272. Baguazhang & ‘Chronicles of Tao’

The Way through Baguazhang - 八卦掌道

Last night I finished reading the biography ‘The Chronicles of Tao’ by author Deng Ming-Dao. Whom, some of you on the spiritual Taoist path, would already be familiar with. This book is supposed to be a loose biography of his spiritual teacher Kwan Saihung. As a lesson in Taoist spirituality and in what the followers of the Huashan sect did to attain immortality, I enjoyed it thoroughly. And it was for me a kind of revision of my own journey: How far I have come and how far I still have to go. As a book on martial arts, basically chronicles how much martial arts in general has changed with the modern times. What we are learning now sometimes feels like we are all just a bunch of overweight middle-aged men with delusions of by-gone grandeur. And for those of you wondering where the baguazhang fits into this book? It only really appears as a brief style of fighting Kwan Saihung’s own spiritual teacher uses to defeat a Xingyiquan master. This book is not really a book about martial arts and most people will find it either boring or implausible. But that line of thought is for the skeptics. For someone like me, however, I got to cross-check events in the book with my own weird shit! And if you are a person who is keen to walk the path of an immortal, you are just going to have to accept that there are somethings in this world that do not and will never fit into the current version of reality that modern civilisation holds so dear. While at the same time to be fair on ourselves, from a western background, some ideas in the book are not really Taoist, but are coming from a typical Chinese mindset of what Taoism is without really knowing the full scope of Chinese civilisational history. For example, if you go back to the Zhou Dynasty, there was essentially no such thing as Taoism as we know it because “all” the Chinese schools of thought were natively Taoist. Lao Tzu 老子 and Chuang Tzu 莊子 only professed one particular version of it. The main difference between Lao Tzu and Confucius, was that Confucius tried to bring order out of perceived chaos while Lao Tzu accepted that chaos was already a form of order in itself. Most of the other ancient sages tended to specialise their Taoist ways towards the particular field of study that they were expert in. Since then Taoism had been shaped and reshaped many times by outside influences. Internal Alchemy or Neidan 內丹術 developed during the late Han Dynasty with the arrival of Buddhism. Meditation, reincarnation and karma are all Buddhist ideas. Before Buddhism, Taoism was (and still us based upon) a mix of shamanism, animism and Chinese folk beliefs. And then during the Tang Dynasty – Christianity arrived in China. Called the religion of Light 景教, it is the reason why in Taoism there is now a Chinese hell presided over by the Ox headed devil. And that the Goddess of Mercy is the Virgin Mary with Chinese characteristics. The Three Pure ones are a reworked version of the Holy Trinity. And that the last supper with the holy grail is essentially the Elixir of Immortality, that if one is holy enough, the Jade Emperor can bestow on them. But I don’t bring all this history up to shock anybody. Rather it is to enlighten the baguazhang practitioner that baguazhang is not just a martial art, but a form of being in church and being in communion with the Divine. I give this book 5 stars out of 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. CHRONICLES OF TAO - The secret life of a Taoist Master By Deng Ming-Dao, author of ‘365 Tao’ HarperOne ISBN: 978-0-06-250219-3