The part relevant to this thread is the first 4 paragraphs. The rest of this post is Yet Another Rant - against de-heathenising, and the growing mess that silent spectator Hindus (or are there truly only the discernable kind that applaud to specious claims?) have allowed and will not put an end to.
The following is from what I understand. Stating matter-of-factly, so no sources or even links (they exist, however private sites by and for Taoists need to be shielded from aliens and subverted/subvertibles, who represent a grave threat to heathenisms, not even their own any more):
The inner universe (body) in Taoism is a reflection of the physical outer universe, and the (Taoist) cosmic Gods therefore are specifically stated to abide in both. This is the Taoist view associated with practices to do with Chi/Qi (or however it is transliterated).
This is not unlike in (Kundalini) Yoga - and IIRC Pranayama too.
Also, like in Hindu religion, the aim is to retain the Gods within by a harmonious lifestyle (practices, prescribed foods vs proscribed foods, etc). As a result, Taoism aims to avoid any act/behaviour that drives away the indwelling Taoist Gods from the Taoist's body*. This is, as usual, connected with the pursuit of Taoist immortality. The aim is to make the Gods reside permanently within the Taoist: their divine, harmonious, contented immortality renders the cultivating Taoist immortal and of the same contented nature, in harmony with/one with the Tao.
[* Hindoo religion also literally warns against doing anything to drive away the Hindoo Gods who are residing within the body (inner cosmos). E.g. Krishna in the Gita also alludes to something like it in some shlokas IIRC, dissuading people from performing such extreme austerities - or rather self-mortifications - as to torture not just themselves but Bhagavaan in their bodies too. See BG 17.5-6.]
** In an article on Yoga, Elst lent credibility to a fellow alien's theory, in a book he'd read on how Kundalini Yoga could 'and therefore would' have derived from Taoism. Elst stated - perhaps with reference to his alien authority - that Hindus would have borrowed the practice of Kundalini Yoga from Taoism, and - as a Hindu innovation to the borrowing - Hindus were to have added the novelty of Gods as residing in various chakras of the body in this yoga.
Already mentioned earlier how alien self-declared authorities have at various times claimed that Taoism's Chi-based practices were borrowed from Hindus' yoga, while at other times other writers have reversed the claim and stated that Hindus' yoga (often Kundalini is singled out) is derived from Taoist practices instead.
BTW, the Taoists specifically make no claims on yoga. (Their own internal discussions show they see it as an old and authentic Hindoo practice rooted in India. They note it was exhibited in Buddhism via borrowing [from Hindu religion].)
At the same time, Taoists are emphatic that their ritual practices (like the chi-based ones) - and the traditional Taoist views belonging to them - are entirely indigenously Taoist and derived from their Gods. I see no reason to disbelieve them as Taoist traditionalists receive instructions directly imparted by their Gods and Immortals to this day.
What I want to draw attention to however, is the fact that Elst not only assumed that the borrowing could well have taken place (and in the direction from the Taoists to the Hindus) to derive Kundalini Yoga, but moreover - and most importantly - that Hindus were to have introduced the notion of associating Gods with the chakras as the Hindu innovation on top of the borrowings.
Ironically, the one feature that Elst pretended was to have been uniquely Hindu in all this - the Hindu Gods dwelling in the inner cosmos of the Hindu Kundalini Yoga - was the very feature that we specifically do share (in the form of a similarity) with the traditional Taoist ritual practices and the Taoist views associated with them: the fact that Taoist Gods are to reside in the inner universe (this being a reflection -within the body- of the outer universe).
Elst, in the same or another article, wrote that heathen Hindus (theistic Hindus, i.e. Hindoos) had effected a "coup d'etat" on godless Indic schools, IIRC he particularly alluded to the late, i.e. classical, Sankhyam and Yoga.
Yet it is notably Elst's own tendency/need to remove the theism from heathenisms - born of his own non-theistic interests in his dabbling in Hindu (and possibly Taoist) religion besides European neo-paganism - that made him present the Taoist views associated with the Taoist ritual practices as devoid of the Taoist Gods.
