Is the Sun/Moon not connected to the Mysterious Female as the Gate of the Dao?

I have a lot of admiration for Red Pine--I wouldn't bust his balls just to bust his balls.

This was almost a decade ago, so my memory's a tad hazy, but it was a simple exchange, and I'm pretty sure I remember it reasonably clearly. At the time Red Pine was delivering a talk that mostly centered on Buddhism, with "emptiness" (空, in Buddhist contexts) occupying a central enough part of the lecture that I felt compelled to ask afterwards what he thought the important similarities/differences between Daoist and Buddhist discussions of emptiness (空 as well a 虛, in Daoism) are. He replied succinctly, "Daoists don't talk about emptiness, because they're only interested in qi," or something to that effect, and effectively closed the book on my question. Perhaps he was just having an off day or was jetlagged or whatever, but the fact is that one cannot read more than a few pages of inner alchemy texts without seeing that the Daoists are quite interested in emptiness, and thus I came to the conclusion that Bill Porter does not read these types of books. Early on he spent a lot of his time in Taiwan in a Buddhist monastery (in the Dharma Drum organization under Master Shengyen/聖嚴法師, if I'm not mistaken), and also spent time in the Land of 10,000 Buddhas in California, which is affiliated with Master Hsuanhua/宣化上人... while those temples are probably great places to learn about Buddhism, they are simply not hotbeds of Daoist alchemy. I know people in Taiwan quite steeped in the Dharma Drum organization, and they are taught very little about Daoism in general, and effectively nothing about alchemy.


If he says that--please dig up the exact quote, if you have the book on hand--that's still simply a very controversial statement. Oracle bone inscriptions of moon (月) and head (首) look nothing alike. The 《説文解字》 does not connect the two characters, nor did the master etymologist Duan Yucai.

As for all the ancient Sumeria/Sanskrit etymology/agriculturalism/Bushmen culture/etc., it's all very interesting in its own right and I am open to the possibility that there are shared motifs, wisdom, practices, etc. in all these ancient cultures, but I think one risks connecting dots that aren't really connected if one runs too wild with these things. From the standpoint of history, I think it's very hard to say that this or that calendrical tradition or representative god/dess found in one corner of the ancient world (and interpreted by some modern person millennia years later) tells us anything conclusive about anything else at some other corner of the ancient world.

And then there's another problem. If there was no moon, would there be no Dao? If there was no sun, would there be no Dao? What about two moons, two suns?

While we can certainly see yin and yang represented in the two big balls in the sky that we see every day, and while they certainly play a part in lots of Daoist imagery and even specific practices, one finds far more nuanced teachings. Song Longyuan, a Qing Dynasty-era Longmen Daoist-cum-imperial archivist who wrote a brilliant and exhaustive commentary on the DDJ for Emperor Kangxi (who was no lightweight in terms of his scholarship, nor credulous when it came to Daoism--he is recorded as once literally having thrown a book on secret methods for reaching physical immortality back in the face of the person who offered to him) for instance, when talking about the 玄 [Mysterious] and 牝 [Female], refers to them as wuji and taiji; it is those two vast, intangible-yet-everpresent, distinct-yet-inseparable, not-one-not-two principles that are constantly mating, giving us the seen and the unseen... not the two balls in the sky. 

Thank you very much for your excellent response! And so the book I "quote" from on Red Pine and the "character" of head and the Dao as face of the Moon is his commentary on the Tao Te Ching, translation. It is stashed in my teepee - that I just came back from - and I never did get a chance to look at it again. I didn't want to waste my headlamp battery, and I figured any reading of phonetic language would have just put me more back into a left brain dominance mode anyway. But it seems you know your Chinese well enough - or classical Chinese oracle bones, etc. - and what you say about Red Pine's response - and your take on it - all makes sense to me. But then we can also consider how the Daoists in the internal alchemy texts incorporated Buddhism - and so the terminology possible has several meanings - based on a Daoist or Buddhist "slant" on the reading.  But my foray into this type of research is mainly only after I did the meditation training from Chunyi Lin who does have a Moon and Sun meditation C.D. set for his Level 3 class to open the third eye. And so my experience, as Chunyi says, the meditation is ten times stronger 3 days before and after the full moon - and my experience has been precisely this - that I could realize it was the Full Moon when the pineal gland magnetic bliss got that much stronger. Anyway ...

And then there's another problem. If there was no moon, would there be no Dao? If there was no sun, would there be no Dao? What about two moons, two suns?

