On Babies, The Big Dipper, and Daoist War Magic

If you spend much time in rural China you will probably come across a mother holding her baby, repeatedly whistling a single tone, waiting for the baby to start peeing. When asked about it she will tell you, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world, that whistling makes babies pee. Naturally. “But how?,” you might ask. “Is it some kind of Pavlovian response, where you train the baby to associate peeing with the sound of whistling?” That seems perfectly reasonable. At least to me it was a satisfying answer. Case closed.

During the third year of the program we began learning traditional herbs from master Yuan, studying the different qualities of plants, whether they were hot or cold, yang or yin, and most importantly what organs they functioned on. By extension I took it upon myself to learn about how organs are traditionally understood in Daoism. In these studies I came across a variety of maps, cartographies of the inner qualities of the body, from the most simplistic model of the body as a manifestation of the five elements of water, wood, fire, earth, and metal, to the Yellow Emperor’s vision of the body as a network of energetic channels and reservoirs, or the Scripture of the Yellow Court 黃庭經 and its revelation of the body as a matrix of dozens of different spirits arrayed in internal organ palaces.

In this divine cartography of the body, the lungs are thought to be home to seven spirits known as the Po 魄. Here is a traditional picture of them from the Daoist canon. It’s OK if it makes you chuckle. I think they’re supposed to look a bit silly. As far as inner spirits go these guys are big time trouble makers.

These seven spirits are associated with different directions, colors, emotions, bodily functions, sounds, etc. It can get really, really complicated if you’re into that sort of thing (I am). In reading up on these different spirits and their associations I came across one that is associated with urination. Can you guess what his corresponding sound is? Whistling, of course! It goes without saying that the average momma just trying to make her baby pee in the year 2022 is not aware of this ancient mystical connection between the Po spirit Swallower of Evil 吞贼, urination, and whistling. And in this article that’s sort of my point. There are tons of daily, mundane activities people perform all over China that have deep, ancient, often abstract Daoist theoretical underpinnings. In the words of a famous sloppy Daoist, we are all knee-deep in ideology.

Toward the end of our five year program, I think it was the winter of 2013, our class had the fortune (I’m still not sure whether it was good or bad fortune) of being on the most popular television show on the planet, I Want to Be on Spring Festival! 我要上春晚! It is an America’s Got Talent-style variety show where different groups vie for the adulation of a panel of washed up celebrities. The group that went on before us was a troop of twenty or so elderly women performing a choreographed rendition of Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies. In other words, the competition was stiff. But Shifu had his eye on the prize. So he showed our class one of the crown jewels of our lineage, the Seven Star Battle Array 七星阵, what is effectively a nine-person kung fu form. In this form seven people are positioned in the pattern of the Big Dipper. Two in the front, then two behind them, then a trail of three more. Each star has a different weapon: horsetail whisk, Dadao, spear, staff, broadsword, etc. The action begins when I explode onto the stage in an aerial and start fighting the first of the seven stars with my straight sword. I fight my way halfway through before one of the stars kills me. Then my enormously talented kungfu brother Louis Tan 資琛, also with a straight sword, flips onto the stage and finishes the rest of the stars off, emerging victorious.

We learned this form in the crudest of circumstances. Performing on a reality TV show? I honestly don’t even know how shifu got us that gig. None of us wanted to be there. And we learned the form totally without context or content. It was just a kung fu performance, nothing more. (I actually did ask shifu what this thing was for and got the classic two-character Wudang non-answer, “defending the mountain” 护山. lol thanks shifu.) But again I started thinking about this thing. Seven stars arrayed like the Big Dipper then these two weaving between them and killing them all off? What’s really going on here?

Our lineage traces itself to the historical scallywag Zhang San Feng 张三丰. His life, if we can even be so bold as to posit such a thing, is an historical hall of mirrors. He is a famously problematic figure. So when dealing with the history of our lineage, we might be better off starting with Zhang’s first generation student, the historically solid Qiu Xuanqing 邱玄清 (1327-1393). Qiu’s life is mercifully well-documented in large part because he was highly adept at war and weather magics, subjects that were close to the hearts of the early emperors of the Ming dynasty, who attributed their rise to the deft battlefield deployment of Daoist weather magic.

