University of Hawai'i Press

It is February of 2015. Here I am, at the bottom of White Horse Mountain (Baima shan 白马山), a tiny speck of life facing its glorious immensity. As it stands still at the end of winter, I can feel the deep breath of Mother Earth in its heart. The abrupt stone stairway reaches to the sky, immobile invitation to challenge and transcendance. I raise my gaze. Something ancient, unnamed, awakens in me, as I walk passed the last village gardens, tea bushes covered in outlines of snow.

White Horse Mountain is the most westerly peak of the Wudang range, famous across China as an important center for Daoist cultivation and internal martial arts, under the protection of a powerful deity, the Perfect (Zhenwu 真武)1. His aura resonates throughout the peaks and inspires reverence and awe for powers of spirit unconceivable to the common human mind.

Ascending toward Dao

Nature slowly unfolds, raw, and the cold air breaks into my lungs. I ground my breath in my lower abdomen, returning my awareness to the lower elixir field (dantian 丹田), and enter a solitary trance. With a full [End Page 152] backpack strapped to my back, I have an hour of climbing ahead to reach my Daoist home, the Five Immortals Temple (Wuxian miao 五仙庙). I begin to move. Step by step, my body warms and my blood starts to rush in my limbs. After a few hundreds steep steps, the stairway vanishes and I move on a small trail into the forest. Cedar and pine trees gracefully wave in the wind, wild grasses crumble under ice, and the silence grows deeper.

In late winter, insects and birds have not returned yet, and there is something striking to the stillness of the frozen forest. Little by little, the chaotic, noisy, polluted world of humankind fades below; I feel its demands leave my body as if a weight is taken off my shoulders. Gender, age, race, appearances, and social categories—my body is disencumbered of those constraints that always feel too small and becomes again the body of pure nature, of cultivation.

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Even though I have climbed the trail hundreds of times now, the walk up is still sacred to me. It purifies my being of accumulated layers of embodied experience and restores integrity and oneness. It is the path of returning to what is most essential, most meaningful, to my raison d'être or, as the Chinese call it, my reason for coming (laiyin 来因). Having lived for years of training has taught me to return to this body of cultivation at all times. It has transformed the ways I walk back into society, delivering into the world a truer, clearer, and more powerful version of myself.

I keep climbing and, at around 1000 meters or 3000 feet, the trail runs along a set of ancient fortifications—irregular stone walls in places covered by moss, between one and two meters high, extending through [End Page 153] the forest. Those old stones remind me of the origins of the temple under the late Song dynasty, at the time of the Mongol invasion.

It is said that five highly qualified scholars, coming from five different directions, were on their way to take the imperial examination in the capital, when they were stopped by Mongolian troops. On top of the mountain, they joined forces and built a sanctuary for people to take refuge during times of chaotic war. Men of knowledge and virtue, each had his own speciality.

The first was a sage of profound wisdom and compassion who could read the human heart-mind. The second was a fierce warrior, a master of the martial arts. The third was an alchemist who understood the course of the stars and of destiny. The fourth was a healer who knew the myriad secrets of Chinese medicine and grew hundreds of medicinal herbs on the mountain. And the fifth was a man of culture who taught calligraphy and the classics: his music was so heavenly that even the wild beasts of the mountain would come to listen

Together, they protected and healed the people, while advancing their own spiritual practice. Eventually they all ascended as immortals and the temple was founded in their honor. People of the neighbouring valleys still look up to them as their protectors. They regularly come to offer incense and burn prayer papers, perform rites at important moments of their life, and seek the help of the resident abbot in times of trouble.

My heart swells. Is there not a sacred mountain inside each one of us? A space to return to our true place between heaven and earth, to our original nature, incorruptible and luminous. A space to move beyond our limits and shed the obstructions of mind and body that prevent us from touching the ultimate. I will soon reach the gate of the temple. I have already walked pass the small altars of the Grandfather of the Earth (Tudi ye 土地爷) and of the mountain spirits. The trail is getting steeper, consisting now of stone steps.

It is said that the Perfect Warrior during his last human life retreated to White Horse Mountain to cultivate himself, then continued deeper into the Wudang range until he ascended. He arrived riding a white horse whose steps were made so powerful by the strength of the man [End Page 154] riding it that it crushed parts of the mountain under them. Those tracks remain today in the shape of flat platforms by the side of the cliffs.

