"the hermitage"
此道至重，百世一出，藏之石室，合之，皆斋戒百日，不得与俗人相往来，于名山之侧，东流水上，别立精室。
This Dao is very important, appearing once every hundred generations. Hide it in a stone chamber. To follow its teachings, perform preparatory fasting and purifications for 100 days and do not associate with normal people. On the side of a famous mountain, above an east-flowing stream, establish an essence chamber. — Gehong 葛洪
Brandi journaling during her recent retreat with Zhenwu 真武 looking over her shoulder
This year I (Simon) have gotten a couple cool positions. First, I’m now a Research Fellow at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, for which I’ve been travelling to Esalen pretty often. More recently I’ve also become a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Center for Theory and Research, for which I’ll be spending all of November in Cambridge. So my scholarly side has gotten some traction lately that’s been taking me away from the kung fu school, leaving Brandi back in Penticton to hold down the fort and teach all the classes.
It felt a little one-sided, that I was getting to fly around and go to beautiful places and hang out with all these brilliant people, so Brandi was looking around for some kind of retreat she could go on. She searched around for months but didn’t really find anything that was both appealing and feasible. That’s when I proposed that we build her a little hermitage on our land so she could spend a week in meditation just like we used to do in China a few times a year. Shifu called these little retreats biguan 闭关, a word for a traditional Daoist meditation retreat that’s composed of two words for closing. You close your sensory doors, close the door to your meditation hut, fast, and sit for anywhere from 3 days to 3 months. Brandi loved the idea. So after all our summer kung fu stuff had wound down, we set to work building a little hut along the lines of the 精室, “essence room” described by the alchemist and wilderness writer Gehong 葛洪 (283-343 CE).
Gehong specifies an east-flowing stream, and while the creek on our land (Chute Creek) flows west, later alchemical texts say west-flowing will do just fine as well. So we took a few hikes around the land and found a beautiful spot, a relatively flat space on a precipice overlooking the creek, surrounded by fir and maple with a handful of big granite boulders behind it. We shot together an 8’X8’ grid of 2x4’s (incidentally making a cool jiugong 九宫), levelled it out using big rocks we scrounged up, and set to work.
After laying down the floor we framed it out and added the rafters. The following weekend we lugged down a bunch of plywood and shot on the walls and roof, adding a couple windows on the east and west sides. Yep, starting to look like a proper essence chamber!
After adding a metal roof and the front door we were ready to rock. As soon as the door was on its hinges, Brandi was off to begin her meditation retreat. She took a number of books with her, most notably the Zhuangzi, the Yijing, David Hinton’s book China Root, and a number of translations I’ve done over the past 15 years: the Daoist morning prayers 玄门日诵早晚功课经, and three alchemical texts from our lineage — one by our grandmaster Zhong Yunlong 钟云龙, another by his teacher Kuang Changxiu 匡常修, and another fantastic text on female alchemy 女丹 by the Dragon Gate Daoist Zhang Suchen 张苏辰 (b. 1903).
When Shifu was introducing us to the culture of the Daoist meditation retreat he taught us a four-character phrase that captures everything you need for a successful retreat. The four characters are:
法 fǎ — methods
财 cái — money
侣 lǚ — friend
地 dì — place
First, of course, you need to know the right methods for your retreat. The tranquil sitting, the alchemical methods, or the protocols for dealing with a specific deity, depending on the focus of your retreat. Second you need some money. This one is pretty simple. You need to be able to afford to leave your life for whatever period of time you’ll spend in the retreat — so you’ll need to pay, perhaps, for your lodging or your food and herbs, etc. Third you need a friend, someone to wait on you while you’re in retreat, to bring you food or medicine if need be. And last you need a place, somewhere to actually carry this all out.
This time around I was Brandi’s 侣 lǚ-friend. I prepared a medicinal rice congee (稀饭) for her every day, similar to what we’d make at shifu’s school for these things, and I’d fry her up some greens — chard, kale, or cabbage — and take her meal down to her every afternoon. We’d chat about how it was going, maybe walk down to the creek. She did the chanting every morning, then just meditated on and off all day, interspersed with walks through the forest, and short bouts of physical practice. She stayed down there for a full week and found the whole thing — even the fasting — really easy and pleasant. In hindsight, I think we both expected it to be harder because we would always carry out these retreats in the context of our training in China, where we were already grumpy, exhausted, and half-starved to begin with. So now, well-fed and well-rested as we are, these fasting retreats can be so much more pleasant.
In Daoist writings the world of daily entanglements is often called hóngchén 红尘 — “red dust.” It’s the dust of society, of responsibilities and distractions, the subtle particles that get in your eyes and cling to the heart-mind 心 until its natural clarity 清 grows clouded 浊. All of the practices we do, from horse stance to meditation, can be thought of as different forms of dusting. And while a daily practice of taiji or qigong can good for keeping too much dust from settling, retreats like this function more like a deep clean.
There are many beautiful images of the heart-mind in Daoist texts. Sometimes it is likened to a mirror: clear, reflective, ultimately unaffected by what passes before it. Or sometimes it is like a crystal: transparent, letting light shine through without obstruction. Brandi’s week in the hermitage was a chance to polish the crystal, clean as glass, and to rediscover the quiet radiance that’s always there, but sometimes occluded beneath the layers of red dust.
And of course, the red dust will gather again — it always does (as long as you’re a human!). The art is not in avoiding it, but in knowing and putting into practice the methods 法 of cleaning, again and again, so that the heart can remain spacious and bright no matter what the world stirs up.