Little Immortal says: 道体 Dao Ti/The Body of the Dao

Internal Alchemy Basics.

The Little Immortal says: “道体”是无形无相，人人都有的先天本质“ “The Body of the Dao is formless and without a counterpart, it is the pre-heaven root essence of all people.”

Hi friends, since it is a new year I've decided to start a new serial on the weekend posts here at IS.

Now every weekend (except maybe next when I'll be in the Netherlands teaching a weekend seminar on Daoist Qigong with Felix De Hass at the Qing Bai Institute) I will post articles about basic concepts in Internal Alchemy called “小神仙说 Xia Shen Xian Shuo/Little Immortal Says.”

This winter I'm also starting a program to learn the basics of illustration so I can make picture books for my son, so I'll be trying to put those skills to use in the article and featuring pictures of Little Immortals who will teach us the important points of the lesson.

The pictures will be crude at first, so please bear with me as I improve my practice!

Today's article is about the 道体 Dao Ti/The Body of the Dao.

Dao Ti is an important concept mentioned in various texts and refers to the nature of the Dao.

It is often used in conjunction with the term 体用 Ti Yong which means body and use, we'll get into that in a future article.

The Little Immortal says:

“道体”是无形无相，人人都有的先天本质“ “The Body of the Dao is formless and without a counterpart, it is the pre-heaven root essence of all people.”

Maybe you fluent Chinese readers can tell me if I made any mistake in my use of grammar, I don't write in Chinese very often outside of sending messages to my Taiji teacher on Weixin so I wouldn't be surprised if my grammar has some mistakes.

Let's look at the idea a bit:

The idea of the body of the Dao doesn't literally mean a body like the physical ones we have, but instead it refers to the nature of the Dao.

When we think of the Dao's nature we should view it as relative to the use of the Dao.

That is to say that although the use of the Dao is in its power to generate Pure Yang Energy in the Universe and thus bring things into being, the body of the Dao is void, without form, without image, and non dual. In other words, the special theory of Daoism is that something which is suspended in the absolute of non-being can generate all being.

Internal Alchemy practice understands this as being the capital from which we derive our primary nature and physical bodies as well as all other things which make us exist and be aware of our existence.

In practice this doesn't just mean we are chasing after non-being, but instead that we want to use the non-being of the Dao as part of a cycle of original generation that can actually allow us to be more complete.

This is a subtle lesson of Internal Alchemy and is predicated on the idea that although the Dao favors non-existence, the immortals view existence as precious, thus they use the power of the Dao in meditation to recreate the original circumstances of the life of the Universe within their own bodies.

This is why old texts often disparage practices like Dao Yin and Breathwork since they only work on the Post-Heaven body and mind rather than our original nature.

It isn't that those practices are bad, actually they are part of a healthy life and can improve our physical situation greatly, but in terms of cultivating the Yang Spirit and making our energy become more mature and more permanent, we need to also realize the original nature of void non-being so the Dao can do its work.

My belief is that harmonizing with the Dao actually means that our energetic bodies become mature enough that we can constantly replenish them during meditation by easily borrowing from the energy of the Dao at any given time, but then again harmony with the Dao comes by degrees and I'm speculating so don't take that as any kind of orthodoxy :)

Ok, that's that for the first Little Immortal Says article,

what did you think?

Tell me in the comments?

Also please consider subscribing to IS, we have lots of fun here and you can learn all about Internal Alchemy and Daoist philosophy!!

I can't say for sure if there will be an article next weekend since I'll be on the move and when not teaching I anticipate eating lots of delightful Indonesian food with my very good friend and counterpart. :)