Personal Potentiation
In the final clip of this section, Roger Jahnke distinguishes between Daoist transformation and traditional Chinese healing. He views Daoist cultivation as an ongoing process of transformation, at a deeper and more spiritaual level than either Chinese medicine or practices such as Qigong or Tai Chi.
Having distinguished Daoist cultivation from Chinese medicine, he then goes on to make a further set of distinctions between Daoist cultivation, the academic study of Daoism and orthodox Daoist lineages of transmission. It is worth reflecting for a moment on this tripartite division of the Daoist experience.
Many scholars, both Chinese and Western, have been interested in Daoism purely from the perspective of understanding its history and traditions, and in Chinese imperial times, Daoism sometimes functioned as a sort of intellectual antidote to the Confucian bureaucracy which ordered the lives of the scholar-officials who task it was to administer such a vast territory.
Next to this Daoist experience, Roger sets the experience of Daoist lineages, the transmission of Daoist texts and practices that passed from father to son over a period of many generations. This second form of Daoism, which we may call priestly or "orthodox" Daoism, is constructed along these lines of inheritance. In this case orthodoxy and authority is defined by one's location within a particlar lineage of transmission.
The third form of Daoism, which Roger personally espouses, is the experience of personal transformation. For Roger, this transformation is premised upon the notion of personal potentiation, the limitless depths which human beings are capable of attaining (see Solala Towler's discussion of the spaciousness of the body). It is not surprising, therefore, that this form of Daoism should be increasingly popular in the West, for it fits in very well with popular cultural attitudes about personal growth and individual sprituality. Here Roger is careful to acknowledge that this experience of personal potentiation is by no means free of tradition, but rather has led him into an investigation of Daoist history, texts and mythology.
In the next section of the website we learn about the Daoist spiritual goal of transcendence, but before you go there, check out the discussion about Daoist cultivation..