Interviews From the Daoist World: David Palmer

Anthropologist of Chinese Religion at the University of Hong Kong

Hello,

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with teachers, scholars and translators of Daoism. David Palmer is an anthropologist at the University of Hong Kong, whose books are brilliant and unique windows into aspects of modern Chinese religious practice. Some of his best known work includes a study of the rise and fall of qigong during the second half of the 20th century (Qigong Fever), as well as an investigation into the various faces of contemporary, globalised Daoism (Dream Trippers). Our interview covered details of David’s own personal engagement with Daoism, as well as many useful intellectual frameworks for understanding the tradition.

Enjoy!

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Professor David Palmer

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How did you come to specialise in the anthropological study of Chinese religion and quasi-religious movements?

Anthropology has been something I’ve been interested in since senior high school. At that time, I went on a three month Canadian youth exchange to rural Pakistan. This got me interested in pursuing Asian studies and anthropology appealed to me because it was about entering deeply into a completely different cultural world. When I went to university I majored in Anthropology and East Asian studies. I was also asking myself a lot of questions and explored Asian religions and spiritualities. I had already developed an affection for Daoism as a teenager through the Daode Jing and Yijing.

When I was at McGill, I studied with a professor called Ken Dean who is a specialist in Daoist ritual in Southeast China. This was the early 1990s and he had just come back from the field — at that time nobody had done any research on what was going on with Daoism in rural mainland China. He was the first one and showed us videos of rituals he had been studying. That really got my interest. He also talked a lot about the main scholars of Daoism, people like Kristofer Schipper, all of whom were in France.

For this reason, after I graduated from McGill I went to Paris. I had studied anthropology, but wanted to understand more about the internal dimension of things. I went to see a professor of ethno-psychiatry called Tobie Nathan. He was doing research on different ethnic groups and cultures, and how they conceive of the psyche and engage in psychotherapeutic practices. At that time I was planning to go to China and I went to visit him before I left. He said that if I became the student of a traditional master, when I came back to Paris I could be his student. This was an utterly non-mainstream branch of psychology and it was very controversial. But in fact, it has influenced one of the main movements now taking place in anthropology and even philosophy, spearheaded by Bruno Latour who has just passed away, and whose book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods was based on his collaboration with Nathan.

So, I went to China as an English teacher in 1993. My goal was just to get a sense of what was happening in China and get some ideas for PhD research. I was teaching at a party cadre’s training college, which was in the middle of the countryside not far from Chengdu. My students were petroleum engineers from all over China, but within days it turned out that one of them was a qigong master. This twenty or thirty-something year old petroleum geologist was running a qigong practice group every morning at 06:00 outside the school. I was invited to join and one of them also took me to a mass qigong healing session, which was held in the cinema of a work unit. It didn’t take long for me to see that there was something going on with qigong. It was incredibly popular. People were talking about it and working with qi. I thought it was a very interesting way to investigate the deeper realms of Chinese culture and Chinese spirituality, whilst also looking at how Chinese society and culture was transforming. What I was seeing there were people who had been cut off from their tradition for decades due to all the revolutions and who were rediscovering aspects of their Chinese tradition.

But they were doing it in a way that was not traditional at all. When I went to the mass healing session, a qigong master was on a cinema stage wearing a cheap polyester Western suit. He was mumbling, giving a kind of speech, which at the time I couldn’t really understand. Then, all these people in the audience started rolling on the floor claiming they had been receiving his qi. So, this isn’t something you would read about in ancient Daoist texts — think of , the aesthetics of this kind of mass event taking place in a cinema with socialist slogans pasted on the walls. These were all fascinating aspects of the transformation of tradition, but also by practising and getting into this qi you could enter another cosmology, another world. I ended up going back to Paris and doing my master’s under Nathan and doing my PhD under Schipper on this whole phenomenon, which became the foundation for my book Qigong Fever.

Qigong was a mass phenomenon that lasted throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. More than 200 million Chinese people were involved in it. It was one of the most important cultural and social movements during what is known as the post-Mao era. What was interesting is that at the beginning, nobody really associated it with religion. Qigong was marketed and promoted as a health practice and so it was perfectly legitimate in mainland China where religion is highly restricted. And yet, you could see that it was getting more and more religious. Some of the qigong groups were becoming openly religious. And then you had these grand-masters who were like gurus, with followings of millions and millions. You had mass healing sessions with ten or twenty thousand people in a stadium rolling on the ground, getting healed and things like that.