I pause for a moment, squat down on my heels and relish the breath-taking view: peak after peak fades into the blue horizon, under waves of clouds flowing like fluffy waters. I hear a rustling and turn back to catch sight of three of the most majestic birds of the mountains: the wild golden pheasants. Their tails are longer than my arm, and their entire bodies are covered in feathers of the brightest blue, green, yellow, and red. This explosion of vivid colors in the blunt of winter makes them seem unreal, as if they were messengers from other dimensions.

I am reminded of the medieval alchemist Ge Hong's 葛洪 metaphoric description of the heavenly immortals as Feather Beings (yushi 羽士) because their bodies are said to transmute and grow feathers in the process of sublimation toward immortality.2

Everything stops. The only thing left is this moment. Daoists prefer mountain tops for their cultivation because they are closer to heaven and further away from the mundane world of the red dust. They study the mountain's energy lines, called dragon's veins (longmai 龙脉) and always pick the most auspicious and favorable spots to establish their temples. Generation after generation, those places accumulate vital cosmic energy (qi 气). They operate as portals to higher dimensions.

I know it is the last turn before I reach the temple. I walk past the last altar on the way up, that dedicated to the Dragon King (Longwang 龙王), the ruler of all waters. We have prayed to him many times for rain in times of drought. Climbing the last steps, I come to facing the entrance stone arch. I walk through it into the front courtyard, with the brick furnace for burning spirit money and prayer papers, pointing to the sky to deliver wishes to heaven. Night is falling, the temple is covered in snow, the twilight is peaceful and pure.

The temple's main door is closed but not locked, and the wood creaks as I open it, step through the doorway, and close it behind me. I turn and face the altar of the Commander of Divine Officials (Lingguan [End Page 155] ye 灵官爷), a fierce protector deity who looks directly into me with his three eyes. My heart quivers and my whole body shakes as it regains strength, as if some essential parts of my qi had been left within those walls, those stones, and now returns to me. Daoists consider that the important encounters and relationships of our lives are predestined, as we are inter-woven together in the tapestry of destiny by mysterious causes unseen to the human eye. They call it "predestined affinity" (yuanfen 缘 分). I put down my backpack, walk three steps forward, kneel down, and bow to the altar of the protector with complete devotion.

I have arrived. I am home.

Honoring the Temple Body

Days start early at the temple. I awake before sunrise and push myself out of the blankets piled on top of the wooden plank that is my bed, before the temptation to snuggle longer in their warmth gets me. There is no heater or insulation, and it's cold and damp. I add layers of clothes, topped by an old Daoist robe that I quickly button on the side before my fingers start freezing. I gather my long hair on top of my head, tie it up, secure it with a silver dragon hairpin, and wrap it in the traditional Daoist topknot that represents the unification of yin and yang in ultimate oneness. I drink a cup of hot water and wipe my face. The water steams in the cold air; the heat of the towel on my face wakes me fully.

I swiftly step out of my room into the central courtyard. The temple is structured in the traditional way, with a strict respect for Feng Shui rules. The main altar opens into the central courtyard, around which rooms are laid out in a square. The night is still dark and silent, and the sky is alive with myriads of brisk stars that seem closer to earth than usual. The air is very pure, and I feel the space all around the temple and the mountain with its utter stillness. Those are amongst my favorite moments, when the temple is almost empty, undisturbed by the noise of many human minds, after winter and snow have cleansed it from all the activity of the warmer seasons.

I cross the courtyard, walk to the living-room, and push the kitchen door open. As I turn the light on, two characters painted in black on the wall display their refined shapes: xinzhai 心斋, they whisper, "fast the heart-and-mind." The Five Immortals Temple is a small mountain retreate [End Page 156] and in winter very much an hermitage. Away from society's constant exposure to distractions and mundanities, deeply nestled in nature where one has to work harder to maintain the necessities to sustain basic needs, its environment alone induces purification.

I grab a plastic ladle, open the big blue plastic barrel where we store drinking water, and fill up the water-heater, so that hot water is available for my fellow residents when they awake. Daoists, as much as the Chinese people in general, prefer drinking water that is hot or warm, to protect the fire of the Gate of Life (mingmen 命门), the ancestral energy stored in the kidneys.