And may as well add here, since I've luckily done the actual work of making my argument in earlier posts on this and the last page, that it was not the Hindoo heathens that did a coup d'etat on the late atheistic Sankhyam, but rather that the classical Sankhyans lifted their Sankhyan views almost wholesale from the pre-classical theistic Sankhyam of the Vedas that Vedic Hindus like the Rishis followed. (Elst is also regularly doing a coup d'etat on the Vedic Rishis: Elst wants to hijack them as espousers of his own atheistic new-age "Hinduism", and tomorrow Elst will start implying that theistic Hindus later rewrote the Vedic Rishis as theists too. Elst is convinced he is a great expert, and so are his parrots. But the lie stops when he touches Taoism: Elst's mangling of Taoism to a subvertible and gullible Hindu audience I won't allow. It (Taoism) being one of the last pristine heathenisms, unaffected by the deviant Indian tendency to subvert. Besides, Taoists are not present to defend themselves. But they took serious exception (to Elst's misrepresentations) when I brought the matter up. The kind of serious exception that the dead species of Hindoos used to take before they were replaced by the subvertibles.)
As for the evidence of the late, classical, atheist Sankhyan having taken from the pre-classical theistic Sankhyam and then removing the Gods, not only was this already documented since decades by several learned heathen scholars of the actual heathenism involved,
but the obviousness is staring one in the face and actually already discussed further up in this thread, though I want to draw specific attention to its relevance to this matter here:
- the pre-classical, theistic Sankhya of the Vedas provided a self-contained explanation of the All and the place of man/sentience therein. It is in this explanation that the sankhyan view makes sense: it is intimately connected to Hindoo cosmology (the evolution of the universe as per Hindoo religion), which explains the origination of the view of the problem (as per sankhyam) and its solution (proposed by sankhyam), and a means to effect the solution (yoga, to ... let's use the verb reunite the individual jeeva with the paramashiva/purushottama, the Hindoo All whose own self/powers and derivation originated the cosmos including the jeevas).
- the later, classical (atheistic) Sankhya did away not only with the Gods, but (therefore) by necessity also did away with the cosmology - as being unverifiable predicates - but retained a final predicate: the problem and its proposed solution (and there was the related 'school' yoga). The missing explanation in the late atheist Sankhyam - whence their view (Sankhya) even derived - is found in the pre-classical theistic Sankhya from the Vedas. And only makes sense there. (Still later religions would make up cosmological explanations of their own, but I'm not going to even bother going into that.)
Suffice it to say that the ancestral heathen (Hindoo) religion shows the derivation of Sankhyan views (and moreover provides the only reasoned derivation, btw), where these views are clearly and naturally derived from the larger framework of Hindoo heathenism's cosmogony.
In contrast, late classical Sankhyam never showed the derivation (it did not have cosmological views), and merely starts with the Sankhyan views already intact and as the primary assumption.
As usual, what I'm saying is: Hindoo religion showed its working on how Sankhyam is derived.
Classical Sankhyam didn't.
(And Buddhism and Jainism fudged in some necessary cosmological views later on to the Sankhyan views which they'd borrowed - which views were by their time nearly 'self-evident' assumptions especially for those splitting from Vedantic views - to fill in the obvious blanks: the missing cosmology in non-theist/classical Sankhyam. B & J rejected Hindoo cosmology because it undoes the main purport and views of Buddhism and Jainism.)
To return to an argument already made here: Elst is ...as much a sinologist as an indologist. Certainly he is not more an expert on Taoism than he is on Hindoos' own heathenism.
I wonder if he'll try dabbling in Taoism after he is finished with Hindu religion. But is no one else tired of seeing him make references to Vedic Rishis as authority for promoting his non-theist views (specifically his views that seek to remove the theism from Vedic religion) as authentic?
