Clearing the air about the modern Neidan community
A group of us is gradually coming to the end of a several month long reading of the 1970s Neidan text Fang Dao Yu Lu (records of interviews with the Daoists) published in Taiwan and revolving around the secular Neidan community there.
The text was written by Li Leqiu, a Neidan practitioner who sought out the instruction of all the major Taiwanese masters of his time in order to better understand the style.
The book consists of short interviews with practitioners of most of the major extant Neidan styles including the Northern School, Wu Liu, Middle, and Western schools as well as disciples of Chen Yingning's Immortality Study.
The various contributors all have different views of Neidan and the text is a great approach to illustrating the genuine differences between approaches in Neidan, showing how Neidan is not one style but actually has significant diversity even if it remains broadly the same topic.
Another thing that was really interesting about the text was that it clearly illustrated how Neidan practitioners in the commons view themselves as distinctly Daoist even though they do not have a direct relationship to a temple community or hold Daoist religious beliefs.
This is an important point which I have mentioned in the past, but it has been quite a while and I want to reinvest myself in this topic for a while because there is a long and drawn out conversation that must be had between the various camps of occidental Daoism so we can all understand each other and get along.
Daoism throughout most of Chinese history has existed in multiple contexts and cannot be pigeon holed into a particular strain of thought.
There are significant records of Daoism as a philosophy movement existing among other philosophies during the Warring States all the way up to the Jin and even later depending upon who you read.
There is also overwhelming evidence that practitioners of Daoist arts such as Neidan, Dao Yin etc... were often not directly associated with temple culture and the list of famous Daoist practitioners such as Lu Dongbin, Zhang Boduan, Lu Xixing, Li Hanxu and many of their disciples illustrates the existence of a school of Daoist practice which did not require ceremonial methods, deity practices, or investment in religious ideas to be legitimate.
It is also clear that the great accomplishments of these figures led to many of them being inducted into the religious Daoist traditions in a post-hoc fashion and that many claims made to practices such as Internal Alchemy did not originate within temple culture but instead in circles of literati who had a special interest in Daoist practice.
It further stands to reason that Neidan was created and was not discovered either organically or through heavenly transmission.
The trajectory of the historical creation of Neidan can be clearly traced over hundreds of years of gradual development of Daoist ideas, some of which took place in temples and some of which did not.
It must also be stated clearly that the open interaction between people studying Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism was what led to the creation of Neidan and that Neidan is not a standalone Daoist practice, but instead a composite of harmonious ideas within the three schools.
It has become vogue among scholars in the West to view modern Neidan communities as a form of culture creation rather than an inherent aspect of Daoist culture and this is a big mistake.
For instance, in the 1500s Lu Xixing and a large group of secular Neidan practitioners wrote correspondences back and forth in order to discuss methods and their views on attaining the Dao.
This again took place in the 1900s within the Western School of Li Hanxu and in the 20th century within Chen Yingning's group of friends and students.
This secular culture of Neidan is not a modern outgrowth of Daoist culture into an imagined tradition, it is one of the most important traditions within Daoism throughout hundreds of years of its history.
Without these figures it is doubtful that Neidan would have ever made it off the ground, much less be as well understood as it is today.
Having said that, there is a difference between modern practice and the practice of past generations and I want to talk about both the positive and negative aspects of this today:
Positive differences:
As a result of the profound contribution of Chen Yingning the modern practice community has grown to view Neidan as the cornerstone of the immortal lifestyle. This way of life is the first voicing and organization of Daoist practices into a secular system.
This might not be super obvious, so I'm going to explain it in more detail...
Although secular Neidan communities have existed for as long as Neidan has been around there has never been a distinction made and never been a tradition of Neidan as a standalone school of Daoism.
That isn't to say that Lu and Li and crowd didn't research and practice Daoist ideas deeply, but instead that no one ever thought to create a standalone way to explain all the complexities of life in the context of secular Daoist practice.
In other words they probably just did it naturally and it didn't need to be mentioned.
Chen Yingning broke the mold by establishing the idea that self cultivation has to reach every part of life and that we should use the philosophies of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism to establish every aspect of our way of living.
This systematic approach to practice is the only true secular school of Daoist practice to ever exist since none of the previous approaches to such practices was organized at the level of lifestyle and those medieval experts were more concerned with communicating technical information than going into depth about how to live.
Of course there will be someone who points out that such and such a Neidan book mentions food and drink and sex, love and anger and attachment, but those things are not detailed lifestyle instructions they are abstentions which serve as a support for the technical practice of meditation.
Neidan masters in the past worked bitterly to achieve the Golden Elixir and since they dedicated so much of their time to it they might not have needed to establish a secular lifestyle which is perhaps why Chen Yingning was the first to really think it through.
Negative:
the negative aspect of the modern community is that it has no absolute consistent values since Daoist philosophical literature is open to interpretation. This means that there are rather a lot of shady figures who walk in the shadows between the religious and secular world, make unreasonable claims and mistreat their students, clients etc..
Another problem is the tendency to water down the message of Internal Alchemy and replace it with Qigong, dualistic techniques and pop psychology. This is the current zeitgeist in the West, but it is also the current zeitgeist in Taiwan as well where many Neidan organizations are nothing more than fancy Qigong clubs with experts on the Yijing who come to say some nice words about the hexagrams once a month.
Positive and negative aside, the modern Neidan community is a reflection of a much longer trend which has existed since the very early days of Neidan.
Another thing to consider is that just like there is much dilution of practice today, those amazing figures of the past such as Zhang Boduan were not the standard of their generation, in fact they are famous because they bucked the trend and invented something profound that overturned existing narratives of their days. This is a far cry from protecting generations of accumulated knowledge of the Dao Zang and passing it down unchanged generation to generation. It is absolutely required to understand that the most famous masters of Neidan who created new styles were radical in comparison to the Daoists of their days and that their contributions were profound and highly heterodox in their time.
I very much want to encourage every secular practitioner of Neidan who has found a good teacher and is able to learn the genuine material that you should not be shy about your identity in Daoism, do not let yourself be bullied by sour scholars who due to their own ingrained biases don't view us as legitimate, and to make sure you do the legwork to understand the real origins of Neidan and how our modern community is a continuation and strengthening of a trend which has already lasted for more than 1200 years.
To practice Daoism is to put the teachings of the Dao De Jing into action in your life, if you do it in a small way you will have a small result, if you do it in a large way you will have a great result.
Keep going!