Dream Trippers

Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality

David A. Palmer, Elijah Siegler

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226484983
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Over the past few decades, Daoism has become a recognizable part of Western "alternative" spiritual life. Now, that Westernized version of Daoism is going full circle, traveling back from America and Europe to influence Daoism in China. Dream Trippers draws on more than a decade of ethnographic work with Daoist monks and Western seekers to trace the spread of Westernized Daoism in contemporary China. David A. Palmer and Elijah Siegler take us into the daily life of the monastic community atop the mountain of Huashan and explore its relationship to the socialist state. They follow the international circuit of Daoist "energy tourism, " which connects a number of sites throughout China, and examine the controversies around Western scholars who become practitioners and promoters of Daoism. Throughout are lively portrayals of encounters among the book's various characters—Chinese hermits and monks, Western seekers, and scholar-practitioners—as they interact with each other in obtuse, often humorous, and yet sometimes enlightening and transformative ways. Dream Trippers untangles the anxieties, confusions, and ambiguities that arise as Chinese and American practitioners balance cosmological attunement and radical spiritual individualism in their search for authenticity in a globalized world.

1

The Subject

When the Daoist monks at the Jade Spring Monastery at the foot of Mount Hua conduct the ritual to the Dipper on the day of Gengshen, the temple, closed to tourists for the evening, is deserted save for the monks gathered for the recitations in the main shrine devoted to Chen Tuan, a patron saint of inner alchemy. But, on May 30, 2006, a different scene presented itself. On either side of Chen Tuan’s statue, eight Daoist monks in their dark blue robes and black caps solemnly chanted the Scripture of the Northern Dipper, following the dreamy cadence of knocks on a hollow wooden fish, reverently holding tablets with both hands, bowing, kneeling, and standing, their backs to the temple’s central court. Darkness had fallen and the light in the shrine only faintly illuminated parts of the court, into which meandered wafts of incense smoke that hesitated between motion and stillness. Around the heavy round incense burner in the middle of the courtyard, scarcely visible bodies turned in the shadows, some in unison, stretching and contracting, and others in spontaneous motion. Still others sat in quiet meditation on steps and ledges, a few in the lotus position, some with their knees to their chests, dispersed at various spots in the small temple enclosure. A young couple held each other in embrace, their minds mingling like clouds of vapor, in the obscure stillness punctuated by the monks’ grave chanting and hollow knocking.

They came from the Americas and Europe, thirty of them, doing qigong, tai chi, inner alchemical meditation, yoga, or just sitting there. There was a martial arts teacher from Mexico, a Sufi seeker from Seattle, a fengshui consultant from Toronto, a shaman from Colorado, a therapist from Turkey, a few enthusiastic youths, others rather jaded, a banker, a brain scientist, several retirees, and a French vineyard owner. They were travelers on the “China Dream Trip,” a tour of Daoist sacred sites organized by Healing Tao USA, one of America’s main providers of courses and workshops on Daoist practices of meditation, healing, and the body.

At the inner altar, the Daoist monks chanted, stood in a single line and bowed, facing South; in the outer courtyard, the Dream Trippers exercised and meditated in all directions, many of them facing North: two groups, their backs to each other, in their own worlds, doing their own rituals. But both groups felt each other’s presence and each other’s pursuit of Dao, and consciously contributed to the shared atmosphere. After the ritual ended, the monks distributed the fruit offerings—watermelon and bananas—to the foreign group members. Few words were exchanged that night, but a sense of peaceful communion was felt by all.

The Dream Trippers had arrived by tour bus after a two-hour drive from Xi’an, across the dusty yellow plains of central Shaanxi, coming within sight of a chain of mountains to the South thrusting upward out of the earth, a forbidding wall separating North and South China. The crown of these summits is mount Hua, its towering cliffs propping up, like a stem, a ring of peaks shooting out of a central bulb, akin to the petals of a flower, thus the Chinese name Huashan or “Flower Mountain.”

The “China Dream Trips” are organized once every two years. At Huashan, the participants spend a week climbing the mountain, meditating in secluded caves, and learning Daoist practices from monks and the hermit tending the caves. On the 2004 trip, they then set off by bus for Louguantai, some 500 miles to the west—a place the group leader, Michael Winn, lauds for its “intensely spiritual vibration,” where, 2,500 years ago, the sage Laozi is reputed to have transmitted the Daodejing, the Book of the Way and Its Virtue, and disappeared into the Kunlun Mountains.

