Tao Articles

I have often been asked to comment on the difference between the “Taoist Water Method” promoted by B.K. Frantzis and the “Water and Fire Method” (Kan and Li) of alchemy taught in the Healing Tao, originally transmitted by Mantak Chia.

Kumar has published two books on his Taoist water meditation method in his Relax Into Your Being series (a great title, and very Taoist). The following comments are NOT a review of his books or the effectiveness of his meditation method, which I think are fine and a valuable part of the Taoist cultivation tradition. I consider Kumar Frantzis a good friend and colleague, and we have had deep discussions about this subject.

But I think Kumar?s introduction in his book is very misleading and inaccurate in its attacks on what he calls the Fire methods of alchemy in Taoism as being a false corruption of Lao Tzu?s pure water method.

Let me further preface my comments by saying I think Kumar is an excellent chi kung teacher, and has made valuable contributions to the American chi kung scene, especially on the use of movement as it relates to development of the energy body. I studied his six part chi kung system as well as his pa kua system, and edited his first book, Opening the Energy Gates of the Body. I think the Marriage of Heaven and Earth chi kung movement he got from his teacher Liu Hung Chieh is the best chi kung movement for opening the microcosmic orbit, although Kumar doesn’t use it for that since he doesn’t believe in “forcing” open those two water and fire channels.

Here are a few of the points I’ve made to Kumar in the past about his alleged water method.

Kumar has performed a valuable service by highlighting the water nature of many Taoist practices. He is not alone: see Alan Watts on Tao, The Watercourse Way. But he has performed an equal DISservice by trying to polarize the water and fire techniques into separate paths. This is essentially self-serving, a non-Taoist attempt to claim “my way is the best way, the true way of Lao Tzu” so buy my book and take my water method courses.

Kumar?s so called water method is actually not a pure water method, because no such thing exists. The core of his water teaching can be summarized as: “dissolve ice into water, dissolve water into vapor”. BUT WHAT DO YOU NEED TO MELT THE ICE, AND CHANGE THE WATER INTO MOISTURE? YOU NEED FIRE.

Kumar just doesn’t name the fire; it is left unconscious. It is the fire of the mind focusing itself like a magnifying glass on the frozen body-mind tissues that dissolves the ice. There is no such thing as water operating purely by itself. The Five Elements are all interdependent, water cannot function without fire.

In alchemy. My position is that if you are going to encourage the water-fire interaction, you are better off having both the fire and water elements made conscious.

The Healing Tao practices begin with dissolving and have plenty of dissolving thruout: the Inner Smile is the prime practice here, but the Six healing Sounds, Fusion of the Five Elements and Kan and Li practices are all focused on dissolving. Kumar’s claim that Dissolving is the trademark of the Water Method is equally true of the Water and Fire Method. Kumar is falsely separating the two. What he really is trying to say is “I use the Yin method, I don’t force anything, I just allow it”.

I sincerely thank Kumar for advertising this point. It is perhaps the only virtue I find in his labeling his approach the Water Method (as opposed to the Kan and Li label, which means the Water and Fire Method). I think that this is a good thing to highlight, especially since westerners have a tendency to force, they are overly aggressive and they injure their chi this way or exhaust themselves with their own impatience. So Kumar, like Juan li and other Healing Tao instructors, have chosen to highlight the yin methods. Many instructors feel Chia overemphasizes the yang methods, and they have correctly changed their practice to suit themselves. I include myself in this category.

But Kumar is confusing “forcing” with “Fire method”. This is just a judgement on his part, and again a self-serving one that makes water look good by default. He is confusing Fire method by linking it with False Yang, when pure fire element should be linked instead with True Yang. All of the Taoist alchemical texts are unanimous is advocating true yang be cultivated.

If I were to play Kumar’s labeling game in reverse, I would start calling his approach the FROZEN WATER METHOD of Taoism and go about pointing out all the evils of yin and water chi that is stuck in the physical plane for lack of Fire. Is this not the historical condition that women are trying to liberate themselves from? The yin energy of the planet, frozen beneath the weight of patriarchy? But I would really be talking about False Yin, not True Water or True Yin, which is never stuck. But Kumar seems to ignore these important distinctions.

Classically in China, you use both the Yin and Yang methods of regulating the Water and Fire. It depends on your body and mind type, on the season, on what you are working on, what you just ate, your phase of development, your age, your sex, etc. etc. This is the whole point of the I Ching: sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow. The I Ching never says: ONLY FOLLOW.

