MCLC: Qigong's quiet return

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Qiqong's quiet return
***********************************************************

Source: NY Review of Books (1/13/12):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jan/13/notes-chinese-cave/

Notes from a Chinese Cave: Qigong¹s Quiet Return
By Ian Johnson

Lift up your head 
Calm your eyes
Look far away, as far as you can
Look beyond the walls
What do you see?

The Jinhua caves are located in a wooded, hilly area about 200 miles
southwest of Shanghai. The most famous cave, Double Dragon Cave, is
entered by a stream that passes under a stone overhang just a few inches
above the water. Visitors must lie flat in a shallow boat as it is pulled
by wires under the outcrop. Rock whizzes by a couple of inches in front of
your face and suddenly you are there, in the earth¹s womb, where people
have come for millennia to meditate‹lifting up their heads, calming their
eyes, and visualizing a world beyond the walls that hold us.

In November, I came to Jinhua with about 400 others on a ten-day retreat
to study with Wang Liping, probably China¹s most famous teacher of qigong,
a form of meditation and breathing exercises rooted in traditional Chinese
religion. Qigong¹s heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s, when it spread
rapidly across China as a kind of ersatz religion. Back then, the
Communist Party still actively discouraged religious life but qigong
escaped regulation because its backers had cleverly registered it as a
sport. In fact, it offered a typically Chinese path to salvation: physical
cultivation leading to enlightenment. Some qigong ³grand masters² claimed
supernatural abilities, saying they could conduct electricity or read
books without opening them. But many offered moral guidelines‹²popular
fundamentalism,² some scholars called it‹that appealed to people who had
seen the Communists¹ ideals collapse during the Cultural Revolution.

This was the beginning of China¹s religious revival
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/china-gets-religion/>
 and qigong became ubiquitous in Chinese parks and streets
<http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-12804-9/breathing-spaces>. Chinese
spoke of a ³qigong fever²
<http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14066-9/qigong-fever> that had
infected the country. But it came to a crashing close in 1999 when the
government brutally cracked down <http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6463>
on the militant qigong group Falun Gong after it staged protests in
downtown Beijing. Most qigong groups disappeared or went underground, and
as a result it is all but impossible today to practice qigong in public
parks.

Wang, who stopped teaching before the crackdown and laid low for much of
the past decade, avoided this maelstrom. Now he is making a comeback.
Among the qigong masters, he had always been somewhat unusual in
emphasizing the religious roots of his teaching‹specifically, in China¹s
only indigenous religion, Daoism. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, government
officials widely saw Daoism as the most backward religion‹ practices like
palm reading or fengshui were routinely condemned as ³feudal
superstition.² But faced with the rising popularity of foreign religions,
especially Christianity, the government is beginning to endorse Daoism
<http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/oct/29/china-getting-religion/>,
 too. Though he remains cautious, Wang has quietly begun teaching again in
public, shunning the word ³qigong² in favor of the Daoist term ³inner
alchemy.²

The 62-year-old Wang has had a colorful career, even if one isn¹t sure how
literally to take his official biography
<http://www.tuttlepublishing.com/book/?GCOI=48053100862270>. According to
that account, in the 1950s he was chosen by three Daoist masters of the
Longmen (Dragon Gate) school to be their successor‹the 18th generation in
a lineage. He lived at home on the outskirts of the northeastern Chinese
city of Fushun but after school would meet his teachers in the forest for
intense training; they would sometimes bind him cross-legged so he would
stop fidgeting.

When Maoists launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the four of them
took to the mountains and lived there for over a decade, practicing
esoteric Daoist self-cultivation practices, studying plant life and
helping villagers suffering from calamities. While Red Guards roamed the
valleys, destroying temples and schools, they traveled the mountains,
avoiding most people until stability returned to China with the Maoists¹
ouster in the late 1970s.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Wang¹s classes were hugely popular, some
resembling revival-style rallies in auditoriums and gymnasiums across the
country. Nowadays, he doesn¹t advertise openly and there are no public
rallies, but hundreds show up to his once- or twice- a year retreats for
the chance to learn from the master. The high point is the autumn Jinhua
classes, which took place this year near the caves, in the Temple to the
Immortal Huang, a historic deity who achieved immortality in the 4th
century by meditating here. Over the past few decades, ethnic Chinese
donors have helped rebuild the temple in a grand manner, with a reflecting
pool and four courtyards leading to the main hall, a soaring building of
9,000 square feet and 50-foot ceilings.

Standing in front of the immense statue to Huang, Wang delivered two
hour-long lectures each day followed by an hour and a half to two hours of
meditation. Every evening, one of his acolytes would hold a class to help
out newcomers. A 400-page textbook helped fill in the gaps.