Or his awkward insertion of himself (and other dabbling aliens) in the company of Vedic Rishis, as if he is following in their footsteps?
And for a dabbler with no actual sympathy for Hindu Gods (besides thinking them a quaint notion concocted by "his" Vedic Rishi predecessors) - he adds in borderline snide remarks about the Gods (so central to Hindoos) at every opportunity - why do Hindus allow Elst to arrogate to himself the right to mention narratives of the Gods, where he treats them in his typically non-theist way.
It is bad enough for - whichever internet and new age Hindus did it - to have let Elst feel he's a "Hindu" now. But now he thinks himself an insider, he not only starts making claims on Vedic Rishis - as if he has a right to them by his self-delusional claim to following in their footsteps - and not only speaks of "us" (and "we") as if he shares the same history and experiences and plight as actual=ethnic Hindus, he is even allowed to treat the heathen Gods of the Hindoos with a levity and a dismissive and condescending manner, which an anti-Hindu would not have been allowed. (Also, why does he imagine he has a right to speak of the Hindoo Gods, to allude to them, at all? As a non-theist and unheathen - if not as an outright alien - he has the Right To Remain Silent on the heathen Gods of the religion he makes free to dabble in and which he would separate from them, to make it conform to what he wants it to be. At its most basic, this last denial of his presumption is no different from how ethnic Indian, Indic atheists who call themselves "Hindu" too have no right to encroach on the Hindoo Gods or their temples: these are the very matters that belong to heathen Hindus, i.e. Hindoos, alone.)
But as if our own gangrene were not enough. One of these days I'm going to contemplate how to ... return the favour to subverted (and subvertible) 'Hindus', including those who let Elst think he's in. All favours ought to be returned, as all debts ought to be repaid in full too.
For now, though, I remain grateful that while Elst is sinking his subversiveness further into Hindu religion, that he is too busy to attempt to poison Taoism (at least, among Taoists/for a Taoist audience) likewise.
No, I haven't done with complaining it seems. Have more (related) cloying things to exorcise by spamming.
I have caught whimpers of complaint from internet "Hindu" activists rejecting late christo-conditioned Europe's presumption in claiming Greek philosophy stripped of its Gods by its illegally attempting to divorce the two: christoconditioned Euros were trying to separate Philosophy from the Heathenism of the GrecoRomans, since - again - the latter could not be digested by the unheathen mind that dared to covet the former. (Later on, christianism would try to ingest Philosophy as a christianism.) There are many christoconditioned in the west now who praise Philosophy as their great ancestral tradition, even as they, often in the same breath, dismiss or even deride the very Olympic Gods who brought forth this divine wisdom - which is of Them, and inextricably linked to Them - into (Hellenistic) mankind's ken.
Yet not a murmur from any Hindus when the Hindoo Gods are treated like nothings while the teachings passed on by Rishis - intimately associated with the Gods - are coveted and are delinked from the Gods and the religion pertaining to them.
I never learnt from christoconditioned western books that "Plato was a worshipper of the images of the Gods" (which books instead preferred to pretend he was a 'secular' Greek philosopher). To learn that detail, I had to hear it from Emperor Julian, whose recorded statement first revealed this little - yet non-trivial - fact about Plato to my limited knowledge. I see the same happening increasingly with Hindoos' ancestral heathenism.
Rest of this post to be placed in a more appropriate thread.
The part relevant to this thread is the first few paragraphs, copied below. The rest is my usual tendency to spam with an incoherent and off-topic rant.
The following is from what I understand. Stating matter-of-factly, so no sources or even links (they exist, however private sites by and for Taoists need to be shielded from aliens and subverted/subvertibles, who represent a grave threat to heathenisms, not even their own any more):
The inner universe (body) in Taoism is a reflection of the physical outer universe, and the (Taoist) cosmic Gods therefore are specifically stated to abide in both. This is the Taoist view associated with practices to do with Chi/Qi (or however it is transliterated).
