Beyond Tantra: Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex (5 page)

and ‘Tai Ji’ are all Pinyin spellings. However, many people still prefer
to use the old spellings of ‘Tao’ and ‘Tai Chi’ while at the same time
adopting the new spelling of ‘Qi Gong’. In this book I have tried to use
the most practical spellings while giving a preference to Pinyin unless
the old spelling is widely used. For example, you probably won’t find
many ‘Tai Ji’ courses advertised but you will find ‘Tai Chi’. There will
be confusion in this area for many years, I suspect; I recently saw an ad
for a ‘tai ji /chi’ course!

Taoist philosophy is not the same thing as the Taoist religion, which developed later. In this book, the terms ‘Taoist’ and ‘Taoism’ refer to the philosophy, not the religion. Please note that this division between ‘philosophical’ and ‘reli-gious’ Taoism is a fairly recent, Western concept. On a practical basis, all it means is that you should not expect to go to a Taoist Church and expect the priest there to be fully conversant with the subjects covered in this book, much as you would not expect a Catholic priest to know a great deal about the practices of the Cathars or Gnostics.

The early Taoists were keen observers of nature and humanity’s place in it.

They had a great interest in promoting health and vitality and put much emphasis on nurturing Qi (life-force). They developed many disciplines based on their

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Ancient Traditions: New Undertanding – Taoism 25

findings. These disciplines are traditionally grouped into branches although not all traditions group in the same way. The following is a simplified list based on an amalgamation from various sources:

•

Nei Dan (internal alchemy, meditation)

•

Qi Gong and Tai Chi (moving meditation)

•

Shuang Xiu (dual cultivation of sexual energy)

•

I Ching (cosmology, astrology, divination)

•

Yi Yua (acupuncture, Tui Na massage)

•

Feng Shui (the use of environmental Qi)

•

Fu Shi (Herbal medicine and Five Element Nutrition)

•

The Arts (includes calligraphy, music and painting) The first two branches are considered to be the oldest and most powerful and an aspiring Taoist would normally learn these first before moving on to any of the other practices. It would have been quite common for someone to study all eight branches in order to get a well-rounded education, as the narrow specialism we know in the West would not have been seen as desirable.

Taoism has had a far greater impact on Western civilization than many people realize. The I Ching (
The Book of Changes
) is one of the great classic texts of ancient China and is reputed to be 5,000 years old although no one is quite sure of its exact age. In 1697, Joachim Bouvet, a French Jesuit missionary who had been in China, introduced the I Ching to the German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz. Leibnitz was amazed by
The Book
of Changes
. Its use of binary arithmetic (also known as Yin/Yang theory) was, at the time, unknown in Europe. This is how Western civilization was first introduced to binary arithmetic, which is not only the foundation of
The Book of
Changes
but also the language of all modern computers. So the computer used to write and produce the book you are reading has been developed as a direct result of Taoist Yin/Yang theory. I find this fascinating.

Dual Cultivation (Shuang Xiu)

Dual Cultivation (Shuang Xiu) has been, until recently, a little known branch of Taoist knowledge. Dual Cultivation was traditionally considered part of the Inner Alchemy (Nei Dan) practices of self-cultivation. Taoist Inner Alchemy practices are used to promote spiritual development as well as physical health. This dual process of spiritual and physical development is also known as cultivating original nature and life. Dual Cultivation focuses on the conscious

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Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex use, by a loving couple, of something known as Sexual Qi (sexual life-force) for health and spiritual development. Dual Cultivation appears to have reached its peak during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), long before Buddhism had become widespread in China. In fact, some Taoist scholars are of the view that the practice of Dual Cultivation predates Taoism itself and was discovered during the very earliest days of Chinese civilization. However, the introduction of Buddhism (c. 67 AD), with its monastic and ascetic spiritual tradition, and the subsequent ascendancy (950–1050 AD) of Confucianism, with its rigid and moralistic ethos, put an end to the widespread practice of Taoist Dual Cultivation in China. It is only recently, in great part thanks to the works of Mantak Chia, Michael Winn and others, that these practices have again been brought to light.

For those readers with a more intimate knowledge of Taoist sexual
practices, I’d like to make it clear that by Dual Cultivation (shuang
xiu) or, specifically, paired man and wife cultivation (fu fu shuang
xiu), I am referring to the inner alchemy practice of using sexual energy for healing and spiritual development. I am not using the term
Dual Cultivation to refer to other, later, Chinese practices such as the
bedchamber arts (fang zhong) and the somewhat more controversial
practice of gathering (cai pu) of Sexual Qi from unknowing partners.

