Neidan, or, Chinese Alchemy
Yet Another Digression: ‘Wild History’
Whenever someone reads or hears something about taijiquan, the reader needs to remember that the prime design criteria of these stories is educational, not journalistic. That is to say, the job of the story isn’t to give an historically accurate rendering of what really happened. Instead, it’s designed to teach a general principle in a way that is both entertaining (so people will listen to it) and striking (so people will remember it). In addition, these stories are also often meant to not be easily understood. People have to ‘work’ at them in order to understand the deeper message hidden within.
Here’s a very simple example of one of these ‘teaching stories’:
A man, having lost his axe, suspected his neighbour's son of having taken it. Certain peculiarities in his gait, his countenance and his speech, marked him out as the thief. In his actions, his movements, and in fact his whole demeanour, it was plainly written that he and no other had stolen the axe. By and by, however, while digging in a dell, the owner came across the missing implement. The next day, when he saw his neighbour's son again, he found no trace of guilt in his movements, his actions, or his general demeanour.
(From Chapter 7 of the old Lionel Giles translation of The Book of Liezi)
This is possibly the most easy-to-understood Daoist story I’ve come across, and is obviously a warning against what modern people would call ‘confirmation bias’. Most of the others I’ve read are more ‘head scratchers’ that bear significant thought. As such they aren’t only meant to transmit information but also to force the reader to go through at least a little bit of time doing real mental cogitation. In that sense, they are more akin to chess puzzles or crosswords than something on the front page of a good newspaper.
In my humble opinion, the are several reasons why Daoism teaches this way.
First, if people have to work things out for themselves, they learn more and remember it better than if someone just told them. This is why school teachers routinely assign children things like math problems for homework.
Second, the goal of Daoism isn’t to create little clones of the teachers. Instead, each individual is expected to bring their own, unique perspective to an issue. This means that a good teacher should allow students maximum opportunity to experiment and ‘figure it out for themselves’---simply because the dao of whatever they are being taught simply cannot be exhaustively explained through words.
Third, things get lost in translation from generation to generation and it’s important to have some humility about ‘ancient traditions handed down from generation to generation’.
There’s a Zen story that deals with this last idea. The Abbot of a temple was retiring and handed-on a manuscript that had gone from Abbot to Abbot for many generations---with each one adding his own ideas. This was duly accepted by the new leader. After few days, the retired leader was horrified to see the new Abbot burning the book he’d been given. When previous leader complained, the new guy explained “I had to burn the book to save the teachings”.
If a community places too much emphasis on a written text, the living spirit of a tradition runs the risk of being snuffed out of existence. Since writings have this power, it’s important to keep some of them sufficiently vague that they force future generations to fall back on their own inspirations and what they’ve learned in their own lives.
I offer this warning because modern people have a sadly common habit of looking at a text and either accepting that everything described in it literally happened---or, if they decide that this isn’t the case, dismissing it in its entirety as so much ‘bosh’.
Once again, I’m pointing out that Daoists---and by implication taijiquan players---live in the world of ‘yes/and’, and, not just ‘either/or’.
Zhang SanFeng
I mentioned before that Taijiquan was originally a martial arts style associated with the Chen clan. But there is also a legend that it was invented in the 12th century CE by a Daoshi (or Daoist initiate) named Zhang Sanfeng. The story goes that he was watching a snake and a bird fight, and was fascinated by the way the snake warded-off attacks by the bird through the geometry of it’s sinuous bodily movements. It waited for an opening and then struck---defeating its enemy. This story has been repeated and the image of a bird fighting a snake is one of the tropes that Taoists use to explain both their path in general, and taijiquan’s place within it.
The story goes that Zhang SanFeng was a Confucian scholar with a government appointment who gave away all his wealth and influence to become a travelling hermit living the Daoist lifestyle. He was interested in marital arts, and decided that taijiquan could be used as a ‘vehicle’ for the practice of Neidan. So while it seems he wasn’t the first person to practice taijiquan, he could be said to be the first to use it as a method of self-transformation.
Neidan
Just about every civilization has a tradition in which people attempt to improve on the basic Homo Sapiens model. Buddhists seek enlightenment, Sufis seek unity, Hindus seek Moksha, Philosophers seek wisdom, etc. This has been going on since the first human tribes recognized the tribal position of ‘shaman’. In Chinese Daoism, the term used is ‘Neidan’, which is sometimes translated as “Internal Alchemy” (ie: transforming the old ‘lead’ person into a new ‘gold’ one).