I can feel the night fading. I walk through the central courtyard to go to the main sanctuary, dedicated to the Five Immortals. I collect my awareness within my body and silence my thoughts as I enter through a side door. Their presence at this altar fills me with a sense of deep peace. It is barely lit by the dim flame of a spirit light—an old oil lamp that burns at all times, keeping a fire that never goes out. I carefully adjust its wick and refill it with sesame oil. The flame grows bigger and illuminates their majestic statues.

With a candle I slowly light a handful of incense sticks. Doing so is a fundamental gesture of worship and ritual in all of Daoism, incense being a prime medium of communication with the higher dimensions, as it carries prayers through its smoke from the world of form into that of formlessness. Everyday at dawn and dusk, incense is offered before opening the altars for the day and before closing them at night.

Holding the sticks with both hands in front of my forehead, I quickly whisper the Incense Prayer Incantation (Zhuxiang zhou 祝香咒) in one breath. A channel opens in the invisible. I offer the incense, holding each stick with a specific hand seal. Next, I open the main door of the sanctuary and I step outside into the courtyard. From here, I walk in a large circle around the entire temple, proceeding to offer incense at each altar in turn before opening their respective doors.

The temple as a whole is structured like a human body, with altars established in places of power corresponding to the body's key energy centers. Thus, the main altar is its heart, the middle elixir field.

The right hand is consituted by the altar of the Lady Who Brings [End Page 157]

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The Five Immortals' Temple. Photograph by Raffael Abella.

Children and Grandchildren (Zisun niangniang 子孙娘娘), a goddess who grants fertility and offspring. Every year, people come to her altar to request help in getting pregnant, support them during the gestation period, or ask for protection for their newborn children. The tradition is to make a pledge with the request. Once the wish is granted, people return and fulfill their pledge by making offerings: they often place a doll on the altar that represents the child. Every year, new dolls appear. The altar actually hosts three female deities, whose statues have been polished by time. Ascended immortals, transmitters of wisdom through revelations of scriptures, cosmic metaphors linking to the stars, each one of them holds a tangible power.

At the back of the temple, matching the location of the head and the upper elixir field is the altar to the great goddess of compassion, a bodhisattava known as She Who Contemplates the Sounds of the World (Guanshi yin 观世音) and in Daoism called the Heavenly Worthy Who Saves All (Pudu tianzun 普渡天尊). A marker of the dynamic interaction [End Page 158] of Daoism with Buddhism, she has many names and forms but only one energy signature. At the back of the temple, her altar is also the space where we keep our medicine cabinet, our healing space.

The left hand is marked by the altar to the God of Wealth (Caishen ye 财神爷), complete with a miniature mountain of coins and gold ingots at his feet. The bringer of abundance and fortune, he is very popular among the people who inevitably come to him when they open a business or start a job. There is something warm and comforting to his field.

At the front of the temple, in the location of the lower elixir field, is the altar of the Commander of Divine Officials, marking the gateway all have to pass through. General commander of all spirits, he works for the higher dimensions, traveling in an instant from the lowest of hells to the highest of heavens. Standing at the temple's entrance, he is its guardian. He also has the power to command all demons and ghosts, and his incantation is used to ward off evil. I have seen it heal people in states of advanced spiritual trouble, often diagnosed as schizophrenia or psychosis in the Western medical system.

There are more altars in the temple and throughout the mountain. For example, in the main living area, a wooden tablet represents the altar of the Stove God (Zaoshen 灶神), said to live in the hearth and protect the household's food. Traditionally, the kitchen fire and the wok are sacred. It is forbidden to throw trash to burn in that fire, and the wok should never be hit or handled disrespectfully. Anyone cooking or care-taking the fire should be in good spirit, and disputes were not to take place in that space. Thus was maintained the energetic quality of the food, and the harmony of the community.

