The Daoist Who Wasn't There pt. 3

~ The Baby & the Bathwater ~

Part III turns from critique to renewal. It honors what early natural philosophers actually gave us ~ alignment, stillness, attention ~ and shows how later Daoists expanded these insights into rich inner maps. This essay keeps the “baby” of functional wisdom while refreshing the “bathwater” of outdated claims, returning practice to nature, coherence, and lived inquiry.

Water runs deep through the philosophical metaphors of the old school dao, distilled most clearly in verse 15 of the Laozi/Daodejing: “When turbid waters are stilled, they gradually become clear.” That line speaks less to metaphysics than to method ~ stop churning the “mud of your mind” and the world appears as it is. And that has been our work thus far. In Part I, we quieted the turbulence; in Part II, we watched the patterns emerge as the mud settled. And now, part III steps into that clarified stream, turning toward the kind of knowing that can only be learned by living it. And as Fischer reminded us at the close of Part II:

“Philosophical Daoism is a philosophy of remaining calm yet focused, of prizing humility, tranquility, and skillfulness in response to an ever-changing world.”

— The Creation of Daoism

That calm is not the endpoint of philosophy; it’s the condition for perception coherently attuned to action. It’s what happens when thought, feeling, and action fall into rhythm ~ the same rhythm that old school daoists studied through body-breath-mind & world. It is what I call the Fourfold Rhythm of Knowing.

The fourfold rhythm describes how knowing itself becomes embodied ~ how awareness circulates through practice. It begins with cultivation, the steady shaping of perception and posture; it unfolds through iteration, the willingness to test and refine; it matures through integration, where action and insight converge; and it renews through optimization ~ the natural refinement of timing, tension, and perception ~ where form clarifies itself into flow. This is not an abstract model; it’s how coherence happens, how stillness learns to move.

And this rhythm isn’t a modern invention. It echoes a much older way of sensing the world ~ one that took shape long before these practices had names. The old school daoists drew their conceptual grammar from nature itself, reading water, wind, growth, and emergence as guides for understanding human life.

Sarah Allan, in her landmark study of early Chinese metaphor and cosmological imagination, shows how deeply this habit shaped the earliest philosophical vocabulary.

“Early Chinese thinkers, whatever their philosophical school, assumed that common principles informed the natural and human worlds. By studying nature, one could understand humankind. Thus, the natural world rather than religious mythology provided the root metaphors for the formulation of many of the earliest Chinese philosophical concepts.” — The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue

That single line distills the ethos of old school dao: study nature ~ not to dominate it, but to remember that we are part of it. The body-mind is the experiment; the breath is the feedback loop; nature is the teacher. When Allan says “the natural world provided the root metaphors,” she is describing precisely what we are recovering: a way of thinking where observation, embodiment, and meaning form one living continuum.

This, then, is what we inherit ~ not a static doctrine, but a continuity of inquiry. Yet continuity doesn’t mean carrying everything forward unchanged. As some old sage once observed, “Water too pure has no life in it.” to which I might add “and neither does water too muddy.” Every tradition accumulates sediment and mud; every stream needs clearing if it’s to keep moving. Which brings me, fittingly, to another water metaphor that names this final part ~ of course we don’t want to "throw the baby out with the bathwater." The baby—what’s alive, vital, and still growing—is the living wisdom of practice. But as I often say, “you do have to change the bathwater. And you have to let the baby grow up!”

That’s the work ahead: to refresh what has grown stagnant, to let the living arts mature beyond the myths that once protected them, and to liberate them from superstitious pseudoscience. Old school dao isn’t about preservation for its own sake; it’s about circulation ~ about keeping the rhythm of knowing clean and clear (qing 清) enough that life can keep evolving through it.

~ the quiet technologies the daoists actually gave us ~

Before later Daoist traditions built elaborate systems of cosmology, ritual, and inner refinement, the old school daoists gave us something far simpler and far more enduring: the quiet technologies of alignment, stillness, and attention. These weren’t mystical revelations or supernatural transmissions; they were methods ~ practices honed through observation, pattern, and lived inquiry.

The Neiye 內業—the oldest surviving text on meditation in China—distills this ethos with startling clarity:

“When your body is not aligned,

the inner power (de) will not come.

When you are not tranquil within,

your mind will not be ordered.

Align your body, assist the inner power,

then it will gradually come on its own.”

— Neiye (Inner Cultivation) vs. 11

This is meditation stripped to its bones: alignment, quietude, breath, attention. No cosmology required.

And this early thread did not end with the Neiye. The Laozi/Daodejing is saturated with metaphors of softening, settling, emptying, and returning ~ images that only make sense to someone who has spent time in genuine quietude. And the Zhuangzi, with its reflections on zuowang (“sitting and forgetting”), shows that these early thinkers were already experimenting with forms of meditative release, perceptual loosening, and ego-dissolution long before later Daoist traditions codified techniques.

