it twice a month at the end of the work day, and they put out offerings on a table too.”

So I had to throw out my perfectly elegant theory about emotional baggage and vanity, and look for another one.  I theorized that this was some kind of deception meant to take place in the unseen world, in hell perhaps, where it would appear that the business was loosing money hand over fist.  Demonic forces hate commerce and are trying to destroy successful businesses using underworld bureaucratic tyranny at every chance they get; however, when they see that this business is already losing money, they don’t bother with it.

Alternately we could see this ritual as paying bribes to smooth the business through that bureaucratic hell realm; or as extortion payments, again with the goal of getting local demon elites off your back.

This created several questions.  What do 24 hour stores like 7/11 do?  Do foreign owned operations like Starbucks also burn hell money?  Since I’m not in Kaohsiung anymore I don’t know if my informant was correct about what happens there, but here in Taipei only about 15% of businesses are visibly participating in the New moon ritual.  7/11 and Starbucks did not put on a show.  Still 15% means there are altar tables on every block.  The increase in smog may effect the ability of demons to see and breathe.



(How come Youtube doesn't have a Business or a Religion category?  I filed this under "How To.")

Professor Yeh met with me again last night along with one of his graduate students in anthropology, Yves  from Holland.  Yeh seemed stunned by my knowledge of Daoism, even though he disagreed with half of what I said.   During dinner he started badgering me to explain the mechanism by which talisman are efficacious.  After that he had me work on the translations into English of the museum’s Daoist artifacts.

So, if burning hell money twice a month is good for business, what is the mechanism?  Perhaps it is somehow linked to cleaning? or accounting? or community expectations of what a good business does?  Perhaps it is like moon rituals of an earlier era in which everyone participated in the public renewal of precepts and commitments.  I think this is likely.  Standing around a pot of burning money with your business colleges must imprint the metaphor in language and image.  If you don’t do your part and consistently look for ways to improve the business, you will find yourself staring into a pot of burning money (real money this time).

What do you think?

Hot Springs in the City

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I  visited Xinbeitou yesterday.  This is a hot spring in the city limits of Taipei.  In fact it’s on the the Subway line, about 30 minutes max from anywhere else in the city, it took me about 20 minutes to get there from Central Taipei.
Walking out of the subway you see a park with a steaming river running through it.  The park has a beautiful new library made of wood and stone, warmly lit with views of the park.  I was there at night so I didn’t get to visit the hot springs museum.
There are lots of hotels around the area and I guess some of them have their own hot springs tubs.  But on the advise of Lonely Planet I went to the outdoor public bath.

It cost 1$ US.  There are booths to change and shower in and a place to leave your shoes.  There are also lockers with keys for your stuff but everyone just puts their stuff on top of the lockers, there is very little theft in Taiwan.

There are four large beautiful stone pools in a hillside.  Each is fed by a water fall and the two on top are 40 and 41 degrees celsius, Hot!  There are also two cold pools, where I spent more than half my time because I was already too hot when I got there.

In a Japanese public bath men and women are separate and naked.  Here men and women mingle together and wear bathing suits.  I remember a public bath in Japan where I watched a guy scrub his body 8 times in between soaks.  These were vigorous scrubs, enough to take off skin.  Either he was scraping off layers of skin or his skin was very tough from years of scrubbing.  Anyway, scrubbing is against the rules in this Taiwanese hot spring.  Any scrubbing you want to do happens in your private booth while you are changing and showering.

The mood is very relaxed and friendly, a couple of young women who were with their mothers decided to talk to me.  (Wow, the sexy hairy monkey talks!)  The waterfalls are the dominant sound especially in the hotter tubs where people are ‘cooking.’  But this is no new-age hang-up keep-your-voices-down kind of place.  It’s all flirting and catching up on gossip.  About equal numbers of men and women but no children.

Really worth a visit...perhaps every other day.  I saw no evidence of religion, or stretching, but one guy was doing arm exercises while standing up in the corner.  They close for 45 minutes of cleaning every 2 hours, so it’s clean.