Item — HN Reader

He is a business man selling stuff to a gullible public. Because the nature of the stuff is so amorphous you can easily distort and invent it as needed.

Note that the price of the book has got nothing whatever to do with it. You are probably referring to my first book recommendation which some enterprising soul is trying to sell for a huge markup (i.e. $300 because it is not easily available) but i just provided the link for reference. You can get it cheap if you search. Or you can read other cheaper equivalent books, one of which i had also provided as my second recommendation.

Now you asked me to define "authentic" sources in your other post. For TCM/Qigong you would start with publications from mainland China preferably by doctors/professors from a Medical College/University/Hospital who study both modern and TCM medicine. You would then try to get at the root texts for the subject. With these sources in hand, you can now start your study. So here goes;

1) The root text for TCM is "Huangdi Neijing" aka "The Yellow Emperor's Canon of Medicine". Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huangdi_Neijing for your research.

2) TCM textbooks have been published from many doctors/institutes in China, two of which (related to Qigong) i had already listed earlier. Here is another recommendation - https://www.amazon.com/Illustration-channels-points-acupunct... Also check the website "www.china-guide.com" for authentic books on TCM/Qigong.

Finally here is a paper named "The Man who Invented Qigong" which explains the origin of the word and its current methodology - https://www.qigonginstitute.org/docs/The%20Man%20Who%20Inven...

1 comments

> He is a business man selling stuff to a gullible public. Because the nature of the stuff is so amorphous you can easily distort and invent it as needed.

That is true. And the "amorphous" comment holds for any teacher. Had you really investigated his stuff (which I get the feeling you haven't) you'd probably have gone further. Chia's books contain a lot of repetition and in aggregate are confusing to follow. Some even contain such gibberish as claiming that water has a "crystalline structure". In my experience it's difficult to find a competent teacher who actually understands (and can teach) the overall system. However, the Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Orbits are effective as can be discovered with a day or two's effort and are widely referenced in much older sources as the Lesser and Greater Water Wheels/Heavenly Cycles. So it'd be unwise to throw the baby out with the bath water on account of someone being a businessman. The Fusion practices are interesting and insightful if done correctly and the Kan & Li meditations also appears effective (but I'm still exploring them). The Kan & Li is the mainstay of internal alchemy and is widely discussed in a variety of far older texts [1], so I doubt he's made that one up either.

Michael Winn talks about how the Communist government gutted qi gong of its spiritual practices and that TCM is diluted as a result (one of your articles mentions a clampdown on it too). I believe Winn's been to China several times and has studied with a variety of teachers apart from Chia. His stuff stacks up so I'm inclined to believe him.

While it's fine to reference older texts though, no one has a monopoly on our nervous systems. For me, the only thing that matters is efficacy regardless of lineage/culture. I don't care for names, superstitions, mythologies or rituals - I only seek (and keep hold of) what works for me. We are incredibly fortunate to live at a time when formerly secret knowledge is widely available. I would encourage the astute student to also study cross-culturally in order to find the most effective, personally verifiable practices available given today's opportunities for research.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Harmonizing-Yin-Yang-Dragon-Tiger-Cla...

Your last paragraph has a lot of truth while your first paragraph is still wedded to wrong ideas. Let me structure my response differently;

1) First, my point in listing the paper on Qigong is that, it is a practice which has been established after the "Cultural Revolution" and thus is a sanitized version from a whole babel of ancient texts with a severe focus on practical efficacy and knowledge of modern science. Thus its inclusion under TCM which was promoted by the Chinese govt. In this process some of the possible valid allegorical levels and mystical knowledge may have been lost since they were considered "woo-woo" gilded in mere flowery language. But the end result is something which is concrete and valid enough to be accepted as "Alternative Medicine" which is a good thing. So you have a solid baseline if you start your studies here.

2) Now you might be interested in studying the ancient texts(from Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism) with all their allegories and flowery language to figure out what might have been lost during the standardization process. But this is quite hard without having the baseline knowledge mentioned above. This is where the hucksters and charlatans have a field day. They take some words/verses/ideas from these texts, interpret them in their own way with no proper comprehension, draw absurd parallels with other similar systems/modern science and hey presto; you have a series of books to sell and a cult to build. The waters have now been muddied. So a student first needs to do some proper research for authentic sources. In this day and age that is not too difficult. For example, you have definitive translations done by "Fabizio Pregadio"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrizio_Pregadio) who is a scholar on "Taoist Alchemy" which is what you seem to be interested in. See his works here: https://www.goldenelixir.com/press/_sub_taoism.html

Those Fabizio Pregadio books look good, thanks for sharing.