Chinese Healing Exercises: The Tradition of Daoyin

Chapter Six Daoyin Today

Daoyin Today 199 trained specialists—altogether turning into modern spalike establishments with hot tubs, computer terminals, and fancy restaurants. Monks and nuns practice healing exercises as part of their daily routine, deities descend to reveal new and more advanced methods, temples publish pamphlets and booklets that praise the importance of the body for spiritual cultivation, and monasteries turn into health centers with all the gadgets and accoutrements of the modern age. In the West, Daoyin is promoted chiefly—and under its traditional name—by two Daoist masters: Ni Hua-ching in Los Angeles (originally from Taiwan) and Mantak Chia (from Thailand). Both inherit the tradition of inner alchemy and clearly have no connection to the qigong movement. Training people in their worldwide centers according to the ancient system of healing, long life, and immortality, they present body practices that reflect ancient Daoyin in that they are executed in standing, seated, and reclining postures, work with deep breathing, and focus on the conscious guiding of qi. Still, despite the masters’ claim that their techniques go back tens of thousands of years and are documented in Daoist scriptures, their methods are mostly new and tend to integrate large sections of yoga. Beyond these two major masters, Daoist associations in the West also promote Daoyin, and certain qigong and Chinese medical associations take recourse in the practices. Already moving the methods out of the strictly Chinese environment, followers of certain new forms of yoga connect asanas with acupuncture points and channels. As energy medicine and energy psychology gain increased acceptance, it is likely that Chinese healing exercises as a traditional form of energy work will spread more widely and influence the way Westerners work with their health. Qigong While the term qigong in common Western parlance refers to a set of exercises that combine gentle body movements with deep breathing and a mental guiding of qi, used predominantly for healing and undertaken by groups of people in parks, in China qigong is very much a social phenomenon, consciously created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that evolved through a series of transformations over the past fifty years.1 It all began in 1947 when Party cadre Liu Guizhen 劉貴珍 (1920–1983), suffering from a virulent gastric ulcer, was sent home to recover or die. He went home but refused to die—he was only twenty-seven years old at the time! Instead, he took les1 . On the history of qigong in contemporary China, see Miura 1989, Heise 1999, Hsu 1999, Scheid 2002, Chen 2003, Morris 2004, Kohn 2005, Chau 2005, Palmer 2007. For Western presentations of qigong, see Eisenberg 1985; Cohen 1997; MacRitchie 1997; Jahnke 1997, 2002. On its history in America, see Komjathy 2006. 200 Chinese Healing Exercises sons in gentle exercises and breathing from the popular Daoist Liu Duzhou 劉渡舟. After 102 days of faithfully undertaking these practices, he was completely cured. He returned to his job and described his healing success to Party secretary Guo Xianrui 郭獻瑞, who undertook the methods himself with great success and suggested that these simple exercises might just solve the continuous problem of health care for the masses—at a time when there was one biomedical doctor for 26,000 people in China. The Party adopted the idea and, in a lengthy series of committee meetings, discussed what best to call the practice: adopted from traditional patterns but to be thoroughly cleansed from all ancient cosmology and “superstitions ,” it needed an appropriate modern name. After discarding the terms “spiritual therapy,” “psychological therapy,” and “incantation therapy,” they settled on “breath exercise therapy” or qigong liaofa 氣功療法 (Palmer 2007, 31–32). In the wake of this politically motivated beginning, qigong has remained very much an artificially constructed phenomenon that has served various social needs in the course of the People’s Republic. These needs, and with them the nature and quality as well as the political standing of qigong, have changed essentially with every decade. Periodic Changes In the 1950s (until 1964) qigong served as the main vehicle of health maintenance for the cadres of the CCP and was predominantly practiced in a medical setting, both in specialized qigong clinics, such as the sanatoria in Tangshan and Beidaihe, and in general hospitals (Palmer 2007, 34). The practice made few inroads into the larger population, and any research and publications served to make it less traditional and more scientific—removing it from its roots and transforming it into the mind...