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Bill Bodri's views on qigong & yogaFrom: Michael Winn
Subject: General
Date/Time 2005-04-08 09:55:09
Remote IP: 66.32.110.160
MessageI forgot to reply to Max's comment about he didn't think that Billl Bodri was opposed to the health benefits of qigong. His website puts out a different story. I've responded to the relevant sections, but the Bodri text is complete and unexpuragated in any way:
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Don't Spin Your Chi, Imagine Microcosmic Circulations, or Play With Your Chakras
Recently quite a few people have contacted me about various Tao school, qi-gong, yoga, Tibetan, even sexual methods for spinning the chi within the physical body. They read these old texts talking about the chi flows through the chi channels, particularly the microcosmic and macrocosmic circulations, and feel they’ve discovered a great secret and the key to successful spiritual cultivation.
Folks, you don’t need to know any of that stuff. It’s all just a pollution if you try to FORCE those things into happening. If you cultivate correctly, they’ll just happen naturally. Just save up your sexual energies and cultivate emptiness and the kundalini will naturally awaken and all these things will happen.
(WINN: Any good Taoist teacher would agree with not forcing. But "not need to know any of that stuff" treats people like they were spiritual infants, that only Big Daddy Nan and nice Uncle Bill need to know about that stuff. Its like catholic priests telling people not to read the bible - "its too complicated for your puny mind and only the high priest can get it right".....)
On the other hand, to focus on them breaks many rules of cultivation:
(1) you’re playing with thoughts and sensations,
(2) you’re bringing consciousness into the body rather than letting it remain non-local
(3) you’re creating mental realms of delusion
(4) it doesn’t lead to anything.
End of story.
(WINN: He should say, End of Body. Or say: being local - in a body - is a stupid and lowly state. His lack of the inner body space awareness that is generated during true qigong - is nil. Or even a simple awareness that the physical body is the temple holding sacred inner space - is totally absent. Which I'm guessing is the real reason he and Nan are anti-Taoist, though they won't admit it. Taoists appreciate physical nature, which is the physical body of Tao. If you hold judgements against body and Nature, you are holding them against Tao as well.
"(4) it doesn't lead to anything". This is a good time for helpful Uncle Bill to read the 3500 scientific studies on the life-saving medical benefits of qigong.)
Did Buddha ever tell you to rotate your chi, or play with sensations of chi and consciousness? He surveyed hundreds of cultivation and meditation methods, desperately wanted us to succeed quickly, and never once advised people to do these practices.
(WINN: I've pointed out these energy practices did not exist in Buddha's time. Perhaps at the time Buddha did not realize the earth, the solar system, and all the galaxies are rotating and spinning, or he might have had more respect for the fact that chi loves to spin and is strengthened by it).
Did the Zen school ever mention these things and say they should be practiced? No.
What about Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu for the schools of Taoism? What about Socrates or Confucius and Mencius, all of whom became enlightened?
No, no, no, no and no again. This is not spiritual cultivation. These spiritual greats never mentioned these practices because they are deviations from the correct path.
(WINN NOTE: BOTH CHUANG TZU AND LAO TZU CONTAIN NUMEROUS REFERENCES TO ESOTERIC METHODS. See Harold Roth's book Original Tao, which shows conclusively Tao Te Ching was a meditation manual. See references such as "the sage breathes through his heels" (eight extra channel point to connect to earth chi) or "sage empties his mind and fills his belly" (allusion to cultivating lower dantian). There are dozens more. So another example of Nan and Bill doing false thinking for their followers, instead of urging them to investigate for themselves.)
First please recognize that such chi flows, and more, will happen naturally when you start cultivating correctly and “correct cultivation” means cultivating an empty mental state, not a state where you are amplifying or clinging to sensations. That’s just playing with the “wind chi” in the body (called “fan chi” in Chinese) and creating realms of delusion involved with the form and sensation skandhas.
All this trouble started because in the Sung dynasty in China, some Tao masters started writing autobiographical accounts of their progress and later students, thinking this is what’s supposed to happen in cultivation, started trying to force these circulations into initiation. They basically took the Tibetan idea of the “resultant vehicle,” in taking the results of the path and trying to make them into a causal force for the path, and applied them to Taoism. But as Nan Huai-chin -- recognized as an “enlightened master” of the Esoteric school -- always says, the Tibetan tantric practices usually just lead to failure and certainly to more disasters than can be imagined. They destroy the culture of countries rather than elevate them.
(WINN: This is really bad history, totally false, heavily biased buddhist-centric view. Plus he ignorantly lumps all harmonoius chi flow together in with bad evil wind chi. For accurate history, read Isabelle Robinet's Taoism Growth of a Religion.).