If you only follow in the water style, this can lead to very slow progress at times. Sometimes you need more fire to transform your life or a situation. Only doing water practice can lead to stagnation and holding of water in the body. Physically, this results in overweight condition; psychically, it can result in unnecessarily slow spiritual progress. I emphasize this alternation between fire and water methods in all my Kan and Li teachings, and in the basics as well: when you don’t have the attraction to doing a yang practice of guiding and interacting with the chi or your shen, then you simply do the inner smile and follow whatever happens. Do I dissolve first, or create first? I just ask before I start my meditation.

Sometimes I start with a yang, self-guided meditation that lawfully manipulates the life force and helps to more quickly manifest my intention to work in a certain area. Then it may change in mid-stream, after I have connected to what I sought — and I surrender to it. Is this a Fire or a Water Method? Why tie your hands with the labels? When I point this out to Kumar, he hastily defends by saying that the Water people use fire and water, they just do it in a watery way. If so, the very label “Water Method” starts to self-dissolve itself!

Kumar’s own teacher Liu taught another one of his Chinese students a fire method of meditation, suggesting that different approaches may be suitable for different folks. Was Kumar so fiery as a killer martial artist that Liu heavily emphasized the water method to him? I don’t know, but it appears to have some merit. But no need to distort the entire corpus of Taoist practices to defend this choice.

Kumar’s claim that the water method has an exclusive on effortlessness is very misleading. It is the balanced interaction of Water and Fire that opens the gates of the Yuan Chi. When you practice from this energy, that is the true effortless state, wu wei, and it is neither water nor fire, yin nor yang. Again, a false advertising claim for the so called Water Method. It doesn’t matter what approach you use to return to the Original Spirit, so why claim one is superior?

The final point I wish to make about Kumar’s alleged Water method is that I believe that it ignores certain aspects of refining chi found in the Water and Fire (Kan and Li) Method. Fire has many virtues which accelerate spiritual progress when cultivated, and these are essential to forming the Elixir. Kumar tells me that at the very end of his process the Fire suddenly emerges from the Water (the hidden middle line of the water trigram). The end may mean years or decades of water method cultivation. Fair enough. But why wait that long to enjoy the benefits of fire?

It is like saying, “Don’t cook your food, just eat it raw and your stomach fluids will naturally digest (cook) it”. The Pure water method ideology, if you take it to its extreme logical end, is essentially anti-Fire technology and against all the uses Fire has brought to mankind, both internally (spiritually) and externally (spark plugs and combustion engines that “force” a change in the energy state of gasoline, etc.). Does Kumar walk everywhere to protest to use of fire combustion in car engines? Of course not. So why condemn use of fire in spiritual technology?

I think it is more prudent to say, there are dangers when you play with Fire, better to approach Fire from a place of good understanding of the Water (=body, matter). The Kan and Li methods always place Water first for this reason — it is the safest way to progress in the beginning. That is why students are better off learning through body movement (chi kung) in the beginning of their cultivation practice. But we still need to recognize the essential need for yang methods and true fire. Otherwise, you may get frozen into a position on the virtues of Water Only.

Michael Winn

ps. I invite Kumar to respond to the issue, and will post his reply when he does so..

Everyone discovers qigong in their own way. When I first began experimenting with it twenty years ago, there wasn’t a lot of support or explanation for the idea of “chi” (the pinyin “qi” had not yet become popular). Chi kung was mostly taught by martial artists, who often had a rather limited idea of chi as being something precious and hard to get, and once you got it you had to defend yours to keep it. There was an assumption that if you couldn’t kick somebody’s butt with your chi, then it wasn’t really there. I later discovered chi is the most abundant “substance” in the universe, that you literally can’t escape it no matter where you go. Wherever you run and hide, the lifeforce is already here! We’re literally swimming in it all the time, it’s the very “stuff” of nature, but we simply fail to recogize its rhythmic pulsation or its pathways.

My biggest problem as a beginner was that I had been well brainwashed by western scientific ideas (empirical materialism), a victim of my own ivy league education. I wanted desperately to believe this “chi” was real, more real than my physical body, but my over-trained intellect was constantly doubting my own experience. It wasn’t enough to stop me from practicing every day, but it blocked me from surrendering to a deeper level of chi flow.

Even when I had an exceptionally “high” chi experience following my practice of chi kung, part of me would ask, “was that my imagination, or was
it real?”. It took me a while to figure out that every experience we have, even in our ordinary reality, is filtered through our imagination, whether it be our conscious or unconscious imagination. I realized that it is not so much that we “create” our subjective reality, but rather that we “shape” the current of life force moving through us. it is silly and presumptious to think that we create the life force itself. Qigong is just a methodology focused on consciously shaping the chi flow for specific benefits, either physical or spiritual.

