232. What is the nature of my personal Tao?
These days, when I wake up in the morning I find myself pondering a lot on the nature of my personal Tao and where it is leading me. Because when a person decides to study the Tao, there happens to be a lot of stuff available. But most of it feels like wading in a shallow pool when there is a whole ocean just over the sea wall waiting to be explored. It is vast and deep and mysterious. And like all men of the sea, I can feel it calling me to her. And so each day, with each baguazhang set done, I move a little closer. But what is one’s personal Tao, I ask? We can all follow systems, methods, beliefs and cultures. But these things are a group thing. Even within Taoism, there are at least three general paths available to somebody doing martial arts. The first is Taoism the philosophy, which is what most people pursue when they do not want to be in conflict with their currently held beliefs. The second is Taoism the religion. This is the path that leads to Wudang and Emei, and Chinese cultural beliefs. And the third path is a mush-mash of the first two paths plus some extra weird stuff thrown in. Most martial artists practicing a Chinese martial art will usually resonate with the third way. Now... ...there is also a fourth path. And that is the Taoism that comes via China’s neighbours: Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam and Thailand. These versions are like snapshots of what the Tao was way back when in time. And even though they may look different, be called something else and feel foreign, it is still the Tao. But what is the nature of our personal Tao? If I based it on the dreams I have been having at night, then there is a sense that my personal Tao is leading me back to the beginning. To the time before I knew about any of this. Before baguazhang. Before weiqi. And before the I-Ching. Back to the time when I was about eight years old and I used to dream a lot about visiting a place with narrow alleyways and cramped up living conditions filled with Chinese. In these dreams I would walk down an alleyway, turn and go through a door decorated with red banners on either side of it. To which I would meet a beautiful Chinese maiden with long black hair flowing straight down to her waist. She would take me down a flight of stairs into a basement area that looked like a whisky lounge. And sitting around on stools and chairs would be half a dozen extremely gorgeous Chinese women, all in their early twenties and with the same long hair style. The dream would end with one of them leading me into another more private room. I would wake up and keep a secret journal of it as best as I could. But I couldn’t make of it at all because at that time, the only thing on television regarding China would either be on the news or ‘Journey to the West’ a.k.a. The Monkey King. New Zealand was about as far away from the rest of the world a person could get to without leaving western civilisation. To some degree I am willing to admit that David Bowie’s classic ‘Little China Girl’ had an influence on me, but China wasn’t exactly on my radar until I met Charlie from Hong Kong in form two, when I was twelve years old. He told me that my descriptions of the places in my dreams sounded a lot like The Walled City in Kowloon, Hong Kong. What any of this has to do with now, I do not know other than my personal Tao is leading me here like a giant bagua wheel.