This Time De, Not Dao

People who are interested in such things usually spend a lot more time thinking about the term "Dao" than they do "De". But it is still very important, so much so that one of the oldest versions of the Laozi that has been found actually bears the title "De Dao Jing" instead of the more common one.

Like most important philosophical or spiritual words, "De" seems to have a lot of different associations and connotations. People like me who have not spent their entire lives learning ancient Chinese and all the nuances associated with specific characters have to get by with translations and what little scholarly reading we can find time for. To illustrate the sort of thinking that I do about such things, take a look at the following translation of chapter 38 of the Laozi. It is the first chapter of the "De" portion of the text and the one that most specifically deals with the concept. (The translator, Victor Mair, has used the word "integrity" to translate "de", so everywhere you see the first word, you know the original text has the second.)

The person of superior integrity does not insist upon his integrity;
For this reason, he has integrity.
The person of inferior integrity never loses sight of his integrity;
For this reason, he lacks integrity. (1)


The person of superior integrity takes no action,
nor has he a purpose in acting.
The person of superior humaneness takes action,
but has no purpose in acting.
The person of superior righteousness takes action,
and has a purpose for acting.
The person of superior etiquette takes action,
but others do not respond to him;
Whereupon he rolls up his sleeves and coerces them.(2)


Therefore,


When the Way is lost, afterwards comes integrity.
When integrity is lost, afterwards comes humaneness.
When humaneness is lost, afterwards comes righteousness.
When righteousness is lost, afterwards comes etiquette.(3)


Now,


Etiquette is the attenuation of trustworthiness, and the source of disorder.(4)

Foreknowledge is but the blossomy ornament of the Way,
and the source of ignorance.(5)


For this reason,


The great man resides in substance, not in attenuation.(6)


He resides in fruitful reality, not in blossomy ornament.(7)


Therefore,


He rejects the one and adopts the other.

(Chapt 38, Victor H. Mair trans.)

Before we get to discussing "de", I think it is important to point out a couple other things first.

Scholars tell us that like the Christian Bible, the Dao De Jing wasn't written by a single writer. Instead it is a collection of sayings from an oral tradition that were brought together and edited into the form we have today. With this in mind, it is very useful to look at a translation and try to parse out the different parts that were brought together. In a scholarly translation like Victor Mair's, clues are left in the text---in the way the stanzas are laid out---so the reader can work out them out.

With that in mind, I've labelled what I am assuming are different "voices" in this chapter from "1" to "7". I've also changed the colour to pink of what I am assuming are "transitional words" that editors have inserted to give the illusion that the chapter is a complete entity instead of a collection. Finally, I've changed the words to green that I think make up a conclusion that the editor inserted.

I've done this to remind myself that because this is a collection of oral sayings instead of the creation of one mind. This means that I shouldn't assume that each one of these stanzas is informed by the same way of looking at the world. Indeed, when I do make the effort, I think I can see a subtle difference.

Another thing I find useful to do is to try and step back from the decisions that the translator has made and substitute the original word so I can just see them in their context without the connotations that the English word brings. Let's do this for the first three stanzas.

The person of superior de does not insist upon his de;
For this reason, he has de.
The person of inferior de never loses sight of his de;
For this reason, he lacks de. (1)

This stanza is arguing that "de" is something that is involved in one's awareness of self. If one is self-conscious about their "de", they lack it. This could be referring to someone who is following a course of action more because of how he wants to be perceived by his neighbours than by whether or not he thinks the action is the "right thing to do". It could also be referring to someone's internal self-image and how that constrains their behaviour. (My Daoist teacher once said that one of the biggest problems people have in life is their self-image that says things like "Oh, I couldn't do that!") Finally, it could be referring to the idea that the act of thinking about some things makes it difficult to do them. (There is a teaching story I read once about a centipede who lost the ability to walk when someone asked him just exactly how he was able to control so many legs. Once the started thinking about it, he found he could no longer do it.)