Wang¹s own teachings hew close to the Daoist practices described in such
classic books like the lingbao bifa (Complete Methods of the Numinous
Treasure) and the taiyi jinhua zongzhi (The Secret of the Golden Flower
<http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Secret-Golden-Flower-Thomas-Cleary/?isb
n=9780062501936>) which‹translated by the German sinologist Richard
Wilhelm in 1929‹is one of the few Daoist cultivation books widely known in
the West, thanks in part to an introduction written by Wilhelm¹s friend,
the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. (For early 20th-century Europeans, the
practices seemed like another route to the subconscious
<http://www.schoolofwisdom.com/history/teachers/richard-wilhelm/carl-jung-o
n-richar-wilhelm/>.) Unlike his teachers, Wang feels that these books
should be taught using modern methods: he shuns binding children and‹in a
sharp break from Daoist tradition‹openly teaches some of the once-secret
methods.

As the only non-ethnic Chinese in the group, I was quickly adopted as the
class mascot. People congratulated me on understanding the value of
traditional Chinese cultivation practices, though meditating wasn¹t quite
like I imagined. For one thing it is more painful. The body¹s legs are
supposed to form a stable platform. The goal is to call up one¹s soul, the
shenguang. It manifests itself as a light, which is brought into the body
and used to purify the five organs‹liver, lungs, heart, spleen and
kidneys‹which correspond to the five elements of Chinese cosmology. But
even simply sitting cross-legged, I found my legs going numb after 45
minutes, then aching. Eventually, I was in such pain that I couldn¹t
concentrate on the meditation and began to fantasize about ways of
escaping.

All the while, one is regulating one¹s breathing. It is the most basic
voluntary movement we make; controlling it is the basis of controlling
oneself. Although we breath through our lungs, the goal in Daoist
meditation is to breathe with all of one¹s body, expanding and contracting
every pore. At the retreat, we also learned more active practices, such as
brisk walking. For an hour after breakfast each day we marched through the
mountain roads, the pace matched to breathing, you walk either three, six,
or twelve paces per inhalation and the same number per exhalation.

The best days were when we meditated in the Jinhua caves. My favorite
wasn¹t the Double Dragon Cave, or Shuanglongdong, which is a major tourist
site and couldn¹t be closed for our visits. But the Chaozhendong, or ³Cave
for Worshipping the Perfected Man² was more off the beaten track. The
Daoist nun who managed it would turn off the lights when we were inside.
Soon, all one could hear were the bats flying around and the drip of water
seeping in from outside. Some practitioners cried out and one woman
started sobbing. Wang said we shouldn¹t be surprised. ³We Chinese aren¹t
very introspective,² he told the class before going to the cave. ³You
think of things, like your father or your mother. It¹s okay.²

As I got to know members of our group, I began to realize how many unusual
people were in our midst. One man with incredibly strong thighs and
buttocks would walk around the retreat in a squat, as if out of the
Ministry of Silly Walks <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8>. One
person nodded sagely and said: ³That man has talent.² Then there was the
man who wore pink-striped pajamas the entire time, and the woman who could
sit in the lotus position for eight hours. My favorite eccentric was a
76-year-old woman who said she had a vision in 1986 that Wang had revealed
himself to be a Daoist master. She contacted Wang and invited him to
Jinhua to teach, the first of his many visits here. She also quietly
distributed pictures of Wang with something that looked like an
overexposed strip above his head. ³That is his dragon spirit revealing
itself,² she said. ³It can¹t be photographed.²

At times, Wang seemed less a dragon spirit than a bumbling professor. He
would get his microphone cables mixed up and often mumbled odd offhand
advice, such as what kind of dumplings to eat in the winter (answer:
mutton). But his followers have stuck with him for decades and seemed
genuinely excited about the event. I met one student who paid her way from
the remote province of Guizhou because she was desperate to know about
Daoist physical cultivation‹a key to Daoism is bodily practice, not just
praying or moral behavior and she wanted to see it first hand. Another man
lived as a hermit near the Yangtze and had been planning to attend one of
Wang¹s retreats for over a decade. He finally left his cave this year and
took part.

Today, the importance of classes like Wang¹s is underscored by the rapid
disappearance of knowledge about the physical cultivation practices he
teaches and that once held sway. One of Wang¹s long-time students, Shen
Zhigang, said that for him, studying with Wang was a way of reconnecting
to traditional Chinese values. ³We¹re studying Teacher Wang but he has
predecessors who go back and back and back to Laozi,² he said, referring
to the mythic author of Daoism¹s key text, the Daodejing. ³The thread
still hasn¹t been cut. It was almost cut. This is why we¹re studying this.
We have to keep the thread intact and pass it down to the next
generations.²

After over 30 hours of meditation, I couldn¹t get out of my head the
liturgy we¹d hear during the sessions. It was said in a rhythmic, calm
voice, urging us to push beyond the perceived world. In a country that has
discovered materialism, it was a reminder that other forces haven¹t
disappeared.

Inhale, pull the room into you
Exhale, push out the walls of this room
Inhale, contract the room
Exhale, expand it
Inhale 
Exhale
Now you are entering a half-sleep state of consciousness
Clear your mind

January 13, 2012, 11:42 a.m.