Rating Neidan schools

Rating Internal Alchemy Schools:

which is the easiest to learn? Which is the best?

Recently the newsletter has been a bit of a dog's breakfast with all the various videos, translations and this and that, but at the end of the day IS is about Internal Alchemy, especially that of Daoism, so it is important to stay epistemically rooted and return back to articles which can be of value to those wishing to learn this unique and wonderful school of meditation.

Today I want to review the major Internal Alchemy schools to try to describe which school is the easiest to learn, which is the most difficult, which is the most nuanced or deepest etc...

I am only going to go with mainstream Neidan schools since tiny little subschools are often heterodox in their approach and can't be judged purely on the merit of their internal alchemy practice.

Before we start let me clarify what school means in Neidan:

Daoism views methods of practice as arts or methods usually denoted by the terms 术 Shu/art 法 Fa/method/Dharma which behave as windows for 道 Dao.

In Daoism regardless of school of thought virtually everyone agrees about the most basic things like what Dao represents, the dynamics of pre and post heaven, longevity and liberation as goals, and the importance of returning to the root.

Neidan is an art within Daoism and is a way to attain the Dao, although not everyone in Daoism will agree that Neidan alone is sufficient to achieve the Dao since most religious Daoists follow some form of Vinaya which traditionally most famous Neidan ancestors thought was not required (even Buddhist practitioners such as Liu Huayang).

The art of Neidan has various styles which are traced back to individual ancestors in the tradition, these ancestors are called 祖宗 Zu Zong which refers to different generations of ancestors who serve roles in creating the style and passing it down, but that is beyond the point I want to make since the term 宗Zong can also be used to describe a style or school of thought, but indicates an ancestral quality denoting the seniority of the style.

In this regard I'm using the term style and school interchangeably, but what I really mean is that Neidan is split into different Zong such as Nan Zong/Southern School, Bei Zong/Northern School, since those are the two ancestor styles of Neidan having appeared the earliest and having fundamentally different worldviews from each other as a result of where they place emphasis in practice.

The rest of the schools are referred to as 派 Pai/School since each of the Pai descends from the Northern School as a result of the political power invested in the Quanzhen religion during the Yuan Dynasty when the Mongolian emperors recognized Qiu Chuji's Long Men school as the representative of the Daoist religion in China.

After that pretty much every other school was influenced by the Northern school as a result of its ubiquity, although from the theoretical perspective many of them focus on Southern School style techniques as a result of the importance of that tradition.

That may all sound confusing, but basically what it means is that the Neidan view is broadly organized into three possible worldviews:

1: Emphasis on Southern School approach:

This approach begins with cultivating Ming, or innate life energy and undergoing the alchemical process of refining essence and transforming Qi, refining Qi and transforming Shen, refining Shen and transforming void, and merging void with Dao.

2: Emphasis on Northern School approach:

This approach emphasizes the idea of attaining stable Dhyana (meditative attention) in order to enter the realm of clarity and stillness and recognize one's innate nature by experiencing initial enlightenment (明心见性 Ming Xin Jian Xing/Illuminate the Heart and See One's Essential Nature).

The cultivation of Jing and Qi is also present, but this method has a stronger essence at the start on spiritual cultivation and in the most traditional sense follows certain temple rules which are meant to pull people out of the dust world so they can focus completely on their practice (keeping in mind the early Quanzhen tradition has both robed and secular disciples who all followed Daoist religious rules on some level, this is where the concept of Vinaya eventually entered Daoism, although it was later).

3: Combined Approach:

in the combined approach the practice is done in a way that promotes realization through cultivating pre heaven energy and cultivation of energy through developing spiritual awareness.

Each of the schools tends to in one of these three areas, although most say that they practice the third approach since it sounds better.

Here are the basics of how each of the schools stack up in this regard:

• Southern School: The Southern School is especially focused on the process of refining essence and transforming Qi at first. The Essence is refined in the area under the umbilicus, it travels to the upper Dantian and is brought back to the space behind the umbilicus. Eventually the Sage Fetus forms and when it is mature it can travel in the middle channel to the head, causing increasing levels of spiritual awareness to be generated. Ultimately this can lead to higher levels of practice in which one realizes the void and can form the body outside the body as well as realize the Dao. It follows the first cultivate Ming later cultivate Xing approach.

• Northern School: The Northern School is a complex subject since it is so dominated by Long Men, but that certainly isn't the entire story. Wang Chongyang wrote significant documents about Neidan, as did other disciples such as Ma Danyang. One of the key things to keep in mind is the emphasis on the Classic of Clarity and Stillness as core literature of the Northern School. This classic lays out the nature of Xing/the innate nature and how to realize it through non-action. Wang Chongyang also had documents about how to live in hermitage, overcoming sensual experience, and even building a thatched hut, so many people get stuck on these documents without reading his internal alchemy literature. Wang's internal alchemy texts actually do focus on the Dantian, but he introduced certain ideas like killing the sleep demons to indicate the need to cultivate in a more religious way by 苦修 Ku Xiu/Bitter Cultivation. There is a common belief that the Northern School originally taught students to attain clarity and stillness before teaching them the skill of refining the essential life energy, so in this context it is probably historically accurate to say that they focused on Xing before Ming, although today if you read Northern School documents you can understand their view of Ming by reading Wang Chongyang and Ma Danyang's documents where the process is explained clearly.

• Middle School: The Middle School emphasizes the idea of Xing and Ming dual cultivation in which the “single opening of the mystery gate” is used to generate both spiritual energy and Qi. Its methods are a combination of the Southern and Northern School in roughly equal parts.