The person of superior de takes no action,
nor has he a purpose in acting.
The person of superior humaneness takes action,
but has no purpose in acting.
The person of superior righteousness takes action,
and has a purpose for acting.
The person of superior etiquette takes action,
but others do not respond to him;
Whereupon he rolls up his sleeves and coerces them.(2)

This stanza seems to be making a different statement. The person in the first line is following the path of Wu Wei, or non-action. But please note that this statement is not some variant of the medical "first, do no harm". That is to say, that there are a great many cases where more harm is done through thoughtless action than would have resulted from letting things follow their natural course. Instead, this stanza seems to be saying that the superior man is acting without purpose at all. I suppose that this could be read---if it was seen in isolation from what follows---as saying that the sage is supposed to spontaneously sleepwalk through life.

I believe, however, that what the author really means is that the superior man of "de" has no motive when he acts. He just does what seems "right" or "natural" as it looks to him at that time. This could mean several different things. It could mean that he has no "ulterior motives", by which I mean that he is being forthright and honest in his dealings instead of following some selfish hidden agenda. It could also mean that he doesn't believe that "the ends justify the means", no matter how good the ends might be. It could also mean that he tends to act instinctively and "in the now", sort of the way people work when they practice "process art". The emphasis is still, however, that when a man with de acts in a "right" or "natural" way, he has a tendency towards doing nothing at all rather than getting busy. (And don't forget that even the process of not acting is still a conscious act.)

The next line of the stanza puts the word "humaneness" in the place where "de" was in the previous one. I suspect that the word that Mair has translated as "humaneness" is the Confucian term "ren". This word is about as important to the "Ru Jia" (Confucians) as "Dao" is to Daoists. If this is the case, then the author is trying separate Daoists from Confucians by saying that both are disinterested members of society---but one is engaged and the other is not.

The distinction is not just conceptual, however, for the author is clearly trying to suggest that "de" is superior to "ren". He does this by placing the former ahead of the latter in a series of declining value. The next step is righteousness, which is specifically mentioned as not being disinterested in nature. This could be the sort of "tough love" of Puritanism or mere hypocrisy based on ulterior motives. The final line about "etiquette" is, I suspect, a jab at the sort of person who's ethical framework is not much more than the conventional forms of social behaviour and who will not shrink from imposing his will by force if someone refuses to abide by the "norms". (Think of the boss who is all "noblesse oblige" as long as his underlings are properly deferential---but fires anyone who has the gall to talk back to him.)

The suggestion might be that once someone commits herself to acting---"ren" instead of "de"---she starts on the slipperly slope that ends in not much more than convention and force.

This slippery slope argument is also the basis of the next stanza.

When the Way is lost, afterwards comes de.
When de is lost, afterwards comes humaneness.
When humaneness is lost, afterwards comes righteousness.
When righteousness is lost, afterwards comes etiquette.(3)

But note that there is a new element involved here. The Dao (or "Way") is being placed ahead of "de". In fact, a progressive decline is suggested Dao>"de">"ren">righteousness>etiquette. So instead of "de" being the attribute of a life lived in tune with the Dao, it is a degenerated form of existence that comes when one has lost the Dao yet is still above the lowly Confucians, who are in turn above the more plebian sort of humanity. This seems to be at odds with much of the rest of the book, which would rest on the idea that a person's ability to manifest "de" is a result of living in harmony with the Dao. Indeed, the title of book is usually translated as something along the lines of the "The Way and its Power Classic" (i.e. Dao De Jing.)


Now let's look at a list of possible translations for "de" that I found at the Wikipedia.

1. Rise, go up, climb, ascend. [升; 登.]
2. Morals, morality, virtue, personal conduct, moral integrity, honor. [道德, 品行, 节操.]
3. Denoting a wise/enlightened person with moral character. [指有道德的贤明之人.]
4. Kindness, favor, grace, graciousness. [恩惠, 恩德.]
5. Grateful, gratefulness, thankful, indebted. [感恩, 感激.]
6. Benevolent rule, good government, good instruction. [德政, 善教.]
7. Objective regulations/rules. [客观规律.]
8. Quality, nature, basic character, characteristics, attribute. [性质; 属性.]
9. Intention, purpose, heart, mind. For example: "Be of one heart and mind". [心意. 如:一心一德.]
10. In Five Phases theory, a reference to seasonally productive energy/air. [五行说指四李的旺气.]
11. First growth, initial stage, beginning of something. [始生; 事物的开始.]
12. A phoenix-head pattern/decoration. [凤凰头上的花纹.]
13. Blessings, good fortune, happiness, resulting from benevolent actions. [福, 善庆的事.]
14. Used for zhí "straight, just". [通 "直 (zhí)".]
15. Used for zhí "to plant, grow, establish". Plant a tree. [通 "植 (zhí)". 立木.]
16. Used for "get, obtain, result in". [通 "得".]
17. A national name. An abbreviation for the Republic of Germany during World War II. [国名. 第二次世界大战结束前的德意志联邦的简称.]
18. A star name. [星名.]
19. A river name. Another name for the Yellow River. [水名. 黄河之别名.]
20. A surname. [姓.]

