Something About My History: Part Two

My previous post was primarily about my personal experiences as a Daoist. There are several issues that come out of this story, so I thought I'd take the time to discuss them.

People who are involved in religious quests make a big deal about credentials. I suppose that this is understandable because people take so much of what they are taught "on faith" that they want to know that they being exposed to the "real deal". In the case of oriental religion/philosophy/martial arts this usually involves coming up with some sort of statement about a teacher's lineage.

After I left the Fung Loy Kok and eventually regained some interest in the subject, I wanted to learn something about its relationship to other Temples in China, and, where Moy Lin Shin fit into to the grand scheme of things.

This was not a trivial task, as I found it very hard to hear anything except "wild history". Some folks talked about him being afflicted by a deadly illness as a child and being given to a Temple to raise as the only means of saving his life. Others talked about some sort of dwarf, Daoist Master he'd met in a park who taught him all he knew about martial arts. Others talked about a temple that he had build in Hong Kong after escaping from the Reds. Others suggested that he was some sort of shady character who had some connection to organized crime. One person I connected with over the internet even sent me a lineage chart that someone had given to her that listed Moy Lin Shin at the bottom of long chain starting with both Laozi and Bodhidarma!



Not knowing what to make of all this, I took a page from Zhuangzi and simply accepted the fact that I would never really know the true story.

What I have learned from my studies and in conversation with academics is that there are several things we need to remember when we look at claims about oriental "teachers".

First of all, we have to accept that naive Westerners have developed a weird attitude about oriental wisdom traditions. North Americans are programmed by our popular culture to assume that truly wise, "enlightened" people speak in enigmatic phrases and manifest strange quirks. The trope is very well established in characters like "Yoda" from "Starwars" and the Shaolin Monks from the television program "Kungfu". This means that people looking for meditation, martial arts, etc, teachers are expecting to find incomprehensible, absurd behaviour from someone who says that they "know". The best discussion of this is by Jane Naomi Iwamura and is titled The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture.

Secondly, weird stories about Daoist teachers is not only an artifact of Hollywood. They are also part of the way Chinese culture has traditionally described Daoist teachers. I found this out when I tried to make my way through the book that purports to be an autobiography of a modern Daoist---Opening the Dragon Gate: The Making of a Modern Taoist Wizard. The experiences and practices described were so "over the top" that I went to the point of emailing a famous academic who studies Chinese religion to see if this is a modern fake. He made the interesting point to me that whatever one may think about whether what described actually happened, it is definitely the sort of book that is traditionally written about Daoist Xians. As such, it is authentically representative of an ancient genre.

Finally, it is the case that there has been a tremendous explosion of self-styled "gurus", "wizards", qi-gong masters, etc, in modern China. Some are simply confidence men who are out to fleece the gullible. Others have created movements large enough to frighten the Communist Party, i.e. Falon Gong. So when it comes to anyone who describes themselves as a "Daoist", let the buyer beware.

But having said all of that, I have found some interesting tidbits that have led me to a "working hypothesis" about Moy Lin Shin. First of all, I came across the Yuen Yuen Institute. I have met some people who argued quite adamantly that this is not a "real" Daoist organization because it has made several significant accomodations with modern society, most notably with regard to lineages. But it is a very large Temple complex in Hong Kong that has extensive charitable and educational projects. I have been told by a couple people that the Fung Loy Kok was a very minor sub-temple in the Yuen Yuen complex. (I have since been told that it has folded.) Recently this large organization has started a huge program aimed at spreading information about Daoism through a website that posts information written by many Chinese and a few Western scholars of Daoism.

As a result of bitter on-line discussions about what is and is not a "real" Daoist, and the role of the Yuen Yuen Institute in this, an American Daoist of Chinese ancestry sent me an article (since lost when the fan on my computer melted over the CPU) that describe a form of "grass-roots" popular Daoism that emerged in China during the 18th century. This emerging movement was populist, ecumenical, and had something like a "social gospel". It appears to have been an attempt to create a lay-movement around the hitherto strictly monastic Quanzhen Daoist tradition. The suggestion was that the Yuen Yuen Institute was a modern manifestation of this movement. This certainly made sense to me, as Moy Lin Shin's Fun Loy Kok was a committed to respecting all religions and charitable acts towards the greater community.

So the end result seems to be that the Fung Loy Kok is a modern manifestation of a religious movement that began in the peasantry of 18th century China, was stamped out by the Communist government in the mainland, yet spread to Hong Kong where it flourished. It since "jumped the ocean" to spread to North America, and from there around the world. In the process, a few individuals like myself "got tapped" to be insiders yet decided that we weren't "team players" and jumped ship. In the process, however, we "got the bug" and have continued to get more and more involved in the religion. Since recluses and hermits are so essential to the tradition, it strikes me that this is almost an inevitable part to the spead of Daoism to North America.