At the end it became something obviously very religious, when it climaxed with the Falun Gong movement. Then the religious became political [in 1999, Falun Gong organised a mass protest in Beijing against perceived government persecution. After that point, the movement was banned and qigong practice widely suppressed]. For scholars of China, even for the Chinese government, this was like a UFO. Nobody saw it coming. People thought that religion had disappeared in China. People thought maybe remnants existed in remote regions, but here we had something in the big cities that modern people were doing. This all led me to be one of the only scholars looking at modern transformations of Chinese religion, and it led me to investigate all other kinds of religious transformations in modern China as well.

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What anthropological frameworks and ideas do you think are most helpful for understanding Daoism in Chinese and Western society today? Connected with this, how would you define Daoism?

There are many different theories and concepts that can be applied. In one sense though, none of them fit very well. We’re dealing with things that are very hard to express and conceptualise within the intellectual frameworks that come out of the modern Western philosophical and intellectual tradition, which is where all sociological and anthropological theories ultimately come from. Anthropology, more than any other discipline, tries to go farthest in questioning those traditions and trying to engage with indigenous conceptualisations, philosophies and worldviews. Still, as soon as you’re using English, you’re already losing something. There are certain things that just can’t be expressed in our Western language or in a Western intellectual framework. But nonetheless, attempting to do so can still shed some valuable insights.

One of these is a comparative theory of ontologies proposed by Philippe Descola, the leading anthropologist in France today. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that questions what the world is basically made of. All different cultures and religions have their ideas about what the world is made of and how those elements are connected together. There are thousands of different ontologies, but Descola made a ‘typology of ontologies’ based on how they see the relationship between interiority and exteriority. Human experience is universally broken into the exterior world that we see outside ourselves, but also the inner subjective world that we experience when we close our eyes.

Descola categorised different cultures according to four different ways of understanding the relationship between interiority and exteriority. First, what he called ‘animism’ sees all beings in the world as having both interiority and exteriority. So, not only human beings, but trees, rivers and mountains all have interiority, they all have subjectivity and think more or less in the same way. Many indigenous cultures in the world today are animist. Second is ‘naturalism’, which sees all beings in the world has having exteriority. That exteriority is common to all in the sense that all beings follow common physical and chemical laws, but only humans have interiority, which is different depending on the individual. Differences exist depending on culture, and individuals have their unique subjectivities. This is the defining ontology of Western culture, which sees only humans as having interiority and the rest of the world as being purely material and external bodies.

Third, we have what Descola talks about as ‘analogical’ ontologies. The world is seen as being made of infinitely diverse and ever-changing beings, and there’s no strong dividing line between interiority and exteriority. The concern of an analogical ontology is to bring order to this fragmented, incredibly diverse world by finding correspondences or analogies between different things. Chinese cosmology is a perfect example of an analogical ontology. That why, for example, we have yin and yang, which corresponds to various things such as day and night. What we see in Chinese cosmology is constant analogical thinking. Whether it’s, for example, the five phases [wu xing, 五行] or the internal three treasures [nei sanbao, 內三寶], they will almost always be correlated to another conceptual scheme in another dimension of the cosmos. So this really helps to understand the basic logic of Chinese, and Daoist, cosmology.

However, analogical ontology is not unique to Chinese civilisation. In India, in many African cultures, in ancient Greece, even in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, they also had analogical ontologies. Understanding this can help us get out of binary West-China comparisons and see that there are some common logical structures common to many philosophical systems around the world which, although quite different on one level, actually share analogical structures. Think, for example, of the Renaissance phrase ‘so above, so below’, which is similar to the Chinese idea of the correlations between the microcosm and macrocosm. The idea that there’s always a correspondence between the material and the spiritual world is an example of analogical ontology. It’s an interesting conceptual scheme for looking at the basic logic underling some of these different cosmologies and worldviews.

The fourth ontology, by the way, is ‘totemism’, which Descola speaks about in reference to Australian Aboriginal and North American Pacific Northwest indigenous societies. That’s outside of my own area of study, so I won’t mention it here!

A collection of essays that you edited called Daoism in the Twentieth Century: Between Eternity and Modernity explores the way in which Daoism changed throughout the 20th century. Could you broadly explain what these changes were?