Sometimes the effects are quite subtle, and so it takes us a while to tune into what is actually happening. inside us. I remember after I first learned to circulate qi in the microcosmic orbit, I noticed a strange thing. I used to eat ice cream every day, my major vice, to counter all the other healthy habits I had acquired. But after I opened the orbit, I suddenly lost my appetite for my daily ice cream. What was going on? It took me a while to figure out that the kundalini yoga I had been doing previously had overheated my body, driving a lot of fire chi up my spine into my head. The ice cream was my coolant. As soon as i began circulating chi down the water channel in the front of my body, I did’t need the outer coolant, I now had an inner coolant. I thought to myself, How Cool this chi stuff is.

Now I realize my experience of the microcosmic orbit twenty years ago was in kindergarden, and the depth of its flow today within my being is multi-dimensional, dissolving levels of my jing (body essence that becomes blood and sexual energy) that I didn’t even know existed. Then later I found myself connecting it this chi flow in my body with levels of shen (spirit/awareness) that I never dreamed were possible. Perhaps the greatest thrill was discovering how yin and yang chi can orbit deep inside the core channel of my body, and generate non-polarized chi (yuan chi, or Original Energy).

Now I see and even feel the chi orbiting in nature everywhere — electrons orbiting around the nucleus of my atoms, planets orbiting around the sun, magma orbiting from the hot depths of the earth to the cool surface and back, students orbiting around the energy field of their teachers, men and women orbiting endlessly around the quest for love and completion of themselves.

It is the same stuff that artists, psychologists, theologians and scientists are all trying to play with and figure out what makes it tick. But the main difference for me, after 20 years of chi kung practice, is that now I experience this fantastic flow of chi and enjoy it, without a doubt.

Taoist Master Mantak Chia is a major pioneer in awakening the West into the Way of the Tao over the last 20 years. He is co-author of over ten books on qigong and its inner meditative aspect, neigong. He is the first to openly initiate westerners into the secret methods of Taoist inner alchemy, the ancient methods for healing the split between body/mind and sexuality/soul. It’s a path that leads to long life and a deep blissful, spirtual rebirth.

His books include Awaken Healing Energy of the Tao, the first book in English on opening the Microcosmic Orbit, a kind of unifying “chakra” or wheel that connects all the meridians and energy centers of the body. I co-authored with him a revolutionary approach to connecting sexual energy to physical and spiritual health: Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy, followed by Healing Love: Cultivating Female Sexual Energy.

Other books focused on different types of qigong: Iron Shirt Chi Kung, Bone Marrow Nei Kung, Transform Stress into Vitality (Six Healing Sounds), Fusion of the Five Elements (mind training of the vital organ qi and emotional qi), Chi Nei Tsang (Deep Organ Massage) and Tai Chi Chi Kung. His specialty is in teaching people how their “energy body” — the collective meridians and deep qi channels that connects the body-mind — can be activated to function as one smoothly functioning whole.

I was one of a small group of western students who helped him found the Healing Tao Center in 1982. We were tucked into a tiny cubbyhole in New York’s Chinatown — a little place with a big vision. Today, the International Healing Tao has over 1000 instructors worldwide on every continent teaching the classical Taoist approach of harmonizing “water and fire” — male and female, yang and yin.

It has given me and hundreds of thousands of others a practical way to manage our health, our emotions, our sexuality, and our minds. It led to my spiritual experience of nature (body nature and worldly nature) as an energy doorway that connects me with “God” in every moment. This is the humble simplicity and beauty of the Tao, the Natural Way. Here is Mantak Chia’s account of how he came to the Way:

Mantak’s Chia’s Story

I am Chinese, and grew up in Thailand. My mother was a Christian chaplain, but I was surrounded by Buddhist monks who taught me meditation at age six. I watched other Chinese do chi kung in the parks, but didn’t get deeply into it until I went to Hong Kong to attend high school. One of my classmates took me up into nearby mountains where a Taoist adept lived in a simple hut. His name was One Cloud, and he was 90 years old though he looked thirty years younger.

I was impressed by his kind smile and gentle strength. He lived simply, ate simply, a diet with no salt. He taught me about taoist alchemical salt, which is heated in bamboo, and used as a solvent to aid meditative practice. I visited White Cloud once or twice a week for almost four years.

He took a liking to me, seemed to think I had the patience to learn something deeper from him than other students. He taught me the classical seven Inner Alchemy formulas of Immortality that he himself had used to stop eating food . He said he had existed solely on chi (qi) for many years when he lived in the mountains of north China. He started eating again when the Japanese started bombing and he came down out of the hills. He believes that his liver was contaminated by bad food at that time, which may have been a cause of his eventual death at age 96.