This is not unlike in (Kundalini) Yoga - and IIRC Pranayama too.
Also, like in Hindu religion, the aim is to retain the Gods within by a harmonious lifestyle (practices, prescribed foods vs proscribed foods, etc). As a result, Taoism aims to avoid any act/behaviour that drives away the indwelling Taoist Gods from the Taoist's body*. This is, as usual, connected with the pursuit of Taoist immortality. The aim is to make the Gods reside permanently within the Taoist: their divine, harmonious, contented immortality renders the cultivating Taoist immortal and of the same contented nature, in harmony with/one with the Tao.
[* Hindoo religion also literally warns against doing anything to drive away the Hindoo Gods who are residing within the body (inner cosmos). E.g. Krishna in the Gita also alludes to something like it in some shlokas IIRC, dissuading people from performing such extreme austerities - or rather self-mortifications - as to torture not just themselves but Bhagavaan in their bodies too. See BG 17.5-6.]
** In an article on Yoga, Elst lent credibility to a fellow alien's theory, in a book he'd read on how Kundalini Yoga could 'and therefore would' have derived from Taoism. Elst stated - perhaps with reference to his alien authority - that Hindus would have borrowed the practice of Kundalini Yoga from Taoism, and - as a Hindu innovation to the borrowing - Hindus were to have added the novelty of Gods as residing in various chakras of the body in this yoga.
Already mentioned earlier how alien self-declared authorities have at various times claimed that Taoism's Chi-based practices were borrowed from Hindus' yoga, while at other times other writers have reversed the claim and stated that Hindus' yoga (often Kundalini is singled out) is derived from Taoist practices instead.
BTW, the Taoists specifically make no claims on yoga. (Their own internal discussions show they see it as an old and authentic Hindoo practice rooted in India. They note it was exhibited in Buddhism via borrowing [from Hindu religion].)
At the same time, Taoists are emphatic that their ritual practices (like the chi-based ones) - and the traditional Taoist views belonging to them - are entirely indigenously Taoist and derived from their Gods. I see no reason to disbelieve them as Taoist traditionalists receive instructions directly imparted by their Gods and Immortals to this day.
What I want to draw attention to however, is the fact that Elst not only assumed that the borrowing could well have taken place (and in the direction from the Taoists to the Hindus) to derive Kundalini Yoga, but moreover - and most importantly - that Hindus were to have introduced the notion of associating Gods with the chakras as the Hindu innovation on top of the borrowings.
Ironically, the one feature that Elst pretended was to have been uniquely Hindu in all this - the Hindu Gods dwelling in the inner cosmos of the Hindu Kundalini Yoga - was the very feature that we specifically do share (in the form of a similarity) with the traditional Taoist ritual practices and the Taoist views associated with them: the fact that Taoist Gods are to reside in the inner universe (this being a reflection -within the body- of the outer universe).
Elst, in the same or another article, wrote that heathen Hindus (theistic Hindus, i.e. Hindoos) had effected a "coup d'etat" on godless Indic schools, IIRC he particularly alluded to the late, i.e. classical, Sankhyam and Yoga.
Yet it is notably Elst's own tendency/need to remove the theism from heathenisms - born of his own non-theistic interests in his dabbling in Hindu (and possibly Taoist) religion besides European neo-paganism - that made him present the Taoist views associated with the Taoist ritual practices as devoid of the Taoist Gods.
And may as well add here, since I've luckily done the actual work of making my argument in earlier posts on this and the last page, that it was not the Hindoo heathens that did a coup d'etat on the late atheistic Sankhyam, but rather that the classical Sankhyans lifted their Sankhyan views almost wholesale from the pre-classical theistic Sankhyam of the Vedas that Vedic Hindus like the Rishis followed. (Elst is also regularly doing a coup d'etat on the Vedic Rishis: Elst wants to hijack them as espousers of his own atheistic new-age "Hinduism", and tomorrow Elst will start implying that theistic Hindus later rewrote the Vedic Rishis as theists too. Elst is convinced he is a great expert, and so are his parrots. But the lie stops when he touches Taoism: Elst's mangling of Taoism to a subvertible and gullible Hindu audience I won't allow. It (Taoism) being one of the last pristine heathenisms, unaffected by the deviant Indian tendency to subvert. Besides, Taoists are not present to defend themselves. But they took serious exception (to Elst's misrepresentations) when I brought the matter up. The kind of serious exception that the dead species of Hindoos used to take before they were replaced by the subvertibles.)
