Laoshan Daoshi 崂山道士 and Virtue 德 as Foundation
Laoshan Daoshi 崂山道士 is a fun short film from China done in the puppet animation style. It originally comes from a collection of folktales called Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio 聊斋志异, written by Pusong Ling 蒲松龄. It tells the tale of Wang Qi 王七, a poor scholar who becomes obsessed with a book about Daoist immortals. He even has the wish to seek out a Daoist master on Mount Lao 崂山 in order to learn how to train to become like the immortals in his book, although his wife thinks the idea is silly (probably a scenario that hits close to home for many friends of mine 🙂). In his dream, he sneaks out to embark on such an adventure. The journey turns out to be harder than he expected, and when he arrives, the Daoist master accepts him but promptly instructs him to start chopping wood. Eventually, his master teaches him the secret technique that grants Wang Qi the ability to walk through walls. However, his master warns him that if uses his newly acquired skills without moral discretion, he will lose this ability. Wang Qi ends up having to learn the hard way that his master wasn’t joking around!
Aside from the lesson that cultivating the Dao necessarily includes hard work and determination (“eating bitter” 吃苦), the story communicates the importance of cultivating virtue 德 as a component of Daoist cultivation that is absolutely necessary. The story suggests that virtue is so important that even if you were to advance to a very high level of cultivation, a level at which numinous abilities (shentong 神通) become possible, if you let your moral cultivation slide you could effectively lose these “boons picked up along the way.”
The cultivation of virtue has widely been considered an indispensable facet of “establishing a foundation” (zhuji 築基) for both advanced meditative practice (neidan/dandao) and Daoist cultivation in general. Some would argue that it is the foundation. Daoists speak of cultivating the Five Virtues, which correspond to the Five Phases:
- benevolence (ren 仁) — wood,
- respect (li 礼) — fire,
- honesty (xin 信) — earth,
- righteousness (yi 义) — metal,
- wisdom (zhi 智) — water.
Daoists also speak of “cutting off the five roots” (desire for material possessions, sex, fame, good food and drink, and sleep). Cultivating virtue is beneficial to cultivation for both very practical reasons as well as for energetic reasons. The Dao is seen as inherently good, inherently virtuous. People are not born with perfect virtue, and so need to cultivate it in order to come into alignment (zheng 正) with the Dao. By practicing virtue you are able to cultivate a different kind of Qi–a Qi that is closer to the Dao. For qigong/neigong enthusiasts who are looking for a way to advance their practice to a more “spiritual” level, I suggest looking into two things: upgrading your meditation practice and cultivating virtue.