I think we can ignore meanings seventeen to twenty. (I doubt that the "old ones" were thinking about Nazi Germany.) But as you can see if you think about meanings one to sixteen, a translator has a lot to choose from when he thinking about a English word that will have all the relevant resonances. Indeed, Mair says in his introduction to his translation that it took him two months of very intense thought before he settled on the word "integrity".

If you look at the possible translations, it strikes me that they break down into three different complexes: goodness (3-6), wisdom (3, 6, 7, 14), and power (1, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16.) From my own limited understanding, it seems to me that the problem that Mair and other translators face is that there is no word in English that encapsulates at the same time the three concepts of goodness, wisdom and power. And the reason why no English word does so is because the common wisdom of our society is that these are totally unrelated---if not mutually exclusive---concepts.

Indeed, for our civilization "de" is a rather revolutionary idea. Most people conceive of goodness in terms of weakness. Think of all the images in popular culture of the weak priest or minister, or soft woman, who is "goodness" incarnate. Their only real strength is their ability to sacrifice themselves for their ideal. And there are only two ways that good "triumphs". The first is through its ability to convert some sort of hard, strong man to support it (think of the classic Western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" where the good man survives because a strong man murders the villain.) The second is through some sort of heroic sacrifice that results in divine intervention (think of the clergyman who sacrifices himself to the Martians in a futile attempt at peace-making in the 1950's movie "War of the Worlds" which leads to their death from disease---a "divine" intervention if there ever was one.)

In the same way, wisdom is usually considered to be separate from goodness and strength. Again, if you look at popular depictions of wise people, they are usually described as old and feeble types who need young, strong types to be able to achieve their ends. (Even powerful Gandalf from "Lord of the Rings" needed the support of the youthful hobbits in order to achieve his ends.)

The idea that a type of real power can be associated with both goodness and wisdom is really a rare idea in Western civilization. Usually our archetypal figures of power have some sort of character flaw that renders them foolish in one way or another. (Think of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, for example, they never seem to get over their silly infatuation with Guinevere---even though the result is a ruinous war and the destruction of the kingdom.)

The oriental, Daoist-inspired, archetypes are different from the Western ones. The wise, good man or woman is also very potent. The Shaolin-monk or priest from Wudang-shan may be old and wise, with good in his heart---but he is also able to fight and, when necessary, make the tough decisions. The nun (such as Ng Mui) may have a heart of gold, but God help any man who thinks he can take advantage of her because she can fight too! And, of course, there are many different types of power. Martial arts are but one example, the powerful tactics and strategies that the Daoist advisor Zhuge Liang used in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms are another example. But they do use the same principles as expressed in the Laozi and manifested as "de".

So this far too long post ultimately has a conclusion. That is, that the ideal of "de" is different from Western ones.

But more importantly, this post is an attempt to show how scholarly thought is also a type of Daoist meditation technique. I wanted to work through this for at least one post because it is a traditional form of Daoist internal yoga, but one that Westerners know almost nothing about and probably wouldn't recognize if they fell over it.

A Mustard Seed of Happiness----

Most people nowadays suffer from the delusion that it is possible to find happiness in the externalities of life. It isn't surprising that this is the case, because our culture pretty much rams this idea down our throats from an early age. Not only is it enshrined in the US Constitution and constantly dinned into our ears through advertising, but I find that people increasingly police each other in order to ensure that each of us has a "positive attitude".

I was reminded of this the other day at work when a co-worker made a comment about my countenance. I had been reading a newspaper article about a researcher who was saying that a very high percentage of men leave their wives when they suffer significant health problems. I don't know if this is truly a problem or just some more hype created by the media. But I'm not sure that I ever want to be the sort of person who isn't visibly disturbed by reading this sort of thing.