As for the evidence of the late, classical, atheist Sankhyan having taken from the pre-classical theistic Sankhyam and then removing the Gods, not only was this already documented since decades by several learned heathen scholars of the actual heathenism involved,
but the obviousness is staring one in the face and actually already discussed further up in this thread, though I want to draw specific attention to its relevance to this matter here:
- the pre-classical, theistic Sankhya of the Vedas provided a self-contained explanation of the All and the place of man/sentience therein. It is in this explanation that the sankhyan view makes sense: it is intimately connected to Hindoo cosmology (the evolution of the universe as per Hindoo religion), which explains the origination of the view of the problem (as per sankhyam) and its solution (proposed by sankhyam), and a means to effect the solution (yoga, to ... let's use the verb reunite the individual jeeva with the paramashiva/purushottama, the Hindoo All whose own self/powers and derivation originated the cosmos including the jeevas).
- the later, classical (atheistic) Sankhya did away not only with the Gods, but (therefore) by necessity also did away with the cosmology - as being unverifiable predicates - but retained a final predicate: the problem and its proposed solution (and there was the related 'school' yoga). The missing explanation in the late atheist Sankhyam - whence their view (Sankhya) even derived - is found in the pre-classical theistic Sankhya from the Vedas. And only makes sense there. (Still later religions would make up cosmological explanations of their own, but I'm not going to even bother going into that.)
Suffice it to say that the ancestral heathen (Hindoo) religion shows the derivation of Sankhyan views (and moreover provides the only reasoned derivation, btw), where these views are clearly and naturally derived from the larger framework of Hindoo heathenism's cosmogony.
In contrast, late classical Sankhyam never showed the derivation (it did not have cosmological views), and merely starts with the Sankhyan views already intact and as the primary assumption.
As usual, what I'm saying is: Hindoo religion showed its working on how Sankhyam is derived.
Classical Sankhyam didn't.
(And Buddhism and Jainism fudged in some necessary cosmological views later on to the Sankhyan views which they'd borrowed - which views were by their time nearly 'self-evident' assumptions especially for those splitting from Vedantic views - to fill in the obvious blanks: the missing cosmology in non-theist/classical Sankhyam. B & J rejected Hindoo cosmology because it undoes the main purport and views of Buddhism and Jainism.)
To return to an argument already made here: Elst is ...as much a sinologist as an indologist. Certainly he is not more an expert on Taoism than he is on Hindoos' own heathenism.
I wonder if he'll try dabbling in Taoism after he is finished with Hindu religion. But is no one else tired of seeing him make references to Vedic Rishis as authority for promoting his non-theist views (specifically his views that seek to remove the theism from Vedic religion) as authentic?
Or his awkward insertion of himself (and other dabbling aliens) in the company of Vedic Rishis, as if he is following in their footsteps?
And for a dabbler with no actual sympathy for Hindu Gods (besides thinking them a quaint notion concocted by "his" Vedic Rishi predecessors) - he adds in borderline snide remarks about the Gods (so central to Hindoos) at every opportunity - why do Hindus allow Elst to arrogate to himself the right to mention narratives of the Gods, where he treats them in his typically non-theist way.
