You can open your hand and wait for a palm reader to tell you your future,

or you can close your fist and make your own destiny.

— Master Yuan

My fate belongs to me, not to heaven.

— Gehong 

Daoism is confusing.  If you read its earliest philosophical texts like the Daodejing, you find this beautiful elevation of seemingly yin principles of the baby body, the feminine, the valley, the mother, of action through inaction, the bent, the yielding, flowing water, of nonbeing.  But fast forward to medieval Daoism and suddenly everything seems to flip into this yang register: the diamond body of pure yang, mountains, patriarchs, complex alchemical procedures, calculation, timing, the circulation of fire.  It is the world of the three straight lines of the pure Yang trigram ☰, the Daoism of mountain peaks and thunderclaps, where you are conquering demons with swords or iron, taming tigers, and subduing dragons.  How can you possibly square, or maybe more appropriately encircle these two wholly divergent yin and yang tendencies?

The former yin side of things has always intrigued foreigners in their approach to Chinese culture. With few exceptions it has characterized the shape of the Daoism received in the west from the beat generation and counterculture through to the new age. Looking a bit further back in time, the Jesuit missionaries to the Qing court were immediately captivated by the enigmatic beauty of the Daodejing and produced two Latin translations in the 18th century.  Prior to that, the king of Kathmandu commissioned what was probably the text’s first translation into the Sanskrit language in the seventh century, carried out in the capital of Chang An 长安 by the great Buddhist missionary Xuanzang 玄奘 and his Daoist comrade Cheng Xuanying 成玄英.  But the foreign interest in the text that would probably serve most monumentally for the future of Daoism was that of a relatively obscure northern Turkic tribe named the Tuoba 拓跋 who founded the Northern Wei dynasty 北魏 during China’s most tumultuous dark age, the Era of Northern and Southern Dynasties 南北朝 (220-589). 

barbarian daoism

In 386 the Tuoba found themselves in the perplexing position of having conquered northern China.  Different dynasties have had varying strategies for when they land, sometimes rather accidentally in this ultimate position of the dog catching up with the car, but one thing everyone has to settle, and settle quickly, is how they manage the grand brocade of China’s religious landscape.  In this specific case a charismatic Daoist and powerful weather wizard named Kou Qianzhi 寇谦之 (365-448) gained unprecedented favor at the Wei court and founded what later scholars have come to call the first Daoist theocracy.  

As one of my favorite modern Chinese philosophers reflects, it was specifically this valuation of the yin, the feminine, the bent, and ultimately of nonbeing, that appealed so immediately to the Wei court.  Being nobodies (a barbarian tribe) from nowhere (the terra incognita of the northern steppe), the idea expressed in chapter 40, the shortest of the Daodejing’s chapters, resonated:

反者道之动， With overturning as the motion of Dao,

弱者道之用。 And weakness as the application of Dao.

天下万物生于有， Under heaven all things are born from Being,

有生于无 While Being is born from Nonbeing.

A metaphysics wherein all things in the cosmos are born fetter-free, spontaneously generated from nothingness, ripples into the world of the political to cosmically justify the rule of this upstart dynasty.  Unshackled from the debunked political philosophies of the past (as Confucianism was generally viewed in this period), they were free to create a new world, promulgating the first state-level reformation of Daoism in Chinese history through Kou Qianzhi’s 415 CE Classic of Precepts as Intoned by Lord Lao 老君音誦誡經.

If a political dynasty can use Daoist metaphysics to free itself from the past, then can’t we?  To explore this idea further let’s take a look at one of my favorite figures from early Daoism, the hilarious and cantankerous bad boy of the warring states period, done dirty by the later Confucian historiographical tradition, Yang Zhu 杨朱 (440-360 BC).

be free

Yang is most famous for his statement, recorded by his later Confucian critic and turbo-nerd Mencius 孟子, “I would not pluck a single hair from my body even if it would save the entire cosmos” 拔一毛以利天下而不为, which has been condensed down to the contemporary phrase “one hair, no pluck” 一毛不拔 a turn of phrase generally used to refer to someone who is selfish or stingy.  And while that’s kind of a misinterpretation of Yangzhu’s nuanced philosophical position, it’s not entirely inaccurate either. 

Writing from the revolutionary era of the Warring States Period, when wandering intellectuals like Confucius were traveling from country to country peddling different ideologies in the face of a broken and collapsing political, philosophical, indeed cosmic system, Yang Zhu expanded on this notion of beginning from nothingness to think through what it meant for a human in a physical body.   

In the Daodejing, nonbeing 无 is primary.  It is in fact the source of all being 有.  The relation between these two categories begins already in the first chapter:

道可道非常道 The Dao that can be Dao’d is not the eternal Dao

名可名非常名 The name and can be named is not the eternal name

无名天地之始 Nonbeing is called the origin of heaven and earth

有名万物之母 Being is called the mother of the 10,000 things

Only three lines into the Daodejing and we’re already dealing with these categories.  From nonbeing, the most primordial cosmic framework, emanates the grand arc of the sky and the flat expanse of the earth.  And these serve as womb and mother of the 10,000 things.  But as one of these 10,000 things, Yang Zhu might remind us, although it was heaven and earth that birthed us, it was ultimately the creative void from which heaven and earth sprang, and so we remain beings sourced in nonbeing.  The biological and social fetters that bind us are accidental, incidental, against this backdrop of absolute freedom.    