• Later versions of the Northern School: Chen Zhixu deserves special mention because he is part of a later generation of Northern School practitioners who combined Southern and Northern methods with an emphasis on cultivating Ming first, which was a departure from normal Northern School thinking. Chen Zhixu was highly influential on the Wu Liu school which we will mention next.

• Wu Liu School: This school claims to be nature and life dual cultivation, but it is actually mainly concerned with the process of refining the essence and transforming Qi etc... the Wu Liu school uses Buddhist ideas to justify the need to cultivate the energy in the Lower Dantian and believe it is the seed of the Buddha since in the long run it can be used to realize emptiness and “pass the other bank” to arrive at the pure land. They claim to be influenced by the Northern School and were influential in promoting the idea of using the space between the eyes to focus the spirit before directing the attention to the Dantian, but still if you read most of their literature they were quite focused on the Lower Dantian, similar to the Southern School.

• Eastern School: this secular school founded by Lu Xixing is similar to the Southern School and begins by cultivating Ming as a means to attain spiritual realization later. There is also some evidence that they continued the practice of Yin Yang dual cultivation which is the method of practicing with one's romantic partner.

• Western School: the Western School and Eastern School are very similar and are both based on the teachings of Zhang Sanfeng.

• Zhang Sanfeng school: this approach is a Xing and Ming dual cultivation approach, but unlike the Middle School which places the weight a little on Xing, the Zhang Sanfeng school places it a little on Ming, although they are so similar that sometimes the Middle School thinker Huang Yuanji is erroneously placed under the name of Zhang Sanfeng in a line that goes Zhang Sanfeng – Huo Long Zhen Ren – Chen Tuan – Huang Yuanji, even though there is no evidence for this.

That is basically the Xing Ming balance for the main schools, now let's look at how easy they are to study:

• Southern School: extremely difficult to study because the information contained in the texts is technical in nature and requires careful teaching from a teacher who really understands the subtle meanings and has a good level of practice,

• Northern School: easier to enter the basic level of practice which includes sitting in forgetting as a basic practice and emphasizes the ideas of clarity and stillness which as bulk concepts are not so hard to understand. The problem with this approach is that the actual Neidan method is just as nuanced as the Southern School and many Long Men monks do not practice Neidan at a high level, also if they do there is a good chance they practice one of the other styles of Neidan and not the Northern school (for instance, according to my teacher, my his teacher, who was the abbot of the White Cloud Temple emphasized the Middle School teachings of Huang Yuanji),

• Middle School: the basic concepts of the Middle School are much easier to understand than the Southern School and once you know how to manifest the single opening of the mystery gate it is like a secret pass into Neidan which will allow you to make progress much faster. It still requires clear teaching to enter, but you don't need to know as many subtle ideas at first, although to go to a high level of understanding you will need to read Southern School books like Understanding Reality which are impossible for the uninitiated to interpret.

• Chen Zhixu and Wu Liu Schools: These methods are the clearest approach to energy cultivation of any Neidan school, especially the Hui Ming Jing, one of the representative texts of the Wu Liu School. The schools use terminology, sometimes which is a little obscure, but they are completely clear about energy cultivation and in this regard are much easier to learn than almost any other method. The weak point of these schools is that they are excessively post heaven in their approach and as such it can be difficult to go beyond the intermediate level of practice.

• Zhang Sanfeng, Eastern and Western Schools: these are the middle of the road schools which are mostly clear and relatively easy to learn. If I were to suggest any new student to study one approach over another I would recommend starting with the Western School method of Li Hanxu and moving on to the writings of Zhang Sanfeng to explain deeper aspects of Daoist metaphysics which are integral in practice. These schools are all excellent, but they are limited in that they withhold information about advanced practice and stop explaining clearly after the Yang Spirit leaving the orifice. This won't be a problem for most people since not so many people attain such a level, but if they do they probably already have some idea about what to do, or they can patch their knowledge by using middle school books like Xing Ming Gui Zhi which explain advanced practice clearly.

When we think of Neidan schools we shouldn't view them as completely different, Neidan is one art with several approaches, so you can learn one school while still reading the texts of the other schools, indeed most Neidan thinkers quote not only each other but even unrelated Buddhist texts such as the Garland Sutra, Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment, the Confucian Classics and much more.

Having said that Neidan has its own unique character and each of the schools has its own ideas, so it is better to learn one first and the others later.

I first learned an approach which was similar to the Southern School, but taught through a 19^th century text called Da Cheng Jie Yao and switched to the Middle School later when I found the most utility in Huang Yuanji's text Dao De Jing Chan Wei. After that I read many of the Northern School texts, all the relevant documents by Zhang Sanfeng, everything by Li Hanxu, some Lu Xixing work, about half the books of the Wu Liu school, most of Chen Zhixu, and many obscure smaller schools from the Tang Dynasty and random marginal Neidan schools as well as modern researchers such as Hu Fuchen. My practice now is basically Middle School, but in all honesty Middle School practice just starts where the rest of the schools end up after exiting the beginner level. That makes Middle School Neidan a little less accessible than some other approaches, but once you have mastered the basics it is a more powerful method capable of producing spiritual results faster than most of the other schools without also losing the energetic value.

Again, it is my basic consideration that for the most part the Western School is probably the easiest point of entry for most people and because its texts are written in plain language and are quite middle of the road it is easy to make progress with less instruction than in other methods which are more demanding intellectually. If you want to advance your practice beyond the basics it is always useful to read Wu Zhen Pian regardless of which style you practice, and many people read Xing Ming Gui Zhi even though it is specifically a Middle School text since it teaches advanced levels of practice that other schools ignore.

I hope this has been somewhat helpful and not too confusing,

let me know if you have any questions.