Daily Practice in Taoist Cultivation

Yesterday I mentioned that Daoist practitioners must first "break free from superstition." A friend pushed back: if a disciple doesn't even believe in their master, how can they possibly summon the determination to learn the master's teachings and push past every obstacle?

The issue here is that we haven't really clarified what "superstition" actually means. As I said yesterday, asking practitioners to "break free from superstition" and personally verify everything does not turn them into a bunch of skeptics! "Breaking free from superstition" doesn't mean doubting or denying everything. It means letting go of all those false, human-made concepts that shape how you perceive and define the universe and the truth of life. It means building a practice grounded in personal cultivation and verification—step by step, feet on the ground, slowly confirming the great Way of the universe and life through your own direct experience.

Why do we cultivate? To let our lives ascend within the universe. That's the most fundamental, the ultimate goal of practice. So-called "seeing one's true nature," so-called "attaining the Way"—these are just byproducts that naturally arise along the way. If we spend a lifetime toiling at practice yet fail to grasp this most basic aim, and instead get caught up playing with ideological notions of "seeing one's true nature" while the vessel carrying our life—our physical body—falls into ruin, racked by illness and ultimately killed by disease—tell me, has that person truly achieved the goal of letting their life "ascend"?

I once spent time in the Zhongnan Mountains, where I saw many practitioners living in seclusion, enduring austere practice. I have deep respect for their spirit—years, even decades of solitary hardship deep in the mountains. But I was also saddened to find that a good number of them ended up "cultivating" nothing but a body full of pain and illness.

In 2013, when I went to the Zhongnan Mountains to rest, a practitioner who had been living in seclusion and practicing austerely for quite a few years (I can't recall exactly how long) suffered a sudden intestinal obstruction one night. His disciples rushed him to the hospital, where they discovered his intestines had actually ruptured. Fellow practitioners and devotees pooled several hundred thousand yuan for his treatment, but in the end, they couldn't save him. He died.

What kind of force can give a person such unshakable conviction, compelling them to abandon the comforts of secular life, withdraw into the deep mountains for austere practice, and persist unto death?

Faith. A kind of steadfast conviction at the level of human ideology.

Faith, working in an individual, can make a person face death without flinching and give their life for the cause. Working in a group, it can even alter the course of history.

Once a person embraces a particular faith, it becomes the most fearsome force in the world. Anyone or any group that dares to challenge its "authority" will be marked for destruction.

Human social groups—especially the "nations" that formed later—are fundamentally rooted in some shared faith and held together by it as a binding tie.

When "religion" emerged as an organized institution, faith became the linchpin holding the religion itself together and binding its followers to one another.

So faith is nothing more than a tool humanity uses to maintain bonds within particular social groups. It belongs purely to the realm of acquired human ideology. Outside the context of human society—whether nation or religion—the word "faith" has no meaning at all.

But then, what exactly are we "cultivating"? Are we trying to understand something about human society through practice? If that's the goal, we could just go talk to a philosopher and be done with it. Why spend a lifetime in solitary confinement, reinventing the wheel?

If our practice isn't aimed at understanding the messy affairs of human society, then what does the word "cultivation" have to do with faith—a concept that only carries meaning within human society?

And if someone has already built up a solid foundation of faith in their ideology, how are they supposed to break free of this distinctly human "spell of faith" and come to know the truth about the universe and the nature of life that lies beyond human society?

Let me give an example. In human society, bullying the weak is absolutely a violation of moral standards and is generally condemned (at least on the surface). But in nature, the law of survival is simple: the strong prey on the weak, the fit survive. If you insist on applying the human norm "don't bully the weak" to the laws of nature, you're making a fool of yourself.

Similarly, a Buddhist and a Daoist, each operating within their own faith system, will hold many concepts that have nothing to do with each other or are even directly opposed. Yet aren't they all living in the same universe? Aren't they all using their minds to think and understand the world? So why are their concepts so different?

In fact, even among Buddhists there are endless divisions—what lineage do you follow, what sect do I follow. People end up behind closed doors, arguing fiercely among themselves. But why? Aren't they all following the same Buddha? Aren't they all chanting the same scriptures? So why is there such a vast difference in their concepts?

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So, for a practitioner who wants to know the truth of the universe and life through their own direct cultivation and verification, is there any place in their thinking for the kinds of faith and purely ideological concepts we've been discussing? Don't we need to first root out these unreliable human-made ideas from our practice altogether?

If from the very start you lock yourself inside a "box" drawn by faith, you can forget about perceiving the world outside that box through any amount of austere practice—let alone the great Way of the universe and life.

This is what I actually meant by "breaking superstition" earlier.

To put it plainly: if you truly want to step through the doorway of real practice, you first need to, in your thinking, "break the old world and build a new one."

That's why a true practitioner will never box themselves into some school or sect from the start. You haven't even begun to practice, yet you slap a tight, unyielding band of restraint on yourself. After that, all you can do is tag along with the people in that group and make a token appearance. Don't expect anything more.

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