For some idiosyncratic reason, what the ancient Chinese were seeking expressed itself popularly in the language of ‘immortality’. That’s why many of the role models that they’ve produced are described as ‘immortals’, or even as people who just lived implausibly long lives. I heard this myself when I was initiated into my lineage where someone said that a particular image on the altar was of someone who was ‘over 250 years old’ and still lived in the hills outside of such-and-such a place. Zhang SanFeng was similarly given the title ‘immortal’ and was said to have lived for at least 200 years.
I’ve met naive people who believe that there are folks who have either become literally immortal, or who at least have extended their lives dramatically through Daoist physical exercises---like taijiquan. This has been going on a long time---even before taijiquan itself existed. Here’s a quote from a key Daoist text, Zhuangzi:
Blowing and breathing, exhaling and inhaling, expelling the old and taking in the new, bear strides and bird stretches—all this is merely indicative of the desire for longevity. But it is favored by scholars who channel the vital breath and flex the muscles and joints, men who nourish the physical form so as to emulate the hoary age of Progenitor P'eng [Peng Zu---the Chinese Methuselah].
(Wandering on the Way, a modern English translation of the Zhuangzi, Victor H. Mair 1994: 145)
But the fact of the matter is that the Zhuangzi itself takes a somewhat dim view of the whole immortality thing:
When Zhuangzi’s wife dies a friend complains that he doesn’t seem to upset, to which he replies that no one morns about someone’s non-existence before they are born, so why should they do so after they die?
One character lies dying and gets upset with his friends who surround him moaning about his passing. He says that all that’s happening is he is changing into other things as his body dissolves and gets transformed into soil and other plants and animals.
The character Liezi is described as seeing a skull at the side of the road and uses that as an excuse to launch into a discussion about how matter gets constantly changed from one thing to another in what modern ecologists would call ‘the conservation of matter’ or a ‘food web’, with a bit of an evolutionary theory mixed into it.
Because I take the points that Zhuangzi raises seriously, I simply cannot accept that the goal of Daoism is immortality. Instead, I accept another term for a Daoist that is not so popular: Realized Man. The way I understand the ‘wild history’ around Zhang SanFeng, therefore, is that he uses taijiquan as a technique or strategy for someone to become a Realized Man (or Woman---of course).
Realized Women and Men
Decades ago I heard (through a translator) an elderly man describe how ever single move in the taijiquan set contains an important principle that can be applied to help a person succeed in life. I’ve also mentioned above how I learned one way that the soft can overcome the hard through taking a punch to the chest and letting its force flow through me without doing any damage. There’s something to be said for learning general life principles through physical activity, or, learning in your bones.
What are those principles we want to learn “in our bones”? This is where things get complicated. To a large extent it is hard to understand what being a Realized Woman is like without going through the process of becoming realized yourself. I’m afraid that all any of us can do is to see this sort of thing not as an item that we can acquire but rather as a journey one goes on.
I’ve mentioned already that doing taijiquan involves ‘dissecting your body with your mind’ and using it to meditate involves ‘thinking about thinking’. Seeing it as Neidan, I would argue, involves thinking about how the principles you learn while practicing it can be applied to the other parts of your life.
I’m not talking just about simple stuff, like how to move a piece of heavy furniture or avoid getting hurt in a physical altercation---although that is also helpful. It also includes the more complex stuff, like how to navigate a complex political reality without either becoming either complicit or a victim. How to control your emotional responses to avoid letting someone else manipulate you. How to be more sensitive to the subtleties of a situation so you avoid problems while they are still small. And how small actions aimed at exactly the right target can create huge effects by initiating cascading results. The list could go on and on.
It’s easy for me to say the above things. But the fact of the matter is that each person has to do the work and figure this stuff out for themselves before they can apply the insights into their own lives. And in the process one of the things I’ve learned is that all ‘truths’ are provisional. We always have to be open to the idea that we could gain some new insight that will turn all we already ‘know’ upside down.
This is why no one ever ‘arrives’ in taijiquan. Even after 40 years, I still feel that I am just a beginner whenever I stop, take three deep breaths, bow, and, begin to do the 108 moves.