We can say in a sociological sense that modern Daoism started around the beginning of the 20th century, and a lot of profound transformations really impacted how Daoism evolved from then onwards. Prior to the impact of the West and the beginning of modernity in China, we had a civilisation that was organised according to analogical principles and cosmology, and which revolved around the three major teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. Each one of these three teachings permeated deeply into many different corners and dimensions of Chinese society and culture. Daoism was one of the main providers of ritual services for local populations everywhere in China and, in a traditional society, communal rituals are one of the most important forms of social glue, and a way in which a community integrates itself into a broader cosmology. For these reasons, ritual had been a fundamental dimension of Daoism and of traditional Chinese society. With the onset of modernity, the Chinese intellectual class came to the conclusion that its traditional worldview was wrong because it had led to the weakness of China and its humiliation, even potential destruction, in the face of Western powers. So, there was a desire to take on a modern Western ontology and completely transform Chinese society. In that context, what happened to Daoism? In a sense, it was torn apart between different ways of classifying and organising the world. Increasingly, traditional cosmologies were no longer the organising principles of society, nor were their rituals considered important. To the contrary, they were seen as superstition and with no value whatsoever. So, this was one area in which Daoism began to lose its status as a fundamental organising force in Chinese society.

That’s at the level of ritual, but then you have another dimension of Daoism, which is its body cultivation and meditational side. Prior to the modern era, that aspect of Daoism was deeply integrated into the ritual side of Daoism. If we could say there was a difference between ritual and meditation, it was quite subtle. Moving to modernity, the ritual dimension of Daoism began to lose its status and legitimacy, but you find that the body-centred side of Daoism had an ambiguous status. Modernity is about disciplining individual bodies so that you can train them to be fit, healthy, productive and countable by the modern state. These are individualised bodies, no longer like the body in traditional China where they say you owe your hair to your parents.

The notion in modernity that your body is individualised and one’s own actually gives space for Daoist cultivation, which includes many practices that are about working on your own interiority, meditating and doing physical exercises. This all gives a place for Daoist practice and, because these practices are physical in a sense, it makes it possible to claim they are not religious, not superstition. It could even be said that we are doing something very scientific. Even then though, it’s all very contested and ambiguous because the ontology behind Daoist body cultivation is a Daoist cosmology. It’s analogical as I was talking about, not naturalist. But still, this modern configuration gave space for the possibility of individual Daoist cultivation.

So that’s what we start seeing in the early 20th century. At this point the story becomes how do ritual traditions survive and how do they adapt to the new configuration? How do they adapt to political regimes that restrict their legal space to exist? And then we have groups that are trying to promote, or find new ways to promote, Daoist meditation traditions. They’re seeking to standardise them and move from secret master-disciple teaching to mass, large-scale teaching with printed pamphlets or online material. They’re creating big organisations with multi-level marketing methods, with a master and lower-level kinds of helpers and instructors that can then disseminate techniques on a large scale. New religious movements are using these different Daoist or Daoist-inspired methods. And then, of course, there’s the globalisation of all these methods. All of these things are part of the story of the modernisation of Daoism.

You spoke about the difference between forms of Daoism that focus on ritual and those that focus on meditation and the cultivation of the body. Which one developed first and has there always been a divide between the two?

There is this tension that exists throughout the history of Daoism. We can see it in the Zhuangzi, to a certain extent in the Laozi and in the Neiye. It’s in the ideal of the eremitic cultivator who wants to withdraw from the world and from society and who is not interested in ritualistic practices. So there is this tension, but there’s also a connection that is difficult to understand for the modern mind. In an analogical ontology, both meditational and ritual practices are about bringing the dispersed and chaotic elements and forces of the cosmos into an integrated structure. You do it within your own body and you do it externally and socially through ritual. Meditation and ritual are inner and outer dimensions of the same process. The secluded cultivator at some point, through their cultivation, develops what we might call magical powers which are used to serve communities through healing practices, divination services, etc. You can end up becoming a ritual master, whose power is the result of cultivation that leads an individual to be able to situate themselves within and manipulate invisible forces and spirits. This is a world full of spiritual forces both helpful and harmful, which an accomplished practitioner is able to sense and utilise to their benefit. So things like internal alchemical meditation can be done in order to purify one’s own body to make it possible to draw upon different kinds of powers through ritual. This kind of relationship between individual meditative practice and ritual practice is, I think, difficult for most modern minds to see.

Historically, didn’t meditative practice evolve earlier than ritual practice? For example if we look at Warring States Daoist texts such as the Laozi and Zhuangzi they don’t feature ritual practice.

I think it's hard to make the assertion that meditative practice precedes the emergence of ritual. In fact, it's probably the other way around. Generally, if we look at the anthropology of religion we see they tend to begin with forms of shamanism and this is certainly the case in the history of Chinese religion. Shamanism is always a ritual practice. It’s exactly what I was describing earlier, somebody who deals with these spiritual forces and who can go out into the spirit world and deal with the spiritual entities out there. Shamanistic training usually involves what we now distinguish and the mind and body, and the ability to do ritual practice. So, in the case of Chinese religion what we’re looking at is the refinement of these shamanistic practices into advanced forms of meditation, that then become forms of personal spiritual cultivation that are not necessarily ritualistic. I should say though, this is all very speculative. I mention it just so show that the common narrative that pure Daoism is purely meditative and doesn’t have anything to do with ritual but later became ritualistic, probably doesn’t stand. I would say it’s more likely the other way around.