Several days before I'd been listening to two of my co-workers talking about some issues that one of them had been facing. The one fellow had been off work for a couple months because he had had two major arteries in his heart almost totally block by plaque. He didn't have a heart attack, but it was almost a miracle he didn't. Thanks to the Canadian health care system, though, he had both blockages fixed and he is back at work now. But in the interim, it was discovered that his wife has breast cancer. So not only was this guy stuck at home and forced to do nothing in order to recuperate from the insertion of two stents, but now he had to watch his wife undergo surgery, help with her post-operation recovery, and, wait to see what the tests will say about the lump that was removed.

What was really interesting about this was the response of two of his co-workers. One said "I bet you're glad you got the plasma screen tv!" The other said "rent movies, lots of comedies". In effect, the solution of life's problems is to keep yourself distracted.

I'm not about to say that there is no sense in trying to cheer oneself up with entertainment. I myself have been a little "down" lately and last night I made my own attempts at distraction with a Patrick O'Brian novel and a glass of red wine. But I do think that our society is really misguided in its attempt to convince people that some sort of physical "happiness" can be the baseline without the odd tragic fluke intruding once in a while. When I look around me I see so much evidence of real tragedy that I cannot think that the odd person I know who really does seem to be immune from bad things is simply the result of my own ignorance of their true condition rather than some objective reality.

I've been contrasting our society's response to human tragedy with one that comes from the literature of Buddhism.

The Buddha was once taken to see a woman who had lost her mind in grief from the death of a small child. She would not even allow anyone to bury it, and she continued to carry the body around. The Buddha told her the following "I will make a magical elixir that will bring your child back to life. But in order to make it, I need you to give me an essential ingredient. Bring to me one mustard seed from a home where no one has ever died." The woman ran off and went from home to home looking for this seed. But everywhere she went she got the same reply "You cannot get it here, many people have died in this house." Eventually, this exposure to the reality of death wore away her grief and brought her back to her senses. She reconciled herself and allowed the child to be buried.

As I see it, the people of our civilization are like that woman running from house to house seeking a mustard seed that could return her child to life. But unlike her, most of us never really twig into the fact that there is no home where things are all sweet and rosy. I suspect that a big part of this comes from the fact that unlike the home-owners in the story, no one tells us "no, this too is a house with sorrow". And I think this gets back to what was happening at work. The co-worker who was trying to jolly me out of my pensive mood, and the others that were suggesting that the other fellow distract himself with movies, were suggesting that the way to deal with sorrow is through denial.

This isn't to say that the problem of suffering is answered simply by refusing to be in denial. In Buddhism the acknowledgement that death is universal is simply part of the first of the Four Noble Truths. And understanding those truths is not enlightenment itself, that only comes from following the Eightfold Path. But having said that, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step. And this step will never be taken until people admit that life is, on the whole, more of a veil of tears than a cornucopia of joy.

Kung Fu and Brain Plasticity

One of the reasons that I have devoted so much of my life to the study Daoism is because I think of it as a rare and endangered part of our cultural heritage. I first saw this issue articulated by a Bill Moyer's clip on television where he showed a young Shaolin monk training in a open hand routine. Moyer's said that this was "the cultural equivalent of a giant sequoia tree". The point he was making was that our ancient cultures have things that can only exist by the lifetime work of individuals assimilating the knowledge that has been gained in previous generations. And just like species of plants and animals, once this intergenerational transmission of information ends, the result is permanent extinction.

I heard an interview on the CBC the other day that has also stuck with me and got me thinking that our civilisation might soon be more willing to put energy into this process of cultural preservation. Unfortunately, I forget the name of the person being interviewed (I was doing stretches at the time), but the point he was making was that our society has laboured under an inappropriate metaphor when it comes to understanding the way our brains operate. The metaphor is that of a machine.

The problem with that image is that machines are static and unchanging---except by outside interference. And this metaphor has framed our discussion about what it means to be a human being. People talk about our personality and who we are as being the result of either our genetics, or our past history, or some combination of the both. Left out of the discussion, however, is any idea of how a human being is self-created by the individual decisions that she makes moment by moment, day by day.

The point this author was making is that this image of the brain has been proved to be factually untrue. Our brains are plastic. That is to say that they constantly change as a result of both the events we experience and the choices we make in how we live our lives. If we decide to do a specific thing---such as learn a new language---then the actions we follow in doing so actually change the way our brain is organised.