Unifying with the Lineage Stream

By the door to the abbot's quarters, a piece of bamboo serves as an incense holder. We offer incense there to connect to his personal altar, placed inside the room, and to pay respect to the lineage—held sacred and carefully recorded. We are part of the Pure Yang (Chunyang 纯扬) branch of the Dragon Gate (Longmen 龙门) lineage of the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全真) school of Daoism. It has its own poem, and when a new generation enters, they receive as part of their religious [End Page 159] name the character of the poem that corresponds to the number of their generation. The first stanza of the poem runs:

道德通玄静 Dao and virtue pervade mysterious stillness.真常守太清 True constancy guards supreme clarity.一阳来复本 The one yang comes and returns to the source.合教永圆明 The united teaching is forever whole and bright.至理宗诚信 The utmost principle is the ancestor of sincerity and faith.崇高嗣法兴 Venerated and lofty, it transmits the flourishing of divine law.

My generation is the 24th, so we are all called cheng 诚, "sincerity" or "honesty." Using this name reminds us that twenty-three generations of practitioners have walked before us, twenty-three lineage masters have dedicated their lives to the practice and its transmission. We receive teachings that have been refined and verified through multiple life experiences.

Entering a lineage is like entering a stream of consciousness and wisdom that has been honed, accumulated, and passed on from one generation to the next. It means that we are not alone on the path and benefit constantly from the guidance and protection of our elders as well as the companionship of our generation sisters and brothers. It also means that we have a duty as disciples to exert our utmost efforts in the study and the practice of the teachings and to support each other on the path.

Once the incense offering is complete, I prepare an offering of tea that I bring to the main altar to chant the Morning Service (zao gongke 早 功课). The chants are a collection of incantations to purify and empower the practitioner's body, mind, and space. Their teachings contain profound guidelines of practice as they invoke cosmic powers and the lineage ancestors. Everyday at dawn and dusk, ceremonies of scriptures recitation are held in all Dragon Gate temples.

I stand by the altar, open the sacred book, and prepare the ritual instruments. I unify my mind and spirit into my breath, and my voice opens. It fills the space, travels in the air, settles on the right tone and starts singing, guided by the beat of the old wooden fish (muyu 木鱼). It is cracked, carved by time, with a spirit of its own. The wooden fish corresponds to the liver and is said to heal people's ethereal souls (hun 魂). [End Page 160] The bell, made of metal, on the other hand, corresponds to the lungs and purifies people's corporeal souls (po 魄).

As I move through the chants, the space in the altar changes, my body changes, my breath changes. Little by little, a frequency of vibration establishes itself in all-pervading ways. It is luminous, intense, dense like gold, and extremely pure. The chants of the Morning Service are yang in quality: they channel the highest dimensions of constant and eternal light into this world.

The ceremony ends as I burn several yellow sheets of spirit money and prayer papers covered in red characters in the furnace in the front courtyard. The sun is about to rise above the horizon, and I start running toward the mountain top. A dozen flights of stairs later, I reach the top catching my breath, blood rushing through my body. It is time for morning qigong.

Cultivating the Energy Field

I enjoy the stillness and solitude of the mountain top, drinking in every particule of the sunrise as I practice in the freezing wind. This is the best moment of the day to gather and accumulate yang-qi. It nourishes vitality, restores health, strengthens the energy fields, and heals the body, especially the eyes. Maintaining a daily qigong practice at sunrise is a necessary requirement for any practitioner of Daoist medicine and cultivation. The strength of the personal energy field lays the foundation of any healing work.

I conclude my practice with a long period of standing meditation (zhanzhuang 站桩). Immobile and focused, I let my breathing slow down as I feel my body restoring its structure according to its original lines of forces. My energy field opens and unifies with nature, qi accumulates in the elixir field. Time stands still, a pillar of light develops around me.

The piercing sound of a whistle, coming from the main temple, snaps me out of my absorption. I am going to be late for breakfast! I run down the stairs, and in few minutes I am back in the courtyard. The small handful of winter temple residents gather in the living-room. Zhen Gu, an old grandmother and disciple of the previous abbot, a resident for many decades, is in charge of the kitchen. We share the simple dishes of [End Page 161] noodles and pickled vegetables she has prepared and eat in silence, broken only by slurpy sounds.