The same logic applies to qi-gong practices, which are just Indian yoga pranayama (breathing practices) combined with concentrations on thoughts and sensations. They never lead anywhere. Yes, you produce some unusual results but who said that clinging to your chi was the spiritual path? Such practices never lead you to get the Tao or even the very first dhyana. Which qi-gong master has the first dhyana? No one! These practices were the most materialistic form of cultivation left over after the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese, with everything else destroyed and the desire to state they had something of their own, promote the heck out of basically nothing.
(WINN: more really bad history, with typical Buddhist diatribe to boot. Qigong texts precede any yogic texts in India by hundreds of years.)
If you should engage in all sorts of practices where you use your mind to spin your chi, why didn’t Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu mention them? Chuang Tzu said that cultivation was “forgetting about material things and the human body, viewing birth and death as a unified whole, making all things equal and dwelling in the formless.” All the ideas of Taoism are based on “quiet sitting” instead of playing with one’s chi and sensations. The ideas of Wei Po-Yang, the great Taoist unifier, involved “cleansing the mind and retiring into secrecy (emptiness cultivation).” Where is there a spinning of chi and chi channels in this?
(WINN: I've already clarified these are preparatory practices).
Master Nan always states that anyone who cultivates a quiet mind will naturally feel the chi start to pulsate through their channels, and that these are physiological reactions that naturally occur in quiet psychological states. There’s nothing strange about them as they only verify the initial effects of quiet cultivation. It was only by the Ming dynasty that the original lofty methods of Taoist cultivation had fallen from their profound sublimity to mistakenly focus on the chi channels.
The Zen school recognizes that these things do indeed happen but since they occur without any special efforts and are the scenario of the path, they are ignored just as is every other type of phenomenon that arises. That’s why the Zen school produces more enlightened successes than any other spiritual school in existence. It’s extremely high, which is why there are no qualified Zen students today.
(WINN: really curious logic here: Zen has the highest teachers - yet no mention that Zen is historical offshoot of Taoism. And because Zen is so high, there are no good students today. Usually the opposite is said to be true: the measure of a good master is his student. Maybe all those enlightened teachers de-materialized into Emptiness before they could teach anyone else the Way? :)
Confucius and Mencius never bothered to talk about these chi-rotation practices either. The most Mencius said is that you should cultivate your chi to a state of fullness (sexual non-leakage once again).
Buddha never mentioned them because they are just the phenomena that happen when you “harmonize the four elements of your body.” That’s how Buddha explained it. You cultivate meditation, the chi channels (wind element) and the other elements transform and become harmonized. End of story because it’s such a low stage on the path.
(WINN: Bill seems to be unaware of confucian style qigong in China,used to cultivate virtue. Bad understanding of chi, limiting it to one element. Even basic Hinduism, from which Buddha rebelled, knows there are fives types of prana that describe everything in existence. Also, I've mentioned before Nan and Bodri's completely miss the boat on the difference between Indian five elements and Taoist five elements. Different origins and different applications and goal. It only one of many reasons his analysis of Tao schools are superficial and false.)
Then we come to all the sexual practices people follow due to mistaken teachings by modern Taoist teachers who say you must swap, borrow, rotate, or spin the chi of the other person. In my new book, Meditation for Beautiful Skin, sex is one of the ways you can activate your chi to produce more beautiful skin so I have to go into these things along with proper sexual techniques. All I can say is that everything out there is based on misconceptions.
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WINN: This is really a hoot. After decrying chi techniques as being the lowest of the low, Bill offers up a book on the most superficial application of sexual chi technique possible - for skin improvement! No mention of the effects of sexual practice on love, spiritual development, etc. - just its correct use for skin improvement, that the bad Taoists had it all wrong. If Bodri had any boat left to float, it surely sinks here. He missed the early bonanza in Taoist sexology books, but never too late to make a buck off a sincere follower...)
The only apology I have to make about posting Bodri's dumb article is that other Zen schools may be offended by being associated with the retrograde ideas expressed above.
Please know that most other Zen practitioners I know do not share Bodri's ideas. I am hiring this summer as a staff assistant at Dao Mountain a super serious zen meditator (spends half the year in zen silent retreats) who loves qigong and Healing Tao practices, and finds no conflict between them.
And I would like to add, that Bodri is not Nan, so not fair to merge the two,
despite their extensive co-authorship relation.
But if you want a nice Buddhist teacher with a more open mind, I suggest you study with Max, not Bodri. For starters, Max has more experience with qigong, and could speak intelligently on the relation between the sitting and moving practices. (As this is an unpaid plug, I hope I at least get a little merit for it...:)
Michael
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