Now this theoretical - well "opportunity cost" as an Economist would call it - the issue I have with this is that the scientific fact that we only see one "face" or one "head" of the Moon is due to the "harmonic resonance" of the moon's orbit with the sun and the Earth - and this is also the scientific reason that the moon can cause eclipses of the sun - despite their huge different in size and distance from Earth. And so in terms of the Dao - we have to ask, is this a "coincidence"? Again in terms of Western science this is part of the argument called the Strong Anthropic Principle stating in cosmology that the whole Universe is based on extremely fine tuning of constants, in order for humans to exist. Of course most scientists state, what to me also seems obvious, that the past, in retrospect, is 20-20 hindsight, meaning it only looks like "fine tuning" since we already exist in order to ask the question of why we exist in the first place. But in the context of what is human consciousness a la the possibility of consciousness of the Universe - and what is the role of humans in terms of life on Earth, etc. - science puts this in terms of entropy - and I won't get sidetracked into a science discussion. In other words it is quite a "left brain" question to start supposing - "what if" Earth had two moons, etc. because the Moon governs ecology of LIfe on Earth - and yet science - western science has destroyed already 80% of life on Earth - in the past couple thousand of years. In other words Western science - by assuming that life on Earth is not sacred inherently, and therefore could theoretically be switched around - (maybe we could power civilization using a black hole or something?) these types of experiments - like maybe nuclear bombs should be used for mining or we should mine the moon, and maybe create an artificial moon, etc. - the results of such theoretical questions have been turned into actual science projects that have destroyed the fragile ecology on Earth. In other words Daoism appears to assume that ecological life, controlled by the moon, is assumed and this would appear to be based on the evolutionary fact that human females, when living in Nature, as a group, are the only primates that have their "estrus cycle" synchronized precisely with the moon and this cycle is governed by the third eye as psychic energy - the pineal gland.

So in other words to project a Western reality as the assumed background - that the background of reality could be switched around willy-nilly - is to inherently already go against the formal process of Daoism itself. Or as VAndana Shiva states, life grows from within, Evolution happens from within first and grows from within, externally. But we as WEsterners take an external approach first. So I don't really see it as a problem - the Sun and Moon meditation is to open the third eye and as per alchemy  - when the Earth is created - this means the Sun manifests within the Moon and for Heaven - the Moon manifest in the Sun - when the Mercury is replenished. And I would take this back to music theory.

In terms of doing a cross cultural examination - David Ewing Duncan's book Calendar is quite fascinating because the issue is how to subtract the lunar calendar from the Solar calendar and try to "line" the two up. And so to do the mathematics using a language based on ideograms or pictograms (sorry I don't know all the fancy terminology) - well it's like trying to do math with Roman numerals but even worse. Just as Chinese are known today to be able to count faster since the english language uses more terms for numbers, etc. And so David Ewing Duncan argues that the Chinese then incorporated the phonetic "rod-based' number system of 10s - into Chinese culture - maybe this is when the Chariots "invaded" China as well with their "hub" wheel metaphors?
But the point being - that from the cosmology as music harmonics - for the Daoist harmonics - the lunar calendar is lined up with the solar - I think it is every 19 years based on 81 lunar months. I would have to quick check the math again. The point is that the math, of course, does not line up precisely - and that is not a problem in Daoist harmonics because the Lunar month is the "foundation" as the first number or number 1 - in the music harmonics.
And so similarly in Pythagorean philosophy - "one" is Not a number - why? Because the full moon is actually the resonance of the Solar energy - and so the female number as lunar has the sun within it - and the source of the number 1 as spirit-consciousness is the Formless Awareness as Yuan Qi.
So to say, for Red Pine, to say that Qi is not emptiness - I disagree with this. Yuan Qi is the Emptiness as a spacetime transformation as the hidden momentum of light ( to put it in science terms) - or as the "doing in non-movement" of Yuan Shen to put it in alchemy terms.
So quantum physics has shown that the source of the Sun is quantum entanglement - this was coined as "negentropy" by Schroedinger in his classic 1930s book, "What is Life?" - again I won't go into a Western science side-talk - but I'm just point out that when you make the connection about the Moon and Sun, as hypotheticals, and not necessarily the Dao, etc. - that I don't think they are mutually exclusive - there are connecting levels to this or "gates" or harmonic nodes. Gurdjieff's philosophy gets into this and so does Sri Aurobindo - although I disagree with Aurobindo more so, as Ramana Maharshi also disagreed with Aurobindo. haha.