As soon as the Dream Trippers arrived at the Louguantai guesthouse, filling the hotel with English chatter, an American couple who had already spent a night there closed the door of their room, packed their bags, checked out of the hotel, and hurried off. They, too, were on a spiritual journey to Daoist sacred sites in China—but emphatically did not want to be associated with Winn’s “Dream Trip.” Louis Komjathy (b. 1971) had recently received his doctorate in religious studies; his dissertation on the early history of the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) order of Daoism would soon be published as a 550-page tome,1 and he would become an important contributor to academic teaching and discussion on the comparative study of contemplative traditions. His companion, Kathryn “Kate” Townsend (b. 1962), a longtime Daoist and Chinese medical practitioner, had a private practice in Chinese medicine. Tired of the superficiality and commercialism of the dominant American Daoist scene, they had come to China to attend a major conference on Daoist Studies and to go on a pilgrimage to important Daoist sacred sites. They were in China in search of the authentic expressions of China’s ancient spiritual tradition—and not to meet a group of American “spiritual tourists.”

On hearing our account of the monks of Huashan, Komjathy and Townsend set off to the Jade Spring Monastery. When they arrived, they sat down for tea with the vice-abbot, Master Chen Yuming (b. 1969), who had seen the Dream Trippers off only two days earlier. Komjathy stressed to Chen that he did not have the same approach as Healing Tao USA. The young scholar-practitioner complained to the young monk about the absence of true Daoism in the West—and that the Dream Trips were the perfect example of everything that was wrong with “so-called American Daoism.” Komjathy told Chen that, instead, he hoped to deepen his own Daoist self-cultivation and determine if he had an authentic connection to Daoism. They also discussed the issue of lineage and ordination as requirements for Daoist identity and affiliation, and Komjathy asked how to establish and develop “authentic Daoism” in the United States, especially one rooted in lineage and tradition.

“I pretended that I didn’t understand,” Chen told us2 a few months later, reluctant to agree to Komjathy’s proposition. “I don’t think we should pay too much attention to these outward forms of Daoism. He is right to want to bring the container over, but one must not be too rigid: the purpose of the container is only to carry the water inside. On the other hand, Michael Winn wants to take the water, without a container to hold it. As a result, he can’t hold the water.”3

This book is about the transnational circulation of the “water” of Daoism, as it spreads outside and beyond, but also flows back toward, its traditional institutional “container.” It is about the people in China and America who “cultivate” themselves with this “water,” and about their encounters, interpenetrations, and appropriations. In the words of Winn, responding to our project, this book is “catching it in midair. You’re saying, ‘Hey, there’s an appropriation going on. Let’s record it while the actual act of appropriation is happening, and the counter reappropriation.’”4 And the book is a reflection on the anxieties that are produced by these encounters, flows, and appropriations—what we call the “predicament” of a modern, global spirituality that both rejects and feeds on its connection with local traditions, their sacred places, their traditional masters, and their broken institutional containers—raising vexing questions about authenticity and authority. How do transnational circulations transform the meaning of spiritual practice, authenticity, and authority for a globalizing, indigenous tradition such as Daoism—both at an individual and collective level?

*

This book is a study of the encounter of two groups of Daoist practitioners, coming from vastly different cultural and religious backgrounds, at a common sacred site. Both the Chinese monks and the Dream Trippers share the experience of practices of Daoist body cultivation and meditation, but live worlds apart in terms of the social trajectories and environmental contexts of their “Daoist” experience. Both groups cross paths on Huashan, physically and figuratively, in monasteries, in caves, and on mountain trails, at different points of their trajectories in life and in their paths of spiritual cultivation. On Huashan they pass through spots that are meaningful or “powerful” on their “spiritual path”; their “way”; their “Dao.”

For the Chinese monks of the monastic order of Complete Perfection, Huashan is steeped in sacred history as: one of the Five Imperial Sacred Peaks (wuyue) of China, a major Daoist Grotto Heaven (dongtian), an important site in the historical genealogy of the Daoist esoteric tradition of inner alchemy, and a way station in the past and present practice of “cloud wanderings” (yunyou) of Daoist monks in their travels from one monastery to another throughout China. For Master Chen, Huashan is the spiritual home of his own master, the place where he came of age as a Daoist and encountered the Immortals of past ages—but which, he feels, has become an oppressive place, where bureaucracy, politics, and backbiting have destroyed the spiritual atmosphere.

For the international spiritual travelers, Huashan is a stop on the itinerary of China Dream Trips, group tours organized by the flame-haired American Michael Winn (b. 1951), former war correspondent in Africa, kundalini yoga instructor, and, since the early 1980s, a student and close associate of Mantak Chia, a Thai Chinese who is one of the best-known teachers of Daoist body cultivation practices in the West. Winn’s organization, Healing Tao USA, is one of the leading American providers of training programs in the traditions of gentle breath, body, and mind exercises commonly known as qigong (pronounced “tchee-gong”). The Dream Trip itineraries combine sightseeing, shopping, and qigong practice and meditation at major Daoist temples and mountains. The international participants, for the most part, have little knowledge of or interest in the geographic, historical, and religious significance of these sites: for them, the mountains are spaces for generating embodied experiences through qigong practice, and for connecting with the powerful energetic imprint left by past generations of anonymous Daoist hermits and cultivators.