After breakfast it is time to clean the temple. We split chores and take turns, making sure everything gets done: sweeping the courtyards, cleaning the main living area, emptying the trash, refilling the water barrels, and so on. Today, I am on toilet duty. I follow a small side-path that branches out of the temple toward the north. North is the direction to build toilets and everything related to water as a cleansing element according to Daoist cosmology and the post-heaven arrangement of the eight trigrams. The toilets are made of ditches running into a back reservoir, over which people squat to defecate. I grab a bucket, fill it up at a nearby pond, and throw the water down the ditch to push the remaining excrements into the reservoir. After a couple more buckets, both male and female toilets have been flushed properly. I mop the floor, and wash the basins. It's cold. The water bites my fingers.

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The Temple of the Perfect Warrior. Photograph by Raffael Abella.

[End Page 162]

Living as Family

Majestically perched on the very top of the mountain, stands a white marble temple dedicated to the Perfect Warrior. This was only built in 2011, and I still remember the previous altar: a small, crooked shack, barely big enough for one person, made of wooden planks that had been so worked over by the elements that they were almost see-through. The way it was rebuilt into this stunning jewel is exemplary of the work that has been achieved on the mountain by its current guardian, the abbot of the Five Immortals Temple, Li Shifu.

Li Shifu has lived on the mountain for almost three decades. When he arrived, the temple was an ensemble of dilapidated buildings. Just as everything else religious in China during the Cultural Revolution, it had been sacked and vandalized. It was kept alive by the spirit of an old female renunciate, Tao Fazhen 陶法真, an advanced adept of internal alchemy and Daoist medicine.

Li Shifu became her disciple and they lived together in absolute poverty until she ascended. For many years, he worked by himself to rebuild the temple, cutting trees to shave into beams, modeling clay to make bricks and tiles that he would bake in an earthe oven and carry on his back. After a decade of such regimen, as China was becoming more open to foreigners, the first overseas seekers arrived. Li Shifu consented to teach them and accept their donations to continue his work, transforming the temple into a unique international training center.

By the time I am back in the living area, Li Shifu has finished his own morning routine and is sitting by the table planning the day. I salute him and, with a few others of his senior students, we discuss the work that has to be done.

In spite of everything he has accomplished, Li Shifu has kept the same way of life, consisting of hard work, frugality, devotion, and a lot of creativity and humor. I will forever appreciate the opportunity to share moments of daily life with him, to learn from every little thing that has to be done.

He is a unique character, wild and fierce, yet patient and compassionate—a complex web of knowledge, experience, and power, whose extent is hardly visible to the human eye. He reminds me of an old Native tive American chief, a man the size of legends, yet scarred by the [End Page 163] harshness of history.

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The Abbot, Li Shifu. Photograph by Johan Hauser.

He has taught me everything I know about Daoism, and I have learnt Chinese from his mouth. His depth and breadth of understanding continue to amaze me, from alchemy to medicine, martial arts to ritual, as does his remarkable capacity to extract the essence of each art according to the principles of self-cultivation.

I have seen him communicate with people through dreams and from a distance, heal the sick with pure water, recognize a hundred wild medicinal plants in a ten-minute walk, and cure his injured back after falling from a roof in half an hour of intensive martial practice. I have also seen him dizzy after drinking too much at an official meeting, sit for hours in the temple courtyard while watching the summer night sky for UFOs, and spend a whole day on his computer trying to download documentaries with a very slow internet connection. As he always says, he is an ordinary person. Sort of.

Our task today has to do with the water system. Maybe because it was freezing last night, something is not working, and no water is flowing [End Page 164] into the reservoirs. The city water system is too far away, so all water used at the temple is from mountain springs. The system requires regular maintenance: it often has issues. When it is too cold, the pipes freeze, and we carry water in buckets hanging from shoulder poles. Today we go to inspect the network of hoses running through the forest between the main temple and the reservoirs.

There is a first feeling of spring in the air. I scrutinize the ground, trying to distinguish what is left of the vegetation. Soon the mountain will turn green, and I can go back to harvesting wild medicinal herbs. I remember this curve in the path used to be overgrown with Epimedium (yinyang huo 淫羊藿), that this rock was covered in Lonicerae (jinyin hua 金银花), that this stream watered some Ophiopogon (maimen dong 麦门 冬). I can't resist stroking the tiny leaves of a violet (zihua diding 紫花地丁) pushing through the cold ground. I love wild herbs, and how Li Shifu has taught me to use them, always in real-life situations, by taking care of ailing students and going on herb-picking tours, before brewing a strong decoction over a fire, or rolling honey pills out of the wok.

