Icon Of Daoism (1)
The Icon of Daoism is the TaiJiTu (太极图）.
The more detailed version is this TaiJiBaGuaTu (太极八卦图）。
The design of this Icon can be traced back to 1000 years ago, in Chinese Song Dynasty, the 11th century, when an Italy Renaissance equivalent culture revolution occurred. The Italy Renaissance was actually about 300 years late, in the 14th and 15th century. During the Song Dynasty, there was a round of advances in Science, Philosophy and Social Development in China. The Icon of Daoism was conceived based on the deep understanding of Daoism. Nowadays, Korea, especially South Kerea still uses the Icon as their national flag.
From the philosophical point of view, the Icon portraits a kind of thinking that everything is comprised of two contradicting or opposite parts. You have friends by definition. Then obviously, you will also have enemies according to your definition of friends. Similarly, you show your strength all the time, then your weakness comes along, which will take your down at your peak. Water is considered the weakest material. Guess what, water kills almost everything, including human, which makes it the strongest.
From the Daoism’s point of view, the Icon has different interpretations. From its face value, it depicts a system that comprised of Yin (negative) and Yang (positive), which indicates that during your training, you will follow the day (Yang, positive) and night (Yin, negative) schedules closely, and the absorbing energy (Yang, positive) and the soothing (Yin, negative) procedures closely. Just like go to school, you study hard, which represents Yang (positive). However, you will also need to find ways to relax your mind, which is Yin (negative). Otherwise, you will be burned out quickly. If you do not study, just relax all the time, then you only have the Yin part (negative part), which means you will not progress at all, and becomes worse.
Training methods will include two parts too. The one part is how to direct energy passing through the Qi network, which will be discussed late, and deposit the energy into your stomach, the body part that contains several organs. The place the energy to go is a node of the Qi network. We will study Qi network late.
Before we are born, we reply on the umbilical cord for nutrition. After we are born, the umbilical cord is cut off and we rely on our stomach, more exactly the
the stomach organ, the liver, and the small and large intestines for nutrition. Other organs are just supplemental. For instance, the pancreas is used to help digest the food and regulate the blood sugar. The kidney is used for filtering poisoning particles from entering your bloodstream. If we can absorb pure energy, other than those chemical energy from proteins, those organs, even the stomach and the liver are not necessary.
To train your body, you have to expand that node of Qi network, which looks like a sunflower seed for ordinary people, so that it becomes bigger and bigger and stores more energy. The expanded node cannot be called node anymore. It is the farmland of dan. You can guess, after entering the second category of Break-Ground, your organs such as liver, stomach, pancreas, intestines, all shrink to eventually the size of seed, and your stomach is occupied by the Farmland of Dan.
The other part of training methods certainly contains measurements to help your body withholding those tremendous changes. Otherwise, you basically hurt yourself and maybe kill yourself. It is not funny that you lose the balance and become out of control, which in China is called “走火入魔”。
I marked this note as “Icon of Daoism (1)”, because there are more to graphical entangling of the Yin and the Yang. Another major characteristic of the Icon is that it is, in my humble opinion, the greatest design of weapons. Does it sound like an UFO to you? Let’s talk about this in next chapter.
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