What this means for people who pursue spiritual practices, or to use the Chinese term: "kung fu", is that they are involved in a day-to-day process of changing the way their brains are organised. And when someone chooses to pursue a specific path, such as the life of a Daoist initiate, they are following an age-old process of reorganising their brain functions to operate in a way that is significantly different from those of the general public. If there is any value in doing this sort of thing, then seeking to preserve this specific cultural "evolutionary branch" is a pretty important thing to do.

I had this issue illustrated for me recently by one of my co-workers. She is a nice person, but she has absolutely no structure at all to her intellectual life. She just flits from one interest to another as her fancy strikes her. (The internet can be an addictive drug for people who are like this.) Indeed, she can see absolutely no reason why anyone would seek this sort of structure if they don't have to. But she complains about an inability to sleep and I asked her what her problem is. She said that "her mind just keeps buzzing with different thoughts". I would suggest that she the endless flitting around following one interest to another for so long has led to that "buzzing" phenomenon.

In contrast, I usually sleep like a log. But I do spend a great many hours every day in one form of practice or another---saying my rosary, doing taijiquan, introspective contemplation, and wrestling with ideas (like I am doing right now.) Part of this process is constantly forcing myself to get some sort of control over the chaotic elements of my consciousness so they follow the path that I have chosen to follow. As I have said before, the "watercourse way" of Daoism does follow the principle of Wu-wei, but it only does so if one follows the hard work (e.g. "kung fu") of internal alchemy (e.g "neidan".)

Karen Armstrong's The Case for God

I just finished reading Karen Armstrong's latest book, The Case for God. Like everything else that I've read by her, I liked it a lot. She is obviously well read and passionately interested in religion. She is not an academic, but she isn't afraid of using big words or difficult concepts. More importantly, she isn't tied to a denomination---like many religious writers---which means that she can follow her ideas where they lead without fear of suffering professionally from her candour. (I think that this effectively muzzles a great many religious leaders who fear retribution from both church hierarchy and the people in the pews.)

Armstrong's basic thesis is that modern religious concepts have been badly damaged by apologists for religion who tried to use the authority of modern science to justify belief in God. As a result, the traditional tendency to emphasise the ineffability and transcendence of God was lost. Once God stopped being beyond our ability to comprehend, people started to emphasise the necessity of belief in specific creeds, which in turn led the way to Biblical literalism and all the intolerance that flows from that.

Armstrong believes that this is a form of idolatry in that once one accepts the notion that people can have clear and distinct ideas about what God is, then it becomes almost inevitable that these ideas become not much more thatn what believer's project upon him. This is the point where God stops being outside of human history and begins to look (at least to Americans) like a sort of cosmic "commander in chief" with a paid-up membership in the Republican party and who is a regular listener to Rush Limbaugh. (And, of course, in Saudi Arabia he keeps his wife in a veil and supports Osama Bin Laudin---.)

I'm don't think that Armstrong actually "makes her case", but I'm not sure that this would bother her. One of her key points is that religious "truths" don't actually get settled by discursive argument. Instead, she repeatedly asserts that whatever wisdom does come from religion is a result of regular personal practice---either individually or as part of a community. Moreover, she believes that the truths imparted are cannot be universally understood (like scientific truths) but instead are intelligible only to specific people using a specific shared language and who are tied into a particular relationship with each other. (This is not so much an epistemological claim---that is talking about the nature of knowledge---but more a recognition of the practical limits or our ability to communicate difficult ideas.)

Two ideas that she keeps returning to in her text are those of "bricolage" and "midrash". The first comes from architecture and refers to a process where one restricts one's materials to a specific set in order to expand one's creativity. In the same way, Armstrong believes that religions grow through the process of re-interpreting and reformulating their specific core myths. The Jewish process of creative interpretations of scripture that inspired Armstrong to use the bricolage analogy comes from the practice of creating a "midrash" to re-explain the value of ancient texts in a new historical context.

She ends the book by referring to the so-called "New Atheists" and suggests that they are trapped in the same nasty circle as the fundamentalists they despise because both have limited their definition of "God" to a idolatrist projection and "religion" to the empty positing of creedal formulas instead of ritual, spiritual practice and good works. Unless society is able to step out of this rut and rediscover the ideal of God as being manifest in our ignorance and how we live our lives, we are doomed to have to choose between these two fruitless options.