Training in Internal Martial Arts

Within an hour, the water problem is fixed, and we are given free time for training before lunch. I go through a general review of the lineage's gongfu methods that are the speciality of the temple. After warming-up and stretching, I first practice the Great Work (dagong 大功), an internal martial arts sequence consisting of intense strikes, movements, and postures combined with specific breathing to condition the physical body and empower the qi in the elixir field. My body has lost some muscle tone over the winter months, and I have to push myself hard to go through the whole set.

Covered in sweat, I next practice the Wudang Five Dragons Heavenly Dipper form in Eight Steps, an ancient version of the Bagua system. It combines circle-walking and power-emission sequences on an elaborate yin-yang pattern that replicates the cosmic structure of life, from individual DNA to galactic constellations. My body grounds in my steps as it flows into movements repeated hundreds of times over years of training. Even though I am still lacking in speed and power, the form activates qi and starts generating an energy field that fuses into my body. [End Page 165] To conclude, I also practice the Dragon Heart Sword of the same system, the Wudang Five Dragons Heavenly Dipper form, an intricate and beautiful sword form whose patterns mimic the orbits of the planets, of the sun, and of the stars. The sharpness of the sword induces a clarity in my mind, a luminosity in my spirit, as energy builds up within the spiralling movements of the form.

These practices are more than mere martial arts. They were transmitted to Li Shifu by his last teacher, Liu Lihang 刘理航, a centenarian renunciant and the last lineage holder of the Pure Yang branch, during the last years of his life. The practice has taught me a lot. When I first came to the temple, I was far from being a martial-arts girl. The first months of my training were extremely uncomfortable, and I grew a strong dislike for all training in basic movements, such as kicks, punches, jumps, and numerous painful steps and postures.

I had to go through them for hours every day but couldn't see the point. It took me years to understand that this intensive physical training of bitter repetition got me to condition my body to act as a potent container for higher intensities of energy. It also tempered my mind and spirit to face life's hardest challenges without losing my direction and inner virtue. Only once this foundation was laid, I began to learn the deeper content of the forms, seeing just how closely they connect to Daoist ceremonies. Ritual stepping methods that map the constellations, hand-seals and incantations hidden deep in the forms, the practice truly is much more than a martial art. It really is a shamanic act that, if pushed to the fullest of its potential, generates an inter-dimensional portal.

Closing my training, I am reminded of how tiny I am, how much there is to learn and to practice, and how easily I fall back into old habits and comfort zone. Daoism in its traditional form is not at all an easy path but can be described as a science to extract the best of human potential—through pure compression. As the saying goes, "Dao is pursued in bitterness" (Dao zai kuzhong qiu 道在苦中求).

Responding to Issues As They Arise

For lunch we have rice and several tasty dishes of vegetables cooked in the wok: we all eat together sitting around the big table. After the meal, we have some time to rest, and I take a short nap. There is more work to [End Page 166] be done in the afternoon. Today we split wood to be used in the kitchen stove. Trunks have been gathered behind the shed, and we saw them in sections with an old electric saw that keeps heating up, before splitting them to the right size with an axe. Part of the work is play, part of it is effort. I like playing with the tree sections by placing them to balance on the stump, before splitting them in one quick movement with the small axe. Once in a while, I miss the section, or there is a knot in the wood and I struggle to get the axe through. After a couple of hours, we carry the wood and pile it up in the shed to dry.

Back in the living area, I find Li Shifu talking to a woman from the village. She seems concerned and I quickly understand one of her family members suffers from a health issue with no cure or treatment in the medical system, Western or Chinese. The abbot listens to her story, then ponders for a while, laying back on the sofa, eyes closed, searching with- in. He turns to me and sends me to cast an hexagram before the main altar.

I soon return with six yin-yang lines drawn on a prayer paper for interpretation. Li Shifu uses a subtle method of hexagram reading, called King Wen Hexagrams (Wenwang gua 文王卦) or Six Lines (liuyao 六爻). It allows the skilled diviner to uncover information in great detail, including causes, factors, and developments over time. Although it can be used for anything from business to weather forecast, Li Shifu uses it almost exclusively for matters of health, and that's how he has taught me to use it. I do my best to compute the time data with each line according to the five phases (wuxing 五行) and still struggle to grasp the whole dynamic, when Li Shifu already outlines the complete information.

