Perfect Health The Taoist Way

PERFECT HEALTH

The Taoist Way

DR. HUA SUN

Copyright © 2013 Hua Sun

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1481841203

ISBN-13: 978-1481841207

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to

all who aspire to live an enlightened life.

Contents

1. Introduction

2. What is Tao, and How Can It Help Us?

So what is Tao?

How to achieve the wisdom of Tao?

What is the purpose of practicing Tao?

Yin and Yang

The five elements of nature

The Taoist’s three treasures

Why the training of the mind is the prime business for the Taoists

3. Living to Your Perfect Health

Sleeping the right hours for perfect health

Sleeping on the right beds for perfect health

Sitting to your perfect health

Kneeling to your perfect health

The sun is your best friend

The moon is your best secret friend

Simple changes in living can lead to lifetime health benefits

4. Using Taoist Exercises and Other Techniques to Reach Perfect Health

Standing still is a perfect exercise for health

Slow walking is another perfect exercise for health

Using your back to hit a wall to gain an excellent health benefit

Other exercises that have good health benefits

A footbath is a perfect way for health

Moxibustion is another perfect way for health

5. Eating and Drinking to Your Perfect Health

The Taoist approach to foods

The Yin and Yang nature of foods

The food pyramid

The way to prepare food and drinks

Salt in the diet reexamined

Slow weight loss is the only good way for weight control

Make your own vegetable drink to detox: the detox drink

Make your own drink for weight loss and beauty: the slim drink

Make your own longevity pill—Gouqi pill

Making your own alcoholic drink to combat back pain and aging

Is Bigu worthwhile to pursue?

A list of foods with regard to their Yin and Yang characteristics

6. Sex and Taoism

The growing-up years

Marriage and sex

The Taoist sex practices

Things to avoid in sex

Sex liberation is a major drain on health

The traditional approach to sex has substantial value

7. Avoiding Damage to Your Body and Mind

Why coldness is regarded as the chief cause of diseases

Where does the coldness come from?

How do you know that you are under attack from the coldness

What can you do to get rid of the coldness?

Avoiding damage to your body

Avoiding damage to your mind

Avoiding damage by menopause and retirement

8. Meditation to Your Perfect Health

What is meditation?

The Taoist meditation

Using your life as a way to practice Tao

The Taoist meditation practices

After cross-leg meditation

Ways to help concentration

Other ways of meditation

Do I need a master to learn the Taoist practices?

Summary on Taoist meditation training

Quotations from a Ming Dynasty book

9. Putting It All Together

The easiest way to achieve primary good health

The intermediate way to achieve perfect health

The advanced way to achieve perfect health and beyond

How do I know whether I am on the right path?

What are the signs of perfect health?

A few case studies using the Taoist and TCM principles

10. Some Critical Health Issues of Modern Life

Ten confusions on health

Ten myths on health

Four health trends facing the West…and the East

Ten ways to fight back for perfect health

11. My Own Journey in Practicing the Tao

The Taoist nine-year body transformation teaching

My first year of practice

My first four years of practice

My second four years of practice

My ninth and tenth years of practice

My eleventh and twelfth years of practice

What lies ahead

12. Questions and Answers with Regard to the Tao and Taoist Training

1. Introduction

Today we are facing enormous health challenges like never before. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, heart disease remains the biggest health problem for over a decade in Australia. Brain episodes, including stroke and blocked brain arteries, are the second biggest killer. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease caused nine thousand deaths in 2010 in Australia, almost triple that of a decade ago. Lung cancer and related diseases caused eight thousand deaths in 2010 with seven million at risk of lung disease. The end stage of kidney disease has tripled over the past twenty years. The number of obesity and diabetes cases has more than doubled in the last twenty years and continue to rise.

The above outcomes can be readily explained by the Taoist (Daoist) principles and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)—a medical system developed based on the Taoist principles. Many of the above diseases and deaths can be prevented and avoided if we know and follow the basic principles of Taoism (Daoism). In addition, many diseases—including those mentioned above—can be dealt with effectively using some simple Taoist techniques practiced over thousands of years.

Taoism has served the health of the Chinese people for thousands of years; in fact, the whole of the traditional Chinese culture is based largely on Taoist principles. If you have ever wondered about the uniqueness of the Chinese culture and why it has survived numerous wars, famines, and all sorts of natural and human destructions, and has remained largely intact over thousands of years and has repeatedly emerged on the world stage as a major (if not the foremost) power, the answer is in Taoism. The Taoist principles are not limited to health, longevity, and culture; rather they are universal and can be applied to practically all things in the universe.