"Guided Meditation", Hypnosis, and, Sitting and Forgetting

I sometimes go to "meditation" sessions organised by various religious groups and I am often appalled by the confused ideas people have about "meditation". One of the things that especially bugs me is what goes by the name "guided meditation".

For those of you who have not heard of this, it consists of people sitting and relaxing while a group leader narrates some sort of scenario to the people sitting and relaxing. Sometimes it involves getting people to visualise breathing in "white energy" and breathing out "black energy". At other times it involves visualising a walk with Jesus. The last time I was at one of these things, it was suggested that we feel some "loving energy" go from our hearts into the earth---in order to heal it. (There was an environmental theme to the church service that week.)

Several things disturb me about this activity.

First of all, it is based on a world-view that seems to accept the existence of a dangerous type of self-delusion. That is, that our personal emotional states have some direct impact on the physical world around us. The problem with this idea is that it is manifestly false. Contrary to the New Testament, faith cannot directly move a physical mountain. Nor can it fix a flat tire or a broken leg. And it most certainly is not going to end global climate change!

What it can do is get an individual or a group of people to work on a specific task that might seem beyond their ability. Faith can inspire a nation to work together and then they can move mountains. The evidence for this is all around us---from the pyramids of Giza and Central America to the cathedrals of Europe.

The problem is when people confuse these two things and substitute the former for the latter. It is one thing to share a vision of a better world and let that inspire an individual or community to work at some great goal. It is another altogether to suggest that having the vision is some sort of action in and of itself. The Notre Dame cathedral was built, in a sense, by faith. But it was also build by the hard work of hundreds of masons working over generations.

And this raises another of the problems with guided meditations. They usually suggest that people develop their faith without bothering to explain what exactly people are supposed to have faith in. This means that pretty much the entire edifice of Eastern religious wisdom gets left behind in favour of some sort of vague "positive think" spirituality that has more in common with Amway than the Dao or eightfold path.

Most of the time this boils down to some sort of vacuous version of "love conquers all". This invariably means that all people have to do is experience a specific type of emotion as much of the time as possible, and avoid anything that might be "negative", that the world will spontaneously become a better place. The practical result is a person who refuses to do any of the heavy lifting required for social transformation---which invariably involves nasty stuff like debate and struggle.

At worst, this sort of things results in some sort of guru worship or some other form of abuse of the self by the person behind the calm voice offering instruction.

This raises the last thing that really disturbs me about this practise: it seems to be not a heck of a lot different than hypnosis.

The popular notion about hypnosis is that some sort of mysterious power allows someone to "put" someone else into a "trance" that then allows the hypnotist to force them to do things that they would never have been able to do otherwise. My understanding is that this is a completely false picture. Instead, what seems to happen is that the "hypnosis experience" is a sort of social role that individuals can enter into and which allows them to loosen up the conventions that restrict the way people allow themselves to act.

When a stage hypnotist, therefore, gets someone to cluck like a chicken, he is not putting a person into a trance and getting him to actually become a chicken. Instead, he is convincing the person that he is now "hypnotised" and a "hypnotised" person clucks like a chicken when he is told that he is now a chicken. He is not entering a complex and new state of poultry-hood, however, he is just having the social convention of "act like a grown-up" removed and replaced by the social convention that now says "it's OK to pretend now, like you did when you were a child".

In the same way, when a hypnotist tells someone to "release a blocked memory", they are telling the subject that "it's OK to fantasise now". (Hence all the horrible stories of people convicted of ritual Satanic abuse---even when no physical evidence exists to support the victim statements.)

This is not to say that hypnosis is a bogus phenomenon. It actually exists, and it has significant value in some situations. The problem comes from people who come to it with a naive psychological world view that assumes that each of us is some sort of Cartesian individual mind totally isolated from everyone else in the world. Instead, a more nuanced approach is to understand that each of us lives in a cultural context where the way we think, talk and experience the world around us is mediated by the set of rules that we learned when we were very young and are still learning every moment of our lives. People get "hung up" by the way their cultural complexes influence their internal life. The ability to enter into the "hypnotic subculture" often allows people a way of "rebooting" their lives by letting them find a culturally safe way of redefining who they are.