Qi and TCM

Qi (also spelled ‘Chi’) is a fundamental, East Asian concept. A direct translation of Qi from the Chinese would be ‘air’ or ‘breath’, but Qi is also used to mean the life-force or ‘spiritual energy’ that is part of everything that exists. Qi is also known as
Ki
in Japanese and
Prana
in Sanskrit. There is no accepted proof of the existence of Qi in the Western world as, in this culture, the concept simply does not exist. There is also no direct translation for Qi in English. The Taoists weren’t actually all that concerned with analysing and defining Qi.

Instead, they invested the bulk of their effort in observing its flow and learning how to work with it. The Taoists observed that, with a good reserve of Qi, you can remain healthy and live a long life. Working with Qi is at the heart of all of the Taoist disciplines, such as Acupuncture, Feng Shui, Martial Arts and Dual Cultivation. Sexual Qi is simply a particularly powerful form of Qi generated in the human body.

During my research, I found that it was much easier to get a coherent understanding of the theory behind Taoist Dual Cultivation than it was of the theory

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Ancient Traditions: New Undertanding – Qi and TCM

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behind Tantra. This is because, as mentioned above, Tantra developed from a religious background and, as with many religions, there are many different and, at times, conflicting descriptions of the practices. In contrast, Dual Cultivation and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) are based on a common understanding of the human body and its energy systems. This means that it is much easier to crosscheck and verify its internal consistency. All of the fundamental concepts – such as Qi, the Meridians, the Tan Tien and the Small Orbit – are iden-tical whether you approach the subject from Acupuncture, Qi Gong, Martial Arts, Dual Cultivation or any of the Taoist branches of knowledge.

The Difference between

Tantra and Dual Cultivation

Tantric and Dual Cultivation methods and techniques have many similarities once you remove their religious and cultural wrappings. There is one major difference, however. Tantra is primarily a method for raising Sexual Qi up the spine to create a state of ecstasy. For many people this can be a religious or spiritual experience as well as an incredibly powerful way of working with Sexual Qi.

Dual Cultivation also works with moving Sexual Qi up the spine; the fundamental difference between the Tantric and the Taoist methods is that the Taoist techniques move the Sexual Qi back down the front of the body to complete the

‘Xiao Zhou Tian’. This circular movement of energy has been translated as

‘Microcosmic Orbit’, ‘Small Heavenly Circulation’ or ‘Small Orbit’. This circulation of Qi has a profound healing and energizing effect as the generated energy is packed or stored back into the body.

Tantra therefore focuses on the ecstatic release of sexual energy and is quasi-religious, sometimes at the expense of the physical body. Dual Cultivation, on the other hand, is a method of using sexual energy to promote good health and longevity as well as spiritual development. This is an important point that is very often not made clear, especially when reading Tantric source material and later Neo-Tantric books and other instructional material.

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Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex
A Western Scientific

Explanation for Sacred Sex

After all this research into Eastern philosophies, I was still left with the question of ‘How do the techniques of Sacred Sex actually work?’ I had studied the Taoist and Tantric texts at length and verified through solo and dual practice that the techniques function when practised diligently and as described. So it was clear that Eastern adepts had identified and accurately documented ways of managing Sexual Qi. But what is actually going on in our body when we use these techniques? I then found some research that sheds a great deal of light on the subject; John C. Lilly M.D. (1915–2001), one of the world’s foremost brain researchers, carried out some groundbreaking research involving the pre-optic nucleus portion in the brain that contains the sexual system. In males, this controls erection, orgasm, and ejaculation – each in a separate place – while farther back, in the mesencephalon, the three are integrated and fired off in sequence.

He demonstrated that the orgasm and ejaculation could be triggered separately by stimulating these different brain areas.

So it appears that the Taoists and Tantrikas discovered, through a process of experimentation over hundreds of years, that it is possible to guide our internal electrical energy to different sections of our brain, just as Lilly proved with electrodes. There will be a lot of practical information later in the book about how to do this (without electrodes!). What about the female brain? There is a lot of evidence that points to clear differences in the structure of male and female brains. Most of this seems to indicate that women do not have the same ‘com-partmentalization’ in their brains as men. The female brain is less concentrated and utilizes significant portions of both hemispheres when it is engaged in a task.