Outside Context

In 2009 Cesca and I vis­ited the amaz­ing slopes of Wudang Moun­tain. The moun­tain is loc­ated roughly in north­west­ern part of Hubei Province of China.  This peak is part of the lar­ger Wudang Shan moun­tain range that runs through the area, but it is this par­tic­u­lar peak that is the most fam­ous. This is due to its very long and inter­est­ing his­tory. The moun­tain is littered with Daoist temples and mon­as­ter­ies, includ­ing the fam­ous Golden Hall, Nan­yan Temple and the Purple Cloud Temple. The his­tory of the area goes back over 2000 years, but it is the period of the Ming Dyn­asty (1388 — 1644 CE) that had the greatest impact.

Dur­ing this time, the Mon­gol led pre­curs­ors to the Ming had col­lapsed and China was about to enter its most fas­cin­at­ing his­tor­ical age. It was an age of intel­lec­tual flower­ing, tower­ing social and polit­ical achieve­ments and immense sci­entific pro­gress. Dur­ing all of this, Chinese Dao­ism was again form­ing into some­thing new. The almost sham­an­istic prac­tices of external alchemy were giv­ing ground to a new prac­tice of internal alchemy. Internal alchemy was the search for “immortality” through the devel­op­ment of magic powers inside one­self. This is a syn­cretic idea heav­ily influ­enced by both Con­fucian­ism and indeed the move­ments of Buddhism, which after all is all about internal real­isa­tions, form­ing ideas that are read­ily recog­nis­able for their influ­ence on the west.

I am talk­ing about internal kung fu.

One of the lead­ing thinkers of Dao­ism at the time was the legendary Chang San-Feng, who wandered up Mount Wudang and made it the base of his Daoist sect. Legend has it that, in one of the temples up the moun­tain, he formed his magical exer­cises into Tai Chi after watch­ing a snake and bird fight­ing. After the Yongle Emperor decreed Wudang to be “The Grand Moun­tain” its place in his­tory was assured. Fast foward in time and the mon­as­ter­ies and build­ings were made a UNESCO World Her­it­age Site in 1994. The palaces and temples in Wudang con­tain Taoist art and icons from as early as the 7th cen­tury. It rep­res­ents the highest stand­ards of Chinese art and archi­tec­ture over a period of nearly 1,000 years.

Of course, the true nature of Daoist his­tory is as slip­pery as the core texts. I will have more to say about the vera­city of this “his­tory” later.

So what is it like to visit? Walk­ing the 20,000 steps (!) up the moun­tain is one of the most spir­itual things I have ever done, but not per­haps in the way that you might ima­gine. We came to Wudang half way through our jour­ney in China and before our jour­ney into Japan. Since we were basic­ally on a spir­itual jour­ney around the world in gen­eral, and Buddhist jour­ney in par­tic­u­lar, the effect of Wudang took a long time to settle into my bones. How­ever, my muscles ached like hell the very next day! Also, this was still China in 2009 and Dao­ism is a very strange and illus­ive beast to get a grasp on. So what the hell happened? This is some­thing I will have to go into far more depth about at a later time, but essen­tially the con­trast between this strange and very for­eign way of life gave me the space to con­sider my own thrown into sharp relief. When you meet people and visit places that are so dif­fer­ent to your exper­i­ences and your life, then you have two choices. You scoff. Or you stop and think. Mount Wudang is one of the best places I have ever vis­ited for mak­ing time to stop and think. To, in fact, go bey­ond think­ing and be able to sub­lime the nature of your exist­ence. It is a fair thing to say that I walked down Wudang a dif­fer­ent per­son than when I walked up, but that I didn’t real­ise it until much later.

So, here is the (small) film about that day. I hope that I man­aged to, at least a little, cap­ture some of the feel­ing of the place and time.

Vimeo ver­sion:

Wudang Moun­tain, the Heart of China from Basho Mat­suo on Vimeo.

You Tube version:

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