I arrived in Australia to study for a PhD in environmental engineering at Adelaide University in 1993. Upon completing the study in 1997, I returned to China. For many people, this Australian experience would be a matter of much celebration, as few PhDs returned to China after their study abroad at the time. For some reason, however, I became bewildered with the purpose of life after many years of pursuing academic excellence and other life goals. At the same time, I found my health had declined considerably to the extent that I could hardly run one thousand meters without gasping desperately for air. Hay fever with running noses became almost a daily business for me. Moreover, I could hardly stand for more than three hours without feeling pain in my legs. Although I was only about thirty-five at that time, I could see clearly what was waiting for me down the track—a fragile and weak man moving on a wheelchair. Even though that may be decades away, it appeared almost unavoidable. I asked myself, is that the life I would like to lead? How can I change my life fundamentally?

I knew that ordinary activities or medicines could help me to a certain extent, but not fundamentally—and the only way to achieve the best outcome is through some fundamental changes in life. Nothing seemed more fundamental than a religion to change my life. Since people have adopted religion for millennia to achieve body and mind liberation, there must be some reason for doing so. In general, people are not stupid, and anything that can last that long must have some good reasons behind it. I also understood that whatever religion I chose, it must contain some practices that require devotion and extraordinary personal effort to achieve the ultimate goal.

I started with an exercise called BaDuanJin (the Golden Eight Exercises). BaDuanJin is a series of exercises that involves a component of breathing exercise, which I could do on my bed. The exercises were described in a little book I picked up from a friend’s place, and it was the only thing I had access to in early 2000. After about six months of daily practicing, I did not find it very useful or helpful or indeed fundamental, and as a result, I stopped practicing it.

By this time, a previous colleague was coming from China to visit Australia, and I asked him to buy me some books that I had researched over the Internet. These were Taoist books written by a person who had practiced to a level that few people could match in China at the time. The reason that I chose these books is that Taoists are renowned for their pursuit of longevity in Chinese history, and they put a lot of effort into both the body and mind in their unique teachings and training. On the other hand, Buddhists—including Chan (Zen) in general—do not see their bodies as precious, even though both Taoists and Buddhists aim to achieve the same final goal, as I found out later.

It has now been over twelve years since I started my journey practicing Taoism, and I have to say I have gained enormously from the practice. The benefits are both bodily and spiritually, and most importantly, the achievements can be seen and measured materially. Almost all my previous diseases are gone or in the final stage of being removed. My hay fever has greatly improved, and my legs are feeling strong again. Since I benefited immensely from practicing Taoism, I must share it with my fellow travelers according to the Taoist tradition, so that you can benefit the same as I have if you follow the same practices.

In this book I try to present a number of simple but carefully selected techniques based on the time-honored Taoist principles and traditions regarding sleeping, exercise, food, sex, and meditation to help you to improve your health. These guidelines are simple to follow, and all you need to do is to choose a few that are most suitable to you, and soon you will feel the difference materially. With persistence, you can achieve either primary health (first class health compared to an ordinary health) or perfect health, depending on what practices you choose and how high your devotion is. In addition, I also present ways to avoid damage to the body and mind due to lifestyle and environmental factors. For those who aspire to achieve even higher goals in life—for instance, those motivated to work toward immortality or a superman status—I also present advanced ways on how to move onto this path and move to a level beyond perfect health, with a particular focus on mind training. Where possible, I try to present some of the science behind some of the traditional principles, but often I refrain from doing this or doing this in a less than comprehensive way to keep with the Taoist tradition of not arguing but letting the facts and truths speak for themselves.

The two essential components behind my practices are to build up the life force and discharge the toxins, poisons, and impurities from the body, so we get rid of disease and become stronger and stronger, relying completely on ourselves. If you are able to grasp the core on sleeping, exercise, food, and sex and avoid further damage from the environment and your lifestyle, you can grow enough life force to overcome practically all your diseases over time. If you are able to grasp the core of the meditation practice, you can grow enough life force to reverse aging in a measurable way over time, and you can even live beyond the Taoist life span of 120 years. When you are 120 years old, you will still be able to run around and live completely independently, just like an average fifty- or sixty-year-old. An ordinary person may live to 120 years, but he or she is more likely to be wheelchair-bound and dependent on others by that time. Moreover, you can even achieve higher levels than just living a very healthy and very long life. In fact, there is practically no limit on how much you can achieve further down the Taoist path.

The methods I present to you are all very simple and easy to pick up, but there are great depths behind them, and some may not be easily explained by current science. The key is to practice tenaciously—see and feel for yourself whether it works for you over time, rather than arguing about their merits beforehand. Some benefits can be achieved relatively quickly, but most require persistent practice to drive out the poisons, which in most cases have been accumulated over decades and can be removed only gradually from deep inside the body. Only when you completely drive out these toxins can perfect health and reversed aging become a reality.