For the scholar-practitioner Komjathy, on the other hand, Huashan is an important Daoist sacred site and a pivotal way station on his personal initiatory journey. It is one of the key links in his Daoist lineage and transmission, the precious and precarious connection between an authentic Chinese tradition and his own project of establishing a “tradition-based” Daoist practice and institution in faraway America.

These encounters between Chinese monks and primarily Western spiritual seekers and scholar-practitioners are moments in the “return globalization”5 of Daoism, when practitioners of an Americanized Daoist practice meet with indigenous exponents of the tradition. China’s indigenous religion has, during the twentieth century, spread to North America and Europe, breaking out of its Chinese cultural matrix and finding a home in the world of alternative spiritualities, natural health practices, and academic scholarship. This book is a study of a moment in the globalization of Daoism: the moment when, having spread overseas through the emigration of Chinese masters, an Americanized Daoism is now making its way back to China, bringing the process full circle. This is the moment when Daoism becomes truly “global”—after its outward dissemination and acculturation in various countries, a new stage begins—a maturing Westernized Daoism returns to China, not only to connect with its roots, but also to bring something back to its ancestral soil, which, after decades of revolutions and reforms, has also undergone deep changes.6 The encounters characteristic of this “moment” have been occurring with increasing frequency in the past few years, with the arrival in China, for short or long stays, of Westerners committed to varying degrees to the study, practice, and promotion of Daoism. Among these, it is “Daoist qigong” tours that have the greatest visibility and impact: international groups of ten to forty people, primarily but not exclusively Westerners, organized by associations and enterprises active in the small but growing “Daoist” niche in the market for oriental spiritual practices and experiences. Such visits began in the early 2000s, are increasing in frequency, and are now offered by most American Daoist organizations.7

The encounters that produce such transnational spaces are multiplying through the circulation of practitioners, monks, scholars, and visitors between locations in China and overseas. This multiplication of encounters has become increasingly evident since we began researching this book in 2004. Each of these links occurs in discrete times and places, connecting different networks of Daoists in China and abroad. No two are the same, and the encounters we describe here should not be seen as representative of all. But it is the increased frequency of all these encounters—the multiplication of these localized spaces of transnational Daoist discourse and practice—which, ultimately, creates the broader contours of global Daoism.

How do these encounters change the protagonists? What happens when “Western Daoists” come back to the “roots” of Daoism in China, and meet with “real” Chinese Daoists? Does the encounter change them? Does it change the Chinese Daoists? What do these encounters tell us about the search for spirituality in the condition of late modernity? Through these encounters, it is the spiritual and religious histories of China and the West that intersect, collide, and interpenetrate—revealing the paradoxes and dilemmas of the search for spiritual authenticity in a globalized world. If Chinese and American Daoists are practicing the same or similar techniques derived from the same tradition, are they doing the same thing? Are they on the same path? Are they leading to the same Way? These are some of the questions we explore in this book.

Forming Spiritual Subjects: Toward an Anthropology of Spirituality

Our Daoists are engaged in what, in the modern context, is often called a “spiritual practice” or “spirituality.” Like countless others, in myriads of contexts and traditions, they are constituting themselves as spiritual subjects—as conscious and reflexive agents in realms perceived as transcending the world of immediate materiality and visibility.8 This is a study of how people are constituted as spiritual subjects through their practices, their experiences, their travels and trajectories, their encounters, their conversations, and their participation in social groups, networks, and institutions. These are processes in which a specific type of subject is “constructed” or “cultivated”—a subject who is engaged in processes of ontological transformation, discovering or attaining his essence as being more than mortal flesh, and living in, interacting with, and aligning himself to a meaningful cosmos that extends deeper or beyond the immediate materiality of the world as it appears to the senses.

Contemporary popular parlance in the West tends to define spirituality in opposition to religion, seeing “spirituality” as rooted in inner, subjective experience while “religion” is considered to be based on external institutions, ritual, and dogma. But this discourse forgets that the term and concept of spirituality emerged within the highly institutionalized and religious context of medieval Catholicism;9 and that disciplines of spiritual subject formation, as we define spirituality, exist in a variety of cultural and religious contexts—the institutions of Daoist monasticism in China being one of them. Through the encounters we describe in this book, different approaches to Daoist spirituality confront and question each other, while linking each other into a global network through which influences flow in both directions.

In this study, we hope to contribute to an anthropological approach to spiritual subject formation. Some questions that might be asked in a comparative anthropology of spirituality would be: what are the forms of knowledge, practice, and social relations through which people constitute themselves as spiritual subjects? And how do spiritual subjects transform knowledge, practice, and social relations? What kinds of subjectivities are generated by different regimens of spiritual subject formation? These regimens constitute what Adam Chau has called the “personal-cultivational modality” of doing religion: “This modality presupposes a long-term interest in cultivating and transforming oneself . . . the goals of this transformation a...