As Stephen Eskildsen observes in his study of Daoist meditation:

“For Daoists, meditation has been a primary means of fostering serenity and bringing it to greater depths. The greatest depths of serenity are entranced states of consciousness wherein mystical insights or experiences are said to come about, or where vital forces of both mind and body—typically conceived as spirit (shen 神), qi 氣/炁 and essence (jing 精)—are said to be activated and mobilized in most salubrious and wondrous ways. However, for such wondrous occurrences to come about in full abundance, it is frequently maintained […] that your method of meditation ought to be simple and passive, apparently so as not to hinder the wonders that can only arise naturally. Less is more in all things, including meditation.”

— Daoism, Meditation, and the Wonders of Serenity

Those early practices were not about ascending to heaven or channeling spirits. They were about clearing the mud ~ settling the body-breath-mind enough that perception could stabilize and vitality could reorganize itself. They gave us the inner quiet that makes any kind of coherence possible ~ the same quiet that every meaningful practice, ancient or modern, depends on.

And that quiet is the root of everything that follows.

~ what the Daoists gave us: refinement of the inner landscape ~

If the old school daoists gave us the grammar of coherence, the later religious Daoists refined its syntax. They mapped the inner landscape in exquisite detail ~ body as cosmos, breath as bridge, awareness as alchemy, mind as mirror. What began as quiet observation of rhythm and resonance evolved into a vast cartography of transformation.

In an earlier book by Stephen Eskildsen, Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion, he notes how these later adepts systematized the spontaneous stillness of early cultivation:

“Internal alchemists developed their own intricate theories about cosmology and physiology and attempted to pursue their daily discipline and meditation techniques in a way that fully integrated the mind with the body, and in turn synchronized these with the cyclical workings of nature.”

— Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion

That line tells the story: the still pond of early neiye (inner cultivation) practice became an ocean of inner imagery. The shift was not corruption but elaboration ~ an attempt to render mystery into method. In doing so, religious Daoists preserved something invaluable: the insight that transformation is patterned, that refinement follows rhythm. Their language of jing~qi~shen, of “returning the essence to the source,” gave later generations a way to speak about coherence and transformation from within experience itself ~ refining a vocabulary the old school daoists had already begun. What began as a fluid constellation of insights and practices among the Hundred Schools gradually crystallized into a canonical formula ~ one that invited endless commentary, variation, and reinterpretation.

So when I say “change the bathwater,” this is what I mean. We can keep the inner maps without mistaking them for heavens; we can honor the metaphors without turning them into superstitious metaphysics; and we can learn from the brilliant psychosomatic techniques without inheriting their supernatural ontologies. These maps were never singular; they reflect different periods, lineages, and philosophical concerns.

Old school dao doesn’t reject neidan (inner-alchemy/Daoist “tantra”)— but nor do I practice it, because its religious, supernatural, and literal aims don’t align with mine. Yet the practices I do study and teach were shaped by that inheritance, so it behooves me to study them: to tend to the “baby,” so to speak, so I can better understand my own naturalistic neigong system ~ my dao of inner cultivation (nèi xiūdào 內修道). Old school dao translates neidan not to preserve its cosmology or ritual, but to harvest its functional intelligence and disciplined rigor. It seeks to ground these practices within the natural-philosophical way that guides my work: the dynamic interplay of body ~ breath ~ mind ~ awareness ~ adaptation ~

But tending the baby isn’t enough. We also have to let it "grow up”. These traditions aren’t museum pieces; they’re living inquiries. The old school daoists of the classical age were natural philosophers of lived experience ~ learning coherence not from theory but from the way body-breath-mind & world respond to one another. To honor their work is to keep experimenting, to let these arts evolve as our understanding of nature evolves, and as we mature enough to meet them anew.

Take the wuxing 五行— the Five Phases. What began as a humble agrarian map of seasonal transformation ~ wood rising in spring, fire flourishing in summer, earth ripening in the “second summer,” metal contracting in autumn, and water storing in winter ~ was a profound early model of pattern recognition. It described how life cycles through change, how one process feeds or restrains another. Over time, that simple ecological grammar grew into a cosmology of correspondence, and eventually into a diagnostic framework of classical Chinese medicine. Not every elaboration that followed was equally grounded—some carried real insight into pattern, while others drifted into cosmological excess or utter nonsense. It was, in its essence, an early systems theory ~ a pre-modern map of feedback and transformation.

That achievement deserves respect. But it also demands context. The wuxing model is elegant within its lineage of medical reasoning; outside of that, it too easily becomes caricature. Today we see people—both Western and Chinese—speaking as if the Five “Elements” were literal substances or magical forces: claiming to “balance the Kidney element,” or that their totally new ancient qigong set “heals the lungs by harmonizing the Metal element when we face westward.” These aren’t systems of understanding; they’re pseudoscientific marketing slogans wrapped in robes of antiquity, or worse, unmoored medical models.