Yang’s position was perhaps the first middle finger in Chinese history (though far from the last), directed at the entire universe, with its overlapping webs of obligation and cosmic debt. His philosophy reframed what it was to be a human, bringing us back to the body, to each and every hair, and most importantly for later traditions, to the felt presence of direct experience.

These early Daoist reflections on being and nonbeing have always reminded me of the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who summed up his existentialism in the pithy phrase “existence precedes essence.”  His meaning, like Laozi I would argue, is that whatever is seemingly essential about us, our humanness or animality, whether we are good or evil, is contingent and ultimately preceded by a spontaneous sense of unlimited, undetermined existence.  We exist in the wholly indeterminate state of nonbeing 无 before we are defined as a biological (human, bird, fish?), social (man, woman, otherwise?), not to mention spiritual creature in the realm of being 有.  

It’s a really empowering framework, isn’t it?  I mean it’s ultimately empowering.   Kind of terrifyingly empowering.  But it’s also optimistic.  As Sartre says in another place in his most famous of essays, “no doctrine is more optimistic, the destiny of man is placed within himself.”  Which has always reminded me of another great Daoist thinker, the fourth century alchemist Gehong 葛洪 (283-343 CE), who after many pages reflecting on the original mystery 玄, the state of muddled being-nonbeing from which the cosmos proceeds, declares: 

我命由我不由天 My fate belongs to me.  Not to heaven.   

This was shifu’s favorite line in all of Daoist literature and he mentioned it all the time.  I think it’s the basic gist of the lineage I found in Wudang.  I’ve written elsewhere on the site about this lineage, named after the Ming Dynasty madman Zhang Sanfeng.  As it exists in the present day it is this really cool concatenation of different Daoist practices: martial arts, qigong, and inner alchemy.  But when I really dig into the tradition and look at what has been central to the Wudang Sanfeng lineage through its history, with its post-cultural-revolution transmission through Wangguangde 王光德 and his master Xiaoyaowan萧耀宛, I’ve found it pertains mostly to the internal methods 心法 of the meditation tradition and its heart transmission 心传, that is, intimate teaching directly from master to disciple.  And when you interrogate what dimensions of our tradition are most related to Wudang mountain, the physical space, you can see it is above all about extended meditation retreat, deep within the mountain caves, the original core of Wudang (many of the temples were originally shelters built on top of caves, and according to the local oral tradition the first Daoist to begin cultivation at Wudang was the cave-dwelling Yinxi 尹喜).  I would posit at its core the Wudang San Feng lineage is a tradition of cave Daoist inner alchemy.

What I found in training under master Yuan for those years was the same attitude we find in Gehong and in Yang Zhu.  And that attitude begins from a declaration of absolute independence.  My fate is mine.  I won’t pluck a single hair.  Followed by an existential middle finger directed toward the entire cosmos.  It’s a perplexing attitude for a foreigner approaching Daoism.  I mean what about going with the flow?  Encountering this mentality was a jarring experience, and I think like many foreigners, at first I thought that I was perhaps encountering some kind of corrupted form of the tradition, a product of the modern world, disconnected from any kind of historical, authentic Daoism.  But what I’ve found instead, upon digging into the linguistic, historical, and philosophical contexts, is that I was simply stumbling into a tradition whose authenticity was so wholly alternate from my limited western conception of what Daoism was that I was not equipped to recognize it.       

Beware the Five Thieves

During our third year of training we studied the Tang dynasty Yellow Emperor’s Talisman Seal Classic 黄帝阴符经, a confusing text if ever there was one.  It begins by talking about how the five elements of metal, water, wood, fire, and earth are actually five thieves 五贼 you need to watch out for?  It then talks about how humans are like machines that are controlled by the motions of heaven and earth.  It talks about how heaven plunders earth, earth plunders humans, and humans plunder both.  What’s going on here?  What happened to our beneficent cosmos where Daoist sages wander in harmony with nature, talking to spirits and animals?  

Master Yuan took us through the text character-by-character and used it to show how you proceed on the alchemical path after declaring your existential independence from all the ostensive debts you owe to society and cosmos.  From this view, the five elements as embodied in your five senses and the five emotions serve as energetic thieves that siphon off your vital energies.  Upon declaring our existential independence we can begin learning the techniques that enable us to recover these energies, and recover our sense of agency in the process. This is what all of the introductory vitality practices 养生 were about. In the first stage you simply reconnect with your breathing and then use it to expel the stale and draw in the fresh 吐故纳新. Then in the second stage you actively supplement your deficiencies by drawing in extrinsic Qi from the cosmos 采气补亏. All the while you are building a foundation 筑基 and sealing yourself off from the world (remember that middle finger).

This mentality is made so clear in the present day when we all carry our phones in our pocket, little nightmare rectangles, a black mirror (ancient occult scrying instrument btw), through which largely AI-driven transnational capital flows wage an alchemical war that transmutes your attention into cold, hard cash in some billionaire’s bank account.  This is literally happening to you right now.  So when you plop down in a cave and turn your gaze inward, you harvest all the dividends, every fraction of every cent, from that attention, recovering your agency from a world that is trying to turn you into an influencer peddling crap to your friends, and recovering a few drops of the vitality that fuels the whole beast. This is the first stage of the alchemical path. An amazing thing about the contemporary techno-dystopia and the attention economy is that it’s turned us all into alchemists, whether we know it or not.