From a meditative point of view, however, the point of spiritual practice is not to sculpt our cultural conditioning into different forms. Instead, the job is to cut through it altogether in order to connect with the Truth. (Or at, least, get to a closer approximation of it.) This cultural conditioning is what the man who practices "sitting and forgetting" is supposed to be "forgetting". It is the Maya that the Hindu Yogi and the Buddhist nun are supposed to be cutting through. The realized man does not become so by having someone else insert some sort of vacuous statement about the need for "universal love", or "positive think", or "mind over matter" into his consciousness. He becomes enlightened by entering into the void that exists when we strip away all that social conditioning and see the world (and his being) as it truly is.

Traditional Chinese Medicine

I sometimes hear from people who assume that because I am a Daoist that I am a fan of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). I suspect that the hidden assumption is that TCM must be grounded in Daoism, so anyone who studies the Dao should have some affinity to it. While I will admit that I haven't done a lot of study of TCM, but that doesn't mean that I don't have a negative opinion about it.

The first thing that I think people should understand is that not everything that comes from Chinese culture is "Daoist". Both Roman Catholicism and Western medicine have their origins in Europe, yet we would never assume that Roman Catholicism would have anything to do with Western medicine, or vice-versa, would we?

More importantly, I think we need to understand that TCM comes from a pre-scientific tradition. That means that none of it has fallen under the careful, collective scrutiny that our Western medicine has. Some parts of it probably works, but most of it is probably about as effective as medieval European medicine was. Lest people take issue with this, I would direct their attention to the following URLs.

The first, "Be Wary of Acupuncture, Qigong and Traditional Chinese Medicine", comes from the excellent medical website known as "quackwatch" and gives a very good overview of TCM. The next two come from the excellent publication known as the "Skeptical Inquirer", and are titled "Traditional Medicine and Pseudo-Science in China" , and a second part article in another issue. At least from these three essays, it seems that there are very good reasons to suspect that a large amount of TCM is worthless or worse.

Some folks might be scandalized to hear someone who calls himself a Daoist---and a religious Daoist at that---being so dismissive of this sort of thing. I would argue, however, that this is because so many people have fallen for the fallacious idea that the age of an idea gives it merit. "Ancient Chinese wisdom" is probably the phrase that comes to mind. But the fact of the matter is that this appeal to age is not much more than an old-fashioned appeal to authority. And Daoists have always been notorious for deflating appeals to authority.

The other thing to remember is that contrary to what people might think, Daoism is not really that ancient. Confucianism---which really is a faith that revers the old---existed long before Daoism. And its real claim to fame (i.e. as "the school of Ru", or "rujia"----which is the better way of describing Confucians---is based upon their knowledge of ancient esoterica, most notably the rites and rituals of the Zhou and Shang.) In fact the rujia existed before there was, by definition, any sort of "Ancient Chinese Wisdom" simply because it was only later, after the ascendency of the Chin empire, that the word "China" came to describe the area and civilization complex.

And if we are going to be totally honest, China is not even the oldest civilisation on Earth. That honour goes to Europe, which can trace its written history back to the Egyptians and Sumerians---both of which have literature that exists to this day because our scholars have learned how to read both some types of cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. People who might balk at this assertion have to realise that "China" has gone through as many dramatic changes as Europe has. The geography has changed back and forth (hence the debate about whether or not Tibet is part of "China".) Its written language has changed so much that modern Chinese readers have about as much hope of understanding Zhuangzi in the original text as I had in reading "Beowulf" when I was at university.

In the face of this extensive history, "Daoism" only stretches back a small way. For example, tradition gives the dates for Laozi in the 6th century BC---about four hundred years after the founding of the Zhou dynasty and over a thousand after the founding of the Shang. Moreover, the founder of the Celestial Master movement, Zhang Daoling, was extant in the second century of the present era---which makes the religion slightly younger than Christianity and only slightly older than Islam.

Moreover, the Immortal most associated with the development of internal alchemy, Zhang Sanfeng, and the legendary creator of taijiquan, is said to have been born as either as early as 960 or as late as 1279 AD. By definition, this makes him not an "ancient", but rather a "medieval". In effect, the founder of neidan was a contemporary of Saint Boniface, Thomas Aquinas or someone who lived between them.