I had returned to Thailand, and opened my own Natural Healing Center in the mid 70’s in which I taught qigong, tai chi, and the beginning levels of inner alchemy — the Inner Smile and Microcosmic Orbit. I was amazed at how many people got healed. I thought of One Cloud often, of his beautiful smile and his teaching me to smile into the body’s vital organs and the dan tiens (energy centers). I preferred his light-hearted Tao teachings to the local Buddhist monks, who were stern and took themselves too seriously.

I also appreciated my mother’s Christian teachings, but the Tao teachings were always practical and wise and gradually became my main focus. I think the qigong principles of harmony and balance are very similar to the Christian teachings on love, they are just expressed in a more concrete energetic form. I don’t see any difference between the idea of universal qi and Holy Spirit.

I also noticed many monks would go see a Chinese doctor when they got sick, suggesting they knew that chinese medicine, based on principles taken from qigong, had a deep understanding of the body. When I was 21, a western style doctor told me I would die from an inherited kidney problem. So I found another Taoist teacher who showed me how to rejuvenate my kidneys by recycling my sexual energy. I believe it saved my life, and I have taught it to thousands of other people and seen how it helped them also.

For me, this is the real joy of teaching qigong and neigong. I get to watch so many people heal and blossom like a flower when they experience their connection to the flow of qi.

How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion? How do I know that he who is afraid of death is not like a man who left his home as a youth and forgot to return? Lady Li was the daughter of the border warden of Ai. When she was first taken captive and brought to the state of Chin, she wept until the bosom of her robe was drenched with tears. But later, when she went to live in the royal palace, shared with the king his luxurious couch and sumptuous food, she regretted that she had wept. How do I know that the dead do not repent of their former craving for life? Those who dream of a merry drinking party may the next morning wail and weep. Those who dream of wailing and weeping may in the morning go off gaily to hunt. While they dream they do not know that they are dreaming, In their dream, they may even try to interpret their dream. Only when they have awakened do they begin to know that it was a dream. By and by comes the great awakening, and then we shall know that it has all been a great dream.

Once upon a time, Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly fluttering about, enjoying itself. It did not know that it was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he awoke with a start and he was Chuang Tzu again. But he did not know whether he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamed that he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming that he was Chuang Tzu. Between Chuang Tzu and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is what is called the transformation of things.

from Readings from World Scriptures – by Prof Andrew Wilson

This study on the right brain frontal lobe as dominant in forming our personality is curiously matched by ancient Chinese theory that the right half of the body is the yin side, i.e. the more contracted personal side.

It also underscores that the traditional strength of western ego, in the left brain language center, is a false center of self. Taoist practice is to cultivate the meeting point between left and right brain to activate the universal brain, the chi field.

Michael Winn

Discovery News
Wednesday, May 9, 2001
dsc.discovery.com/news/reu/20010507/brain.html

Researchers studying patients with a rare degenerative brain malady that can trigger dramatic changes in personality said today they have pinpointed a part of the brain that controls a person’s sense of “self.”

An area in the front portion of the brain’s right frontal lobe appears to harbor the sense of self — in other words, personality, beliefs, likes and dislikes, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California-San Francisco.

Miller said he began looking into the anatomy of the self after noticing that several of his patients with frontotemporal dementia, commonly known as Pick’s disease, underwent a stark transformation, changing their religious and political beliefs, and altering their preferences in food and clothing.

Miller and several colleagues examined 72 people with Pick’s disease, which is similar to Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers used advanced brain imaging techniques to determine which areas of the brain had the most severe degeneration. They also evaluated the patients for major changes in personality, values and tastes. Seven patients had undergone a dramatic change of self, the study found. Six of those had their most severe abnormalities in the brain’s right frontal lobe.

Of the 65 patients whose sense of self had been preserved, only one had the most severe damage in the right frontal lobe. Miller said the findings indicate that normal functioning of the right frontal lobe is needed for people to maintain their sense of self. He also said the findings demonstrate that a biological disorder can break down well-established patterns of awareness and self-reflection.

“This is kind of a mysterious area in the brain,” Miller said in an interview. “The question is why in this non-language area do we see a loss of self concepts. And the answer is: We don’t know.”The study was presented during a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Philadelphia. One patient involved in the study was a 54-year-old woman described as a charming, dynamic real estate agent who went from wearing expensive designer apparel to choosing cheap clothing and gaudy beads and asking strangers the cost of their clothing. Once a lover of French cuisine, she adopted a love of fast food, particularly Taco Bell.

The concept of self has intrigued philosophers, writers and scientists for centuries, but only recently has the technology been available to study its anatomical basis, the study noted.