The practices I present to you have nothing to do with religious beliefs or even philosophy, which is contrary to my initial thought when I picked up the practices. In fact, the core of Taoism, and Buddhism too for that matter, is simply practice rather than religious belief. The belief part of Taoism was an addition more than several thousand years later, as the followers tried to best retain and preserve the Taoist practices passed on from previous masters. So do not feel you need to give up your current religion in order to gain the health benefits of the Taoist practices.

In the following pages, I will try to answer as many questions as practical regarding the Tao, the Taoist training, meditation, reverse aging, longevity, revitalization, and immortality, which I am sure you will find most useful and exceptionally informative.

In addition, I will describe the current health problems we have, what went wrong, and what can be done to reverse this process. I will also present my own personal journey on practicing the Tao, which is very rare for a Taoist practitioner, and you may find this information very relevant if you wish to embark on the path of rejuvenating yourself.

2. What is Tao, and How Can It Help Us?

Tao is the way the old Taoist sages see the universe as well as the human being itself. The first three prominent figures in the Chinese civilization are all prominent Taoist figures: Fu Xi, Shen Nong, and Huang Di (the yellow emperor), who lived about five thousand years ago. Fu Xi is the first Taoist. He developed the most important aspect of Tao (the Way or Dao): the idea of Yin (negative) and Yang (positive), which comprised everything in the universe, including human beings. Shen Nong is attributed with the development of farming and herbal knowledge and practices. The Yellow Emperor is attributed with the development of medicine. He is also the first Taoist with records of flying to heaven in daylight.

From traditional Chinese perspective, these three people finished the whole human business: the first one allowed the understanding of the universe as well as the human being itself; the second one provided the means for survival (farming and food); and the third one told how to live without diseases, how to cure the diseases when they occurred, and finally, how to become enlightened (flying to heaven in daylight is the Taoist way of becoming enlightened). In a perfect world, the human history could finish right there, as no other business is required other than knowing the world, surviving in the world without sickness, and finally, becoming enlightened before the end of your life.

These three prominent Taoists are renowned in Chinese history because of their immense contributions to the Chinese civilization. There are many more Taoists before, in between, and after them, as revealed in the book of Chuang Tze (Zhuang Zi, Chuang Tzu), which is the second most prominent written material of Taoist writings. The book of Chuang Tze has been translated into English a number of times and introduced widely to the West.

The most prominent book on Taoism is Lao Tze (Lao Zi, Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, or Lao Tsu) or the Tao De Ching (Dao De Jing). It has only five thousand words and eighty-one chapters illustrating various aspects of the Tao—the way. It is not a book on how to practice but rather a book on the fundamentals and the essential aspects of Tao. This is the most important book for Taoism and Taoist training, and it has been regarded as the highest and best writing by generations of Taoists.

Lao Tze is regarded as the person who established Taoism as a religion some 2,500 years ago. You can see that Taoism as a religion came at least three thousand years later than Taoism as a practice. The Taoist practice is the core of Taoism and universal, while the Taoist religion is limited and perhaps confined to the converts. However, the purpose of Taoism as a religion, as I can understand, is to spread Taoism as a practice, and as a place to store Taoist teaching and writings, which also aim at spreading Taoism as a practice.

So what is Tao?

The Tao De Ching gives the definition of Tao in chapter 25 as:

There was something formless and complete

That existed before heaven and earth;

Without sound, without substance,

Dependent on nothing, and never changing,

All pervading, and never failing,

It can be called the mother

Of all things in heaven and earth.

I do not know its name,

I call it Tao.

Here, in this chapter of the Tao De Ching, Lao Tze is actually talking about wisdom and not knowledge, which cannot be acquired through reading or studying. It demonstrates a state after acquiring the wisdom so that he knows what he was talking about. The layperson who had not done any training toward acquiring that wisdom would not know what he was talking about. People often refer to the Eastern mystics and such; that is because they do not understand that the sort of wisdom talked about here cannot be acquired through anything other than cultivating the Tao. It cannot be acquired by any academic or scholarly pursuit as we know. This is vastly different to the Western way of pursuing truth or new discoveries. Unless we seriously undertake the Taoist training ourselves, we will always call it Eastern mysticism and never know the truth behind it.

Although the Tao De Ching has been translated hundreds of times to the West in a number of languages, it is not easy to understand for the layperson, even though it is regarded as one of the best-written texts for over two thousand years. Since the Tao De Ching is written in the plainest text, a ten-year-old Chinese student can easily recognize and read most of the text without much difficulty even today, which is remarkable compared to many other historical writings, which are almost unrecognizable to the same ten-year-old student.