It is bad enough for - whichever internet and new age Hindus did it - to have let Elst feel he's a "Hindu" now. But now he thinks himself an insider, he not only starts making claims on Vedic Rishis - as if he has a right to them by his self-delusional claim to following in their footsteps - and not only speaks of "us" (and "we") as if he shares the same history and experiences and plight as actual=ethnic Hindus, he is even allowed to treat the heathen Gods of the Hindoos with a levity and a dismissive and condescending manner, which an anti-Hindu would not have been allowed. (Also, why does he imagine he has a right to speak of the Hindoo Gods, to allude to them, at all? As a non-theist and unheathen - if not as an outright alien - he has the Right To Remain Silent on the heathen Gods of the religion he makes free to dabble in and which he would separate from them, to make it conform to what he wants it to be. At its most basic, this last denial of his presumption is no different from how ethnic Indian, Indic atheists who call themselves "Hindu" too have no right to encroach on the Hindoo Gods or their temples: these are the very matters that belong to heathen Hindus, i.e. Hindoos, alone.)
But as if our own gangrene were not enough. One of these days I'm going to contemplate how to ... return the favour to subverted (and subvertible) 'Hindus', including those who let Elst think he's in. All favours ought to be returned, as all debts ought to be repaid in full too.
For now, though, I remain grateful that while Elst is sinking his subversiveness further into Hindu religion, that he is too busy to attempt to poison Taoism (at least, among Taoists/for a Taoist audience) likewise.
No, I haven't done with complaining it seems. Have more (related) cloying things to exorcise by spamming.
I have caught whimpers of complaint from internet "Hindu" activists rejecting late christo-conditioned Europe's presumption in claiming Greek philosophy stripped of its Gods by its illegally attempting to divorce the two: christoconditioned Euros were trying to separate Philosophy from the Heathenism of the GrecoRomans, since - again - the latter could not be digested by the unheathen mind that dared to covet the former. (Later on, christianism would try to ingest Philosophy as a christianism.) There are many christoconditioned in the west now who praise Philosophy as their great ancestral tradition, even as they, often in the same breath, dismiss or even deride the very Olympic Gods who brought forth this divine wisdom - which is of Them, and inextricably linked to Them - into (Hellenistic) mankind's ken.
Yet not a murmur from any Hindus when the Hindoo Gods are treated like nothings while the teachings passed on by Rishis - intimately associated with the Gods - are coveted and are delinked from the Gods and the religion pertaining to them.
I never learnt from christoconditioned western books that "Plato was a worshipper of the images of the Gods" (which books instead preferred to pretend he was a 'secular' Greek philosopher). To learn that detail, I had to hear it from Emperor Julian, whose recorded statement first revealed this little - yet non-trivial - fact about Plato to my limited knowledge. I see the same happening increasingly with Hindoos' ancestral heathenism.
Rest of this post to be placed in a more appropriate thread.
The part relevant to this thread is the first few paragraphs, copied below. The rest is my usual tendency to spam with an incoherent and off-topic rant.
Quote:The inner universe (body) in Taoism is a reflection of the physical outer universe, and the (Taoist) cosmic Gods therefore are specifically stated to abide in both. This is the Taoist view associated with practices to do with Chi/Qi (or however it is transliterated).
This is not unlike in (Kundalini) Yoga - and IIRC Pranayama too.
Also, like in Hindu religion, the aim is to retain the Gods within by a harmonious lifestyle (practices, prescribed foods vs proscribed foods, etc). As a result, Taoism aims to avoid any act/behaviour that drives away the indwelling Taoist Gods from the Taoist's body*. This is, as usual, connected with the pursuit of Taoist immortality. The aim is to make the Gods reside permanently within the Taoist: their divine, harmonious, contented immortality renders the cultivating Taoist immortal and of the same contented nature, in harmony with/one with the Tao.
[* Hindoo religion also literally warns against doing anything to drive away the Hindoo Gods who are residing within the body (inner cosmos). E.g. Krishna in the Gita also alludes to something like it in some shlokas IIRC, dissuading people from performing such extreme austerities - or rather self-mortifications - as to torture not just themselves but Bhagavaan in their bodies too. See BG 17.5-6.]