In your book Qigong Fever you write in depth about the rise and fall of qigong in the 1980s and 90s. Could you explain where qigong originally came from and from what sources it drew most heavily?

So basically one could say that qigong came from Daoism. In a sense it's a modern form of beginning-level Daoist body cultivation. That is one way of answering your question. And that would be correct in many ways, but not entirely. In another way, qigong is an entirely modern creation that arose as a result of the transformations of modernity that I was speaking about earlier. Even before the Communist Party had taken over China, in some liberated zones during the Chinese Civil War the Communists were investigating how local forms of what we would now call Chinese medicine could heal people. The idea was to extract the valuable healing methods, but remove their feudal superstition.

There was one individual in what is now Hebei province, Liu Guizhen, who was tasked with investigating some of these healing methods in his own home village. He was a cadre of the Communist Party and he learned from a master some techniques of standing meditation and a few others things. They were very valuable and so he reported them to his superiors and the health department. And so then they started to practise this. They systematically researched these methods, standardised them into simplified sequences of gestures and movements, and removed all the Daoist or Buddhist cosmology or anything “superstitious” that the masters had been doing, such as fortune telling or ritual. They cut out these parts, but kept the body practices that could be perfectly legitimate within the materialist scientific worldview.

That’s the immediate origin of qigong. It’s the result of a secularising attempt to modernise these body cultivation traditions. But you can never fully wipe out the original ontology that underlies them. When you practice you feel qi, so well, what is qi? You can never get a real consensus as to what exactly this is within the naturalist ontology of the modern worldview. This leads to endless debates. Anyway, although many of these practices derive from Buddhist lineages, I think that if you really trace the history they’re more linked with Daoism, or what we would call the very early traditions of body cultivation in China, which are linked up with the Chinese cosmology of qi and so on.

How do you tend to make sense of what qi is? For example, some people say it is a subtle energetic substance, whilst others say it is used to discuss general processes of transformation.

I have two answers to this question. First, how I decided to handle this question early on when I was doing my anthropological research on qi was that qi is just a word. It’s nothing more than a word, and it’s a word that helps us to link up certain experiences and get a handle on them, because qi is then part of a whole set of other ideas and concepts. These ideas and concepts are usually linked together within the structure of Chinese cosmology. So what you’re doing with qi is just giving a name to various things that are happening or various things you start to perceive, and then you learn how to handle those perceptions within the cosmology that the word qi is situated in. So, from one perspective qi is really nothing but a name. But if we lack a name, then it’s harder to train the perception to become aware of certain things. Lacking the name, you lack the perception and a way of handling it or seeing where it fits into.

My second answer to qi is in the context of a project that I have been working on with a colleague, Mike Brownnutt, who is an experimental quantum physicist. We’ve been working on how to understand the relationships between science and religion when we’re not looking at Western traditions. In the Western philosophical tradition, we have something called ontological realism, which is the idea that there are things completely independent of the mind. If something exists, it exists regardless of whether I’m thinking about it, whether I know about it, or whether I’m even present. These things exist independently of me and what I’m thinking — that’s the view of ontological realism. The opposite of that is ontological anti-realism, which says that there is nothing outside of my mind. Nothing is mind-independent. Some forms of Buddhism are radically anti-realist in that sense. Now, qi is somewhere in-between these two positions. If you take an ontologically realist approach, you’re going to get into trouble with qi. That’s what people are trying to do with scientific laboratory experiments on qi. They can’t find anything, because qi does not exist independently of the human perception of it. But it’s not entirely within the human mind, either! Qi is an entirely relational thing.

If you’re a practitioner engaging with qi, you will perceive something, which comes from various parts of your body or the environment. So the perception doesn’t originate from within your mind, but your perception of it actually modifies your mind and your experience of it. You can work on that perception to transform the experience, to transform the energy with your mind. And so, cultivating qi is a dance between your mind and something that is beyond your mind. And I think that’s how I understand qi. It’s something relational, something that is halfway between realism and anti-realism.

You mentioned that you yourself are a practitioner, please could you describe what you practice, and how your practice and academic study have influenced and interacted with one another?