Qiu became a Daoist renunciate at Wudang mountain in the mid-14th century but quickly worked his way up the temple hierarchy to become the head of Five Dragons Temple 五龙宫, the oldest temple on the mountain and the main altar of the warrior God Zhenwu 真武, patron saint of Wudang mountain. After an audience with the emperor he was installed as Head of State Sacrifices 太常卿 at White Cloud Temple 白云观 in Beijing, making him in a sense the top Daoist in all of China. The emperor was so pleased with Qiu’s accomplishments that he gifted him two wives. Unable to consummate the marriages due to his Daoist monastic vows, but also unable to reject the wives on account of their being gifts from the emperor, Qiu took a rather unexpected route and castrated himself. Until recently there was a statue of him at White Cloud Temple in Beijing that supposedly looked like an old lady, a common convention when depicting eunuchs. The above picture is a more traditional rendering.

Qiu served as Head of State Sacrifices 太常卿 in Beijing before returning to Wudang, to Five Dragons Temple, where he was buried in 1393 along the banks of the Black Tiger River 黑虎江, one of my favorite spots in all of Wudang. It lies along the old pilgrim trail that goes between Five Dragons Temple and Purple Cloud Palace and has this ancient decrepit Ming Dynasty bridge. It has serious abandoned Jedi temple vibes. That dank wabi-sabi.

In the San Feng lineage oral tradition Zhang San Feng is remembered as the creator of a practice known as the Thirteen Postures 十三式. It was his students in the first generation, principally Qiu Xuanqing, who created a more martial version of his practice known as the 108 postures 一百零八式. Assuming there is something to this oral tradition, what was it that Qiu might have created way back at the beginning of the Ming dynasty? Looking at his life, it is pretty clear he wasn’t teaching brawling. My hypothesis here is that just as whistling to make babies pee and our nine-person big dipper form contain hidden complexity and depth, this practice in 108 steps becomes a lot more interesting if we approach it with Daoist eyes, with dragon vision.

So please put on your dragon goggles now.

So basically by the end of the 1300’s China was super haunted. The black plague had decimated the population (estimates range from a fifth to a half of everyone in China was wiped out by it). And as we all in 2022 know only too well (or not well enough, depending on your disposition), political resentment follows hot on the tails of pandemic. In the 1350’s the Red Turban rebellion erupted, ejecting the Mongols from a century of foreign rule. The early emperors of the following Ming dynasty promulgated the most comprehensive legal code in Chinese history, the Great Ming Code 大明律, a significant dimension of which pertained to the rehabilitation and social reintegration of ghosts and wayward spirits through the use of Daoist ritual. It was something taken very seriously by the emperor who facilitated Qiu Xuanqing’s rise.

This is precisely the time period in which one of the greatest novels in Chinese literature was produced, Outlaws of the Marsh 水滸傳, also translated as Water Margin written by the author Shi Nai’an 施耐庵 (1296–1372). This book is centered around the valiant exploits of 108 outlaws who were actually rehabilitated demon kings 魔王. Originally destiny stars, they were banished to the underworld by the Cosmic Emperor Shang Di 上帝 for evil deeds rendered. After a requisite time in the underworld, repenting of their sins, they return to earth and band together in the service of justice. Much knight-errantry ensues.

As Head of State Sacrifices 太常卿 of White Cloud Temple, at the heart of the court that produced the Great Ming Code, the haunted but optimistic early Ming dynasty that generated Outlaws of the Marsh, I would venture to speculate Qiu Xuanqing’s 108 steps were a form of ritualistic spirit rehabilitation. In Chinese cosmology, the earth is thought of as a square divided into nine regions 九州 while heaven is a circle partitioned into the twelve animal zones 主星 of the zodiac. When we multiply the nine regions with the twelve zones we arrive at 108, symbolizing the traversal of every permutation of the relation between heaven and earth. In this reading the 108 steps becomes a form of daimonic therapy, reintegrating all the wayward spirits, every orphaned ghost and unpropitiated soul from every earthly pairing of every zone of the sky, into the new Ming order.

While the Great Ming Code deals extensively with the rehabilitation of wayward spirits and orphaned ghosts, it also treats the societal reintegration of those on the margins: those orphaned by the plague, war, and famine that characterized the 1300’s, those who had lost everything, who had lost everyone; the generally down-and-out. Having risen to power through populist uprising, the first Ming emperor understood the power of collective discontent. He and his heirs sought to mitigate it through ritual and social means, and this Wudang practice in 108 steps seems to have been part of that. When we ask whether the practice was religious, theatrical, or martial, we run into trouble because all of those categories collapse in on one another in a traditional Daoist context. Likewise if we ask if this practice was political, spiritual, or simply a way for the monks to maintain bodily health, we must answer it was all of the above, because in Daoism the body is the world, the world is the body, and ones own health is inseparable from the health of the people. And so here, with our dragon vision, we have transformed a mundane series of martial movements into an elixir: connecting the disconnected, reintegrating the marginalized, restoring harmony to a world out of balance.