The difficulty in understanding the Tao De Ching is twofold: translation is lost along perhaps 50 percent of the content or context, even if the best translator is put on the job. Secondly, not all scholars are well trained in Taoist meditation; in fact, few reach a sufficient level to grasp the core of the two languages as well as the core of Taoism through serious training. Therefore, the problem is not on the surface but much deeper and not easily resolved. In addition, a lot of background information is needed if one wants to truly understand the Tao De Ching. If you are bewildered by the translation, do not give up— you can come back to it later, maybe after a few years of practice on Taoist meditation and after some reading on similar topics written more recently, such as the Taoist writings produced in the last thousand years. By then, you will be better equipped to understand what Lao Tze was talking about and really appreciate the profoundness of his writing.

How to achieve the wisdom of Tao?

The Tao De Ching gives a number of ways to perform and acquire the wisdom; for example, in chapter 16, it states:

Seek to reach the very depth of the emptiness,

Maintain a state of perfect stillness.

I see all things come into being,

And see how they return to their original place.

They come in all shapes and sizes

And then go back to the roots whence they came.

To go back to the root is called stillness,

Through stillness one goes back to true life.

Upon going back to true life one becomes permanent,

One who knows permanence

Becomes the enlightened.

One who does not know the permanence

Will stumble into violence and miseries.

Here, Lao Tze describes the most fundamental aspect of Taoist meditation training, which is to go to the state of deep and absolute stillness. While you do that, a thousand and more things (thoughts) will crop up to disturb you, but you are determined to see the root of them. The root of all things is stillness—in other words, you need to expel all your wants and thoughts before you can reach the state of stillness. Once you can do that, you actually find your true life or true self, which is neither the ordinary life nor the ordinary self as we know. Your true life is actually a permanent life, which is in a state of enlightenment and has nothing to do with death, as many perceive. If you cannot reach the absolute stillness, you will not know that it is permanent and will die an ordinary life, as we are all familiar with. So the true wisdom is, either you have it or you don’t. If you have it, you will not only understand what Lao Tze talked about earlier, you will also become the enlightened.

Lao Tze stood up high, and he had no time and space to write down the very details of how to achieve the enlightened status; rather he was there to give directions and guidance only. He was not going to tell the measures and methods to expel the wants and the random thoughts, or how long it will take to achieve the enlightened status, let alone any health issues. Those things are to be sorted out by the followers later based on the principles laid out.

As a result, you should not just focus on the Tao De Ching in starting your journey of transforming yourself, even though it is perhaps the best guide for your journey. You will need a more practical guide to lead your journey and reach your ultimate goals. The Taoist tradition is going through a step-by-step process, starting from the lowest position and edging toward the highest position.

Many other books and written materials on Taoism are contained in a massive collection of Taoist records called the Dao Zang (Tao Tsa—Treasury of Tao); it contains over a thousand volumes complied over 1,500 years. Many of the more famous ones are being translated into English and introduced to the West now.

The book of Chuang Tze is the second-most significant book in the Dao Zang, as stated earlier. Although Chuang Tze writes in a freelance style, focusing on the true freedom of body and mind, some of the key practical training methods actually come from Chuang Tze. Not the least is the method of listening to your breathing as a core method for achieving stillness, which will be discussed in more detail later.

What is the purpose of practicing Tao?

The Western society has a tradition for freedom and liberty. This freedom and liberty is in a very limited way, however, as the freedom to vote and a liberty to do, write, and say things freely. Practicing Tao has the same purpose but in a different way, which is truly freedom and liberty at a personal level. When you have trained yourself to the state of not requiring any food and water and can go anywhere in an instant, you have effectively liberated yourself from all the chores of ordinary living. But it takes a lot to get to that superman state. For ordinary people, the secondary goal is to live without any pain or diseases and for a very long and healthy life, which is within the reach of each and every layperson.

Through practicing Tao, we will have better appreciation of life and be grateful with what life has already offered instead of looking for what might be offered in the future. We will have more confidence in ourselves, and we will be able to achieve more profound things in life. We will treat others with more respect and be more tolerant and accommodative to other ideas and people. We can become completely changed persons in just a few years’ time. This fundamental change will come naturally as we practice and progress on the Taoist way.

At the same time, we will begin to observe the physical, mental, and health improvements almost immediately when we begin the Taoist practices. We will sleep better, feel more energetic, and be much more content with ourselves and life in general. For many people, the feeling of tiredness and worry will disappear quickly. There will be progressive relief for stress, anxiety, insomnia, and many other diseases we might already had for many years.

Having said that, the comprehensive and complete elimination of the diseases will require much