Through my research when I was in China, I engaged in qigong practice and then later I studied with Daoist monks. Over time, my whole sense of embodiment was completely transformed, my consciousness of my body, my relationship to my body, my awareness and my engaging with what we would call qi. I’ve practised on and off, and there have been times when it’s been more off, but in the past decade it’s definitely been more on. I’ve been really trying to live with and engage with the energetic experiences of my body and the world.

This is also a part of, or in parallel with, my religious practice. I’m a Baháʼí, which is a universalist, monotheistic religion. Daoism and Baháʼí monotheism are different and yet come together for me in beautiful ways. At some level I am a qigong practitioner, or a practitioner of Daoist body cultivation, but at another level for me it’s simply just the way I experience the world and the way I experience my body. For me, what’s beautiful about it is discovering the body as being like Ali Baba’s cave. It’s so full of treasures that you can just play in, and it’s so exquisitely blissful! It’s such a pleasure to discover on an almost daily basis how we actually have access to this fountain of bliss within our own body. That goes on to create great vibes, a sense of gratitude, a sense of acceptance, and something that can’t be described.

You asked how I take that into academic work. I think it’s very important for academics who are so deeply immersed at the mental, intellectual level. When we’re overly focused at the intellectual level, we can become completely disconnected from our body and from the world our body is embedded in. We can become completely disembodied. Not only is that not healthy, it’s also a pity to lose out on the experience of the world. Anyway, I’m still exploring how to bring these insights into academic work. When I start teaching social theory next semester, I’m going to try bring some of these insights into dialogue with all the major schools of sociological and anthropological theory. It’s an interesting time to do it, because the body has become a major theme of theorising and reflection in the past four or five decades. For example, Michel Foucault, who is one of the icons of modern social theory, really brought the body into the centre of sociological discourse. However, most of this has been about the social construction of the body, , and what he and other theorists have brought us is a very dark and negative understanding of the body being subject to external power — a kind of invisible power running through institutions that are trying to discipline our bodies and things like that. Actually, I just published an essay on how Foucault, toward the end of his life, became very interested in spirituality, and studied the spiritual disciplines of the Greeks. But in spite of this, in Foucault and other social theorists, there’s no sense of what our body itself actually is — that we have an endless reservoir of power within us. This is the power of life. It’s a different kind of power that gives us resilience to survive and flourish in the shadow of external powers.

Lastly, please could you tell readers about any upcoming publications or events that they may be interested in.

There are a few major projects I’m working on at the moment. One of them is exploring the connection between inner and ritual practice in Daoism. It’s a study of the Daoism of the Lanten Yao ethnic minority, who live in Northern Laos, Vietnam and Yunnan in China. Amongst this ethnic group the whole society is based on Daoist ritual in a way that is far more intense than Han Chinese even. It’s always fascinated scholars of Daoism because the Yao Daoism in some ways is very similar to the original Celestial Masters Daoist tradition from the Han Dynasty, in which all young men become ordained as Daoist masters. And it’s really fascinating because they speak Yao and Lao, they don’t even speak Chinese, but they actually have to learn how to copy Chinese texts and then how to understand them. So they use Chinese as an exclusively ritual language, just as European priests would use Latin in the Middle Ages. And they have an incredibly complex ritual system, which is largely Daoist, but there’s also an incredibly rich inner visualisation practice as well. It’s like a movie projecting in the mind of the master while they’re conducting the ritual. So this really allows us to explore the connections between inner meditative visualising practices and the ritual practices. I’m working with the anthropologist Joseba Estevez who has been living amongst the Yao for ten years doing field work, collecting data and learning their rituals. We’re also working with some postgraduate students and young scholars who are studying their manuscripts. So we have a team and it’s been a lot of fun! We’re currently developing a website for this ongoing project, you can check it here.

Another major project I’m working on is about science and religion, called Re-Assembling Reality: A New Frame for Science, Religion, and Society. It’s basically trying to reframe the science and religion debate away from purely abstract propositions and doctrinal statements, and around how people actually do things rather than how they talk about them. It’s also trying to bring it out of a purely Western frame, which is primarily about Christian theologians talking to biologists and physicists. What happens if you bring Daoists, Buddhists and Hindus into the picture, or animists? What happens when you bring in anthropologists and sociologists? This leads to completely different ways of framing the topic. This leads to completely different ways of framing the topic. I have written a series of essays on this topic with Mike Brownnutt, the physicist whom I mentioned earlier. We’re now turning the essays into a book manuscript. A lot of it is inspired by my research on Daoism, but many other things as well. You can read the essays here.

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道炁長存,

Oscar