Qigong,
The Secret of Youth:
Da Mo's Muscle/Tendon
Changing and Marrow/
Brain Washing Classics

I came across this book about the Yi Jin Jing and Shii Soei Ching in a strange way. If you've read much of my blog you may know that some unusual things have happened to me from time to time. This was one of them, although actually when it happened it didn't seem all that strange. I had become accustomed to strange things.

Literally what happened was that something woke me up in the middle of the night about twenty years ago -- just a feeling that something odd was going on, that creepy feeling you get that something or someone is in the room, and almost always that's just silly. This time, that feeling woke me up, and I opened my eyes and looked around to see if anything was happening for real, and there actually was. To my right, beside the bed, a fellow was standing and staring at me with an impish grin. Not that he appeared to be real or solid -- in fact he wasn't, and seemed to be composed entirely of green light. If you could produce a green laser hologram image of a person, I suppose it would look like that. All the details were there and he was fully life-sized -- an Asian looking fellow of middle age, slightly balding and wearing an odd headband and what looked like a martial uniform of some sort. After I shook my head a couple of times and forced myself completely awake, he was still there. I thought, well, I ought to be polite at least, so I said out loud, "Oh! Hello, there!" He didn't respond, except that maybe he grinned a little wider. We looked at each other for a little while and after fifteen or twenty seconds he faded out, kind of like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, and I went back to sleep no more confused than usual.

In the traditions I follow, these things aren't random events or meaningless hallucinations. It may take awhile, but if you keep looking you do find the meaning behind the event, and a few months later when I was looking through the martial arts and chi kung training section at Barnes & Nobles and trying to find something pertinent to the questions I had, I picked up a book. While flipping through it I found a picture of the same fellow I'd met that night. He was Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming, the author of many books on Shaolin and Tai Chi Chuan, and a follower of Jou Tsung-Hwa, someone I already knew from other strange things. Dr. Yang had written many books but this one was the first that I'd come across, and that made it special.

If you're interested in the Asian Internal Martial Arts, then you know that there are many layers to practices like Shaolin kung fu and Tai Chi Chuan. Some people practice them purely from a physical approach. Others choose something more esoteric, the system which is based upon energy instead of physical strength. Not everyone believes the energy practice is real -- some very masterful fighters completely disregard it. The people who are interested in the internal side of the practice tend to not be involved in fighting, and you could argue the reason for that in all sorts of ways. My argument is that the internal side is about something else, something which used to be called enlightenment. Compared to that, fighting isn't very interesting or even very difficult. Enlightenment is the hard part, and it certainly isn't what most people think it is.

Da Mo's system of enlightenment training is still one of the best and the most direct. Finding out what it is, well, that's tough. It's been kept secret for a very long time. We live in a fortunate period of history, when those secrets are available to anyone who has the curiosity to seek them out. They're in this book, and anybody with the ability to read and think could put them into practice and judge the results for themselves. Very few people will, because there's a price. The book's cheap, but the discipline involved is beyond the reach of most human beings.

This isn't a book everyone should read. Probably out of a population of six billion people, about six hundred are qualified to understand and practice what's written here. Those six hundred people will be seriously looking for this book, if they haven't found it already. Everyone else would be bored, confused, and probably very shocked at what the monks were actually doing behind those monastery walls.