Daoism and Chinese folk religion are intertwined in very ornate ways to the point it's hard to tease them apart. A case in point is the interaction with the calabash gourd and cinnabar.
The calabash gourd has many meanings in Chinese cultures. The oldest meanings are likely related to fertility and connubial bliss (because the many seeds within it suggested many children). Later it adopted the meaning also of fortune and wealth because of its similarity in sound to those terms. Finally it took on the meaning of health because doctors would transport their medicines inside of them.
And this is where the Daoist part enters the picture. Daoism, in its religious form, is obsessed with making "immortality pills" (recall that pills were frequently stored in the calabash), so calabashes became common symbols of Daoism.
The two things most commonly associated with these pills are quicksilver (mercury) and cinnabar (a mercury compound, but this wasn't known at the time; the colour of cinnabar was always a favoured colour in Chinese culture, up to today). Indeed one of the ways these pills were to be made was to put cinnabar in one part of a calabash and quicksilver in the other and have them "marry" (perpetuating the fertility symbolism).
Which leads us to the subjects of today's little photo-essay: a brass calabash-shaped charm with a surprising interior, and an actual calabash used as a charm ... with a surprising interior as well.
As usual the alt text has the explanations and Mastodon users will have to click through to the Pixelfed post to get all of them.
So why did I get these? I wanted to see if I can use them for those tiny dice I posted a while back¹. Unfortunately the hole in the real calabash was too small to fit all the dice, and the brass one was too tight a fit to be practical.
"In thought we distinguish alternatives, joy and sorrow, life and death, liking and dislike, and we mistake the principles which guide us to the preferred alternative for the Way itself. But the alternation of joy and sorrow, life and death, is itself the Way, and we run counter to it when we strive to perpetuate joy and life."
Made my recent journal entry about the story of Liezi into a medium post because why not. Still feels weird to share something that unpolished, but since unpolished jade and unhewn blocks are daoist metaphors after all it's probably fine.
The River God said, "But then what should I do? What should I not do? How shall I decide what to accept, what to reject, what to pursue, what to renounce?"
Ruo of the Northern Sea said, "Taking the point of view of the Course: what could be worthy, what could be worthless? The question points to their reciprocal overflowings, back and forth.
Not restricting your will to any of them, you limp the great stagger of the Course. What is greater, what is lesser? The question points to the bloomings of their witherings, the bounties put forth by their declines. Not unifying your conduct along the path of any of them, you go along uneven and varied with the Course."
"Can you really make the body like a withered tree and the mind like dead ashes? The man leaning on the armrest now is not the one who leaned on it before!"
China sees the goddess Mazu as key to influencing politics in Taiwan ~ Beijing hopes to use the faithful’s adoration of the goddess Mazu to manipulate elections in Taiwan.
Hu Tzu said, "I have already showed you all the outward forms, but I haven't yet showed you the substance—and do you really think you have mastered this Way (dao 道) of mine? There may be a flock of hens but, if there is no rooster, how can they lay fertile eggs? You take what you know of the Way (道) and wave it in the face of the world, expecting to be believed! This is the reason men can see right through you."
A floating temple to the Chinese sea goddess Tin Hau, also known as Mazu, has been moved to a permanent location and will undergo an extensive renovation.
3/3 So in all our travels we can never really know where we are going, in all our dwellings we can never really know what is maintaining us, in all our eating we can never really know what we are tasting. This is all the bright and vigorous energy of heaven and earth—how could it be obtained and possessed?"
Another striking similarity is between what I was writing about regarding the butterfly story in the Zhuangzi and this passage from "Beyond Nature and Culture" by anthropologist Philippe Descola:
1/ I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but whenever I read a new book I'm always thinking about ways it connects or relates to all the other books I've read.
Naturally, because I tend to reread a lot of the same things (like #Thoreau and #Zhuangzi) I tend to more easily find connections between new books and those more familiar ones.
When I first read #BraidingSweetgrass a few years ago I immediately felt many, many connections to both.
4/4 It took me a long time to finish it, and it is quite long, but I hope it captures my thought process, or the connection I see between these two texts and why it matters.
If you're looking for a 3000 word personal reflection on the #Zhuangzi and how it relates to my own struggle to make and keep close relationships while being a #caregiver to my disabled brother, then I have just the thing for you:
Two bronze-coated metal eight-sided #dice marked, one in red, one in blue, with the names of the eight #trigrams of #Daoism. Also present is a six-sided die marked in #Chinese characters in both red and blue. By pairing the dice in two colours all 64 #hexagrams of the #Yijing can be thrown in a modern form of consulting that ancient oracle. The six-sided die is used to select the "moving" line.
When I first learned about #daoism almost 20 years ago, there was one concept that had an outsized influence on me: wuwei, sometimes translated as nonaction or non-doing.
It took me that whole time to realize my understanding of it was all wrong. Not only was that translation incomplete at best, it actually strengthened a burgeoning anthropocentrism I didn't realize was there.
Yard work and #IndigenousKnowledge finally made me realize the error of my ways.
I'm late to the game because I don't know what I'm doing, so a brief #introduction:
I take care of my disabled brother full-time and stress about it the rest of the time. When I have the capacity I like to read and think about #Zhuangzi, #Thoreau, #animism, and #indigenousknowledge like the work of Tyson Yunkaporta and VF Cordova. I also drink too much tea (#gongfucha), am a former classical and folk musician, and wish I could sit under more trees
Hi! Sarissa here ✨✨ finally coming back home to this server so here's another #introduction post: I'm an independent researcher and uni staffer newly based in #Nottingham 🇬🇧. I'm #trans 🏳️⚧️ (she/they), I love #horror (watch Incantation!!) and my ideals are a confluence of #anarchism 🏴, #Buddhism ☸️, #Daoism ☯️ and #prefigurativism 🌅.