The irony is that the genuine benefits of qigong ~ physical, subtle, and numinous (dare I say "spiritual") ~ can be far better explained through complexity science and plain old anatomy, physiology, and biomechanics. There’s no need to invoke cosmic metallurgy when a diaphragm, a vagus nerve, and a good feedback loop will do. As a healthcare practitioner who has taken the Hippocratic oath, I cannot, in good conscience, make or endorse such unscientific and unethical claims about health and disease. To do so would betray both medical integrity and the very spirit of dao (way) these teachings once embodied.

Seen through a modern lens of complexity science, the wuxing schema can be honored for what it truly is: a remarkable early attempt to model dynamic balance, interdependence, and feedback within living systems ~ and also as a pedagogical framework for orienting martial arts techniques. But we serve it best by translating its insight into language that is testable, teachable, and transparent. That is how we let the “baby” grow up— by carrying forward the intelligence of pattern without inheriting the literalism or magical prescriptions that later gathered around it. In doing so, we don’t diminish the old models; we dignify them. We free them from the burden of superstition and return them to their natural soil, where observation, adaptation, and relation can once again guide our practice.

For me, that means grounding the ancient practices of yangsheng (nourishing life) ~ the larger tradition from which qigong, meditation, dietetics, massage, and other arts of self-cultivation (including the so-called “bedchamber arts”) descend ~ and rearticulating them in the modern languages of complexity science & embodied cognition. Yangsheng was never just exercise; it was a philosophy of regulation and renewal ~ a way of living in rhythm with natural processes, especially the turning of the seasons. These contemporary fields echo, in their own way/dao, the same insight those early thinkers intuited: that life organizes itself through feedback, flow, and relation. The alchemists glimpsed this through metaphor; we can explore it now through system and study

And this, perhaps, is how we move beyond Golden Age thinking—and its close cousin, allochronism, the refusal to let the past have a past. What’s lost to time isn’t the tragedy; believing that truth lived only there is. The point was never to recover a perfect origin, but to stay awake to the rhythms that endure. "Beside the point," as it turns out, is the point— because difference isn’t division; it’s what keeps the living tradition alive. Distinction, not sameness, is what lets the dao keep moving through every age, changing shape but never losing coherence.

This, ultimately, is why I call it old school dao ~ not as a gesture of nostalgia, but as a reminder that there has always been another way/dao to study the dao: through lived inquiry, through body-breath-mind, through the art of coherence itself. The early daoists were the original natural philosophers ~ the “OGs” (zi 子) who studied pattern from within the flow of life, using nature as both root metaphor and living laboratory ~ knowing flow through flow itself, the way water co-creates the shape of its path.

To walk that path today is not to imitate them, but to continue their experiment ~ to listen, to adapt, to learn how life learns. The work now is the same work it has always been: to cultivate calm enough to perceive, vitality enough to act, rhythm enough to adapt, and poise enough to refine. That is how coherence renews itself ~ how difference becomes dialogue, how old knowledge becomes living practice, and how the dao keeps evolving through us.

Old school dao is a nod to this old guard ~ the scholars & sages, hermits & monks, poets & warriors who preserved and renewed this living tradition through so much change & chaos. Humanity is forever wiser for their devotion, and to that, a deep bow.

Epilogue ~ the way the way goes ~

Old school dao isn’t a return; it’s a reminder. A way of pointing without fixing, of honoring the past without embalming it, and of letting the living tradition breathe in its own time. If these three parts have done anything, I hope they have loosened the grip of these golden-age fantasies long enough for a more human, more coherent lineage to appear: a lineage of people who embodied the dao not by escaping the world but by entering it more fully.

The old school daoists taught by watching how water moves, how wind shapes the grass, how breath shapes the mind. Later Daoists taught by mapping the inner cosmos with care and devotion. Today we inherit all of it ~ not to preserve a museum, but to cultivate a practice. The point was never to guard the ashes; it was to keep the fire warm.

If there is a thread that runs through each part—the fantasy, the distinction, the renewal—it’s that the dao is not a doctrine. It’s an orientation. A sensitivity. A way of noticing the patterns that hold us, and the ones that need to be released. The old guard, the zi 子, did their work. Now we do ours: to live with enough clarity to perceive, enough vitality to act, enough rhythm to adapt, and enough poise to refine.

Traditions survive when they change; they stay honest when they listen. And the more deeply I study the dao, the more I understand that the ten thousand forms don’t point back to a single origin— they point forward to a single invitation:
~ to move with the way the way goes ~

May this work be part of that movement. A bow to those who carried it before us, and a nod to those who will carry it next.