Tao Cosmological Terms Clarified

There was a string of postings that revealed how different Taoists use terms like “hun dun”, “wuji”, etc.

There is no consensus on these terms as far I am able to tell – different writers use them differently, depending on the application they seek to highlight. So Chinese medicine and martial artists and buddo-Taoists and neidangong specialists all used these terms differently over the thousands of years of use, which implies changes in culture and language.

The vast majority of writers are not practitioners of innner alchemy to any deep level, and so they have little use for making detailed distinctions between, say, wuji and yuan shen and early heaven. It’s unimportant for someone practicing chinese medicine, TCM doens’t even believe that shen can be manipulated for speeding up the healing process.

And Wuji-Taiji-Wuxing is a simple and sufficient cosmology for a martial artist – anything beyond the tangible physical is formless or empty, practically speaking, and no further distinctions are really useful to learning their movement forms or applications.

But I found, over 25 years of trying to make sense of mass of conflicting terminology, that I had to select out the terminology that was practical and useful for inner alchemy cultivators. “Hun” (from hundun) is the anceint term used to describe the primal state that precedes taiji. Ames and Hall (in Philosophical Daodejing) note that “hun” does not imply “emptiness” in classical use by early Taoists, but rather a positive connotation of “spontaneity” within the arising of the original self.

“wuji” is a later cosmological term that was added many centuries later, probably to match taiji.

Wu means “not”, “ji” means “to know”, so together we get “the not known”, what I render more poetically as the Supreme Mystery.

The brilliant french scholar Claude Larre in his excellent Survey of Traditional Chinese Medicine notes that radicals of the characters used to write “wuji” does not imply a void, but rather an opening from which the original breath comes.

Even modern quantum physicists have not been able to find a true void – there are just mysterious levels of “dark energy” that they don’t yet understand but can measure as having energy and presence.

Many Taoist writers, especially the syncretic ones from Song Dynasty onward (last 1000 years), use “wu” as Emptiness and use it interchangeably with the term Tao or Buddhahood. However I consider most of these syncretic writers to have deviated from the original sense of “hun” as original state of spontaneous self-arising, which is very different from the state-oriented Buddhist metaphysic of emptiness.

The syncretic writers are expressing the Chinese cultural value (Confucian) of creating “surface harmony” and trying to paper over differences, and that is fine with me on the cultural level. But for training purposes, clear language and clear intention are important.

The problem is compounded with translation into English, and the level of ambiguity is increased ten fold.
The translated words become meaningless when “non-being” and “emptiness” and “immortal self” and “dao” are all used interchangeably as concepts representing knowable ‘states”.

The whole point of spiritual science and using method to accelerate the evolution of self-realization, self-healing, and harmonizing personal and collective self is to be as precise as possible in defining the intention behind every method used to deepen one’s process.

If one simply wants to “have a religious belief about a state of mind that pre-exists or in a deity”,
then that is not method-based spiritual science, it is religious belief.

There is no point in arguing about religious belief – one either chooses to hold it or not, and arguing rarely convinces someone to change their belief.

That is why I focus on practice and the experience it engenders. The cosmological language is a useful adjunct in allowing practitioners to discuss more subtle levels of intention. If your religious belief does not include those subtle levels of existence, but is divided into only “here in the physical” and “there in the absolute/emptiness”, then alchemy will be of no use to such a person and their beliefs will interfere in the experiences of subtle bodies and subtle planes.

The life force is always listening to your intent, and responding.

This use of cosmological terms to clarify the subtle details of the alchemical process is why I have chosen my particular definitions of the terms – they correlate to practical and attainable levels of experience.

Whatever was once in an undifferentiated process of spontaneous self-arising has now differentiated itself, and thus the yuan shen-chi-jing in motion in early and later heaven I view as a different level of process than the primordial passive state (cosmic egg before it cracks open).

There is no right or wrong here, only a discussiosn about what is useful or not.

michael