Time in Daoist Practice

Book excerpt: Daoists pay close attention to all different modes and dimensions of time. They carefully observe the planetary movements in nature and set up detailed guidelines to match their course and follow the Chinese calendar with its various man-made divisions, such as the twenty-four solar periods, twenty-eight lunar stations, and the sexagenary cycle. Beyond this, Daoists activate the trigrams and hexagrams of the Yijing to designate phases of growth and decline and to mark certain temporal units with specific significance. Moving beyond this, they also work with time in the human body, linking certain features to stages of life and creating temporal rhythms by their own physical actions. They revert the flow of entropy within the body, establishing mastery over time, and transfigure their very physical constitution to subtler levels, opening ways to transcend time altogether. This volume brings together senior and junior scholars as well as practitioners to explore these various topics under three main headings: planetary, calendar, and body time. They cover the entire history of Daoism, from its precursors in the Han to its monastic and popular activation in the 21st century, as well as a plethora of different methods-social predictions, personal horoscopes, physigonomy, healing modalities, qigong, self-cultivation, internal alchemy, and more. Opening new ways of looking at time and expressing uniquely Daoist features, the volume is path-breaking and highly relevant today. A must for anyone interested in time studies, religious practice, and Chinese culture.