That sounds great Wanderer, it'll be good to read about what you've learned of the historical traditions aswell, because I'm just reading up on that at the moment. I searched for this thread aswell but couldn't find it so it's great to see it here again. Maybe I searched for 'Tao Magic' or something and didn't get the thread in the results.
If other people are interested, it seems like this thread could be a good discussion forum for what taoism "is", and various aspects of taoist practice, both ancient and modern. I can post brief sect-by sect synopses of the major historical traditions, if people want specifics for historical/cultural discussion.
That'd be really cool. I've just started reading Early Daoist Scriptures by Stephen R. Bokenkamp, and agree that there's a lot of things in the Taoist religion that correspond with CM, and that you maybe wouldn't think would be there before searching for it.
With the sect by sect synopses, it'd be good to read your views on them, because I've just been reading about 3 of them aswell. The Celestial Masters, The Shanqing and the Lingbao sects are the 3 that Early Daoist Scriptures covers, and the book has texts from each one, (including an alchemical text from the Shangqing) so it should be a huge help in learning about them once I've read through the texts, the commentaries, and the rest of what's there. I agree with alchemy being a big part of it aswell, or neidan (inner-alchemy) as they name it, but again, I'm only just scratching the surface here so I'll have to learn a lot more before I can speak about it with much accuracy.
Even though I only have basic info though, one thing that I did start, and that I'd love for anyone with more knowledge to be able to help with, is a wiki page on neidan itself. I wasn't able to add much and only started it in the hope that people would know what it was, and that others would be able to turn it into something better, but it has a few decent links that I added at the bottom aswell, for anyone wanting to read up on it more :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neidan
If you can see any major faults in that Wanderer, please either let me know so I can change them, or feel free to alter it yourself. One other short text that isn't added there is The Hundred Character tablet, that I found at the Tao Speaks forums and that I liked a lot aswell. It's listed as a commentary here, and attributed to Chang San-Feng, so maybe it's just a commentary, but it's the same thing I read from the forums. The site it's on also has plenty of Taoist info :
http://www.egreenway.com/taichichuan/chang1.htm#Lu
As for the practical side of things, I've got 2 books on Baguazhang now, and even though you can't learn it from a book, I've been practising the circle walking exercises during the week and so far they seem really good at getting chi, or qi, flowing through the body.
The practise is centered around the Bagua, or 8 Trigrams, and there's eight movements that correspond with each gua, that have you manifesting the energies of each one of them. In English they're translated in one of the books as Heaven, Fire, Thunder, Water, Earth, Mountian, Marsh and Wind, and there's a brief explanation of them here that I found useful and a little different to other descriptions I've read :
http://www.kheper.net/topics/I_Ching/trigrams.htm
Another interesting thing is that the circle walking is decribed as being a blend of meditation, exercise, and self defense, and when trying to learn it, the meditation aspect becomes apparent straightaway.
Looking at Taoism as a whole, it looks more complete than many other things I've learned about in the past, and a lot deeper than it's often described as being by many people who don't look very far beyond the Tao Te Ching. As for how the sects teachings relate to early Taoism, I think there's a lot of difference after having read the Chuang Tzu, and looking deeper at the Lao Tzu text, but how they'd merge, or can be merged, into a practical system is something that should be worthwhile learning about. |
