I recount Master Yun’s personal experience because his autobi-
ography, first published in 1914, is an important landmark in Taoist
Meditation. Before him, no one had written about the actual meth-
odology, personal experience, benefits or side effects in simple,
explicit language. There are volumes and volumes of Taoist Eso-
teric writing in Classical Chinese but the methodologies and ac-
counts of experiences are hidden in a cryptic language. The ben-
efits are written more explicitly, but the side effects are frequently
clouded.
At age twelve, fascinated by the personal experience of Master
Yun, I started to go through all the available Taoist classics that I
could lay my hands on. But I was disappointed because I simply
could not break what seemed to be a code, although I could under-
stand every single Chinese word literally. It was then that I started
an unending pilgramage to Taoist and Buddhist temples. I went to
temple after temple but found that there was a lot of ritual, philoso-
phy and religious data built into the meditation programs. Because
I refused to do the rituals. I could not be initiated into Taoist prac-
tice. I was concerned by the fact that Master Yun had no teacher,
he learned from a Chinese medicine book and was never initiated
into Taoist practice via rituals. Never the less, I managed to talk to
several Taoist teachers and many of their students, whom are now
scholars and successful businessmen in Hong Kong, and was
able to learn of their personal experiences in terms of energy flow
and improvements in health similar to Master Yun’s.
Initiated Taoists spoke of step by step guidance into the experi-
ences that Master Yun had described and then higher levels be-
yond that. Master Yun had no such step by step methodology. He
had only one step and one method that carried him through the
experience described above.
Unfortunately, university life was demanding, and there were so
many new attractions and distractions, that I stopped researching
Taoist and Buddhist meditations after I entered medical school.
The busy internship and residency years carried me even farther
away from my investigations. My resurgence of interest began sev-
eral years after my residency when I was in private practice. Al-
though I was using every means available to modern medical sci-
ence, many of my patients were still suffering and some of them
continued to die, perhaps needlessly.Chapter XI