According to his reading, the disease is caused by an invisible energy field, related to an ancestor's death. It can be treated by performing a ceremony. The villager calls her son to collect and carry up the required materials. He arrives an hour later, and I go to help them arrange the five kinds of ritual offerings on the altar, while Li Shifu prepares the petition to be burnt and sent to heaven. With a thin brush, he writes in tiny characters on a special prayer paper the terms of the official request so that this family member is delivered from suffering. He often says that this type of work is like negotiating, and sometimes comes out of ceremony looking a bit tired. [End Page 167]

The evening incense is offered as the sun sets, bathing the mountains in ripples of light that fade to shades of purple. We gather in the main sanctuary to chant the Evening Service (wan gongke 晚功课). Performed at dusk, it resonates with the yin world and opens a portal through the layers of the spiritual dimensions to deliver fragmented souls of departed humans who still have to move on fully after death. Halfway through the ritual, the air is heavy and thick, and I start to feel dizzy. Li Shifu presents the petition, chanting in a deep, resounding voice. After one more offering of incense, cold food, and water, the petition is burnt as he covers it with an invisible talisman. The prayer paper flames up to the ceiling before turning to ashes that lightly float to the ground. The air clears up at once. Everyone stands in silence; a deep peace pervades. The family will call Li Shifu a week later to let him know their relative is getting better. He rejoices at the news, then brushes it off and moves on.

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The author with Master Li. Photograph by Raffael Abella

[End Page 168]

Returning to Purity and Stillness

Dinner time has come, and everybody is hungry. The old cook has steamed fresh buns, dipped in corn soup, to eat with fermented tofu. Afterwards we discuss the preparation of this year's international training seminars and teaching courses. Each resident has his or her own task, working to maintain the website, managing students' registrations, and producing new content about Daoism. The night slowly wraps the temple in velvety darkness, as we conclude our day with meditation.

I go to sit before the altar to Guanyin at the very back of the temple, where everything is most quiet. The flimsy light of the spirit lamp, the fragrant curls of incense smoke—there is something grand to the stillness. I adjust my posture to sit cross-legged on a small coushion placed over a thin mat. I return my breath into the lower elixir field and close my eyes to leave only a slit open between my eyelids for light to come through.

For what seems a long time, my mind discharges an impressive mess of mixed memories, images, thoughts, and sounds, cleansing the superficial layers of my consciousness. I persevere, returning to the object of my focus again and again, until the agitation finally settles. An inner space opens and unfolds. My breathing slows down, my body clears from accumulated tensions, my energy centers activate and become warmer. I feel the top of my head opening and extending into the cosmos. My breath drops into my lower elixir field as I plunge into oblivion, a state as if on the edge of sleep, yet not sleeping. The world disappears. I disappear.

When I come back, I have no clue how much time has passed. I feel fresh and rested. Everything is silent, and I only hear the cristalline sound of snow flakes falling all around. I feel the stars shining behind the roof, and the orbital movements of the cosmic bodies in the sky. I stay there for a long time, in a space so pure and tranquil. At peace. [End Page 169]

Loan Guylaine Tran
Chengfeng 诚凤
Loan Guylaine Tran

LoAn Guylaine Tran, Daoist name Chengfeng 誠鳳, is a 24th-generation disciple of the Dragon Gate lineage of Complete Perfection. She teaches Daoist energy arts, both with her teacher Li Shifu at the Five Immortals Temple on Mount Wudang and internationally during intensive retreats. Website: www.featherbeings.com; www.fiveimmortals.com. Email: loan@featherbeings.com.

Footnotes

1. The deity is also called the Dark or Mysterious Warrior (Xuanwu 玄武) and, more formally, the Great Sovereign Dark Warrior (Xuanwu dadi 玄武大帝) or Highest Sovereign of the Mysterious Heaven (Xuantians shangdi 玄天上帝).

2. See the forthcoming work by Fabrizio Pregadio, "Seeking Immortality in Ge Hong's Baopuzi Neipian, to be published in Dao Companion to Neo-Daoism, edited by David Chai (New York: Springer, 2020).

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