In contrast, if we were to look at the roots of "traditional Western Medicine" (if such a thing existed), we would probably go back to people like Hippocrates (460-370 BC), who coined the oath that Western doctors take to this day. We should also include rationalists like Socrates (469-399 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), who are often called the inventors of the scientific method. So if age is the only criteria to use for accepting something, then "Ancient European wisdom" has as much right to our allegiance as "Ancient Chinese wisdom". And given the choice, I'll opt for double-blind studies over the Yellow Emperor's Classic.


The thing to remember is that Daoism is not about preserving tradition. Instead, it is about finding the truth.

Living in a Dream

A while back I wrote a post about the "episodic" nature of human existence. This was an attempt to explain one of those prosaic things with very profound implications that comes to a person as a result of internal alchemy. That is, in case you can't be bothered to read the original post, that our experience of self-consciousness doesn't exist in a continuous stream but rather in isolated bits connected by our memories. As the Buddhists would say, we have no real experience of an ego, just individual moments when various sense experiences come together and become self-referential. (This is the doctrine of "anatta".)

To build on this point, however, it is important to understand that the illusion of self comes from the ability of memory to tie together these transitory self-referential experiences and suggest that they are bound together like the beads on a rosary.

The complexity resides in the fact that memory itself is a phenomenon that simply cannot be trusted to give us an accurate description of the past.

Most people have the naive idea that our memories exist like some sort of video tape recorder that records our experiences and stores them somewhere where they can be retrieved more-or-less the same way we had them in the first place. This is not true at all, however. Indeed, it turns out that memories can be constructed through suggestion.


Take for example the famous case of the Swiss psychologist Piaget. He had a very vivid memory of an attempted kidnapping where unknown attackers were fought off by his nanny.

"I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station."

It turns out, however, that Piaget's memory was totally false. Years after the fact his nanny spontaneously confessed that for some reason she had made the entire episode up. Piaget could only surmise that his vivid recollection could only be the result of the many times he had heard her repeat the story to others.


A lot of sad stories exist about how our naive understanding of memory has resulted in terrible persecution of innocent people. Take a look at this very informative essay by an expert in field to see how easy it is for a "therapist" to convince people that they have memories about things that simply did not take place. This might be just an interesting piece of information if it did not also come with the knowledge that a great many people have been wrongfully accused and convicted of crimes they never committed. See this modern example. Pick away a bit more at this thought and consider the following: a great many people are convicted by eye-witness testimony at criminal trials. But as the above links show, memory can be very easily manipulated by police and others simply by the way they conduct their interviews with people. Lest people still believe that they know what they see, take a look at the video at this link.


If it is possible to have totally false memories planted in our minds simply because someone else strongly suggests that they did in fact happen, and that even when we are distracted we can miss a great deal, then we should be really careful when we consider our own self-image. Is our perception of what happened to us in the past an accurate record of what really happened? Or is it some sort of conditioned reflex that comes from the culture we inhabit?

I know in my case I sometimes have to watch myself with my memory because I have extremely vivid dreams. The issue is that these dreams seem so real that I begin to think of them as events that really have happened to me. For example, I have a very strong memory of going fishing once when I was a child and seeing a tanker truck emptying its load into a crystal clear stream with fish in it. It seems like a memory, yet I cannot for the life of me remember a time, place or opportunity where I could have possibly seen this thing happen. (I grew up on a dreary farm and my childhood consisted of work and very little else.)

There are several very famous stories in Daoist literature about dreams, perhaps the greatest being Zhuangzi's inability to tell if he were a philosopher dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a philosopher. I suspect that most people see this as an amusing story, but I suspect that if we really did think about the relationship between dreams and our consciousness we'd be really, deeply disturbed. Most of us go through our lives without having this point deeply affect us. But the mindfulness that comes from neidan practice points out the ultimate hallucinatory experience of being alive.

I once took a very strong dose of magic mushrooms and experienced the full gamut of what we normally call "hallucinations". Two things really stood out. The first was sitting on my bed and watching my alarm clock running backwards. The second was some sort of strange "self evident" realisation that it was patently absurd to be afraid of dying. The more I think about that experience and the really powerful role that my dreams have in the way I look at the world, the more I question the self-evident facts of my personal existence. I suspect that a fully realised man might have his "common sense" so shaken by this sort of thing that he no longer experiences the world around him in a similar way to ordinary folks.