Gong Zhebing
Grain avoidance (bigu) is a method of cultivation created by the ancient Taoists in which one abstains from food for a specific period and drinks only water. The method has been popularized and put to use among ordinary people today, with remarkable results in weight loss, health cultivation, and treatment. The fasting therapies popular today in Europe, America, and Japan are very similar to Chinese grain avoidance. In the first half of 2011 I practiced grain avoidance three times—fifteen days the first time, fifteen days the second, and twenty-one days the third—and achieved combined results in weight loss, health, and treatment.
Here is an overview of the methods of grain avoidance as I understand them and of my personal experience.
1. Types of Grain Avoidance
1. By method of ingestion: qi-ingesting grain avoidance (ingesting air and drawing energy from it) and medicine-ingesting grain avoidance (taking medicinal substances in place of grain to obtain energy).
2. By degree: full grain avoidance (eating nothing at all apart from drinking water) and partial grain avoidance (small amounts of fruit may be eaten).
3. By duration: short-term grain avoidance (abstaining from food for three to seven days), medium-term (8–14 days), and long-term (abstaining from food for fifteen days or more).
4. By state of consciousness: intentional grain avoidance (the start and end can be set in advance by oneself) and natural grain avoidance (which arises spontaneously in the body once a practitioner has reached a certain level of attainment).
2. Choosing When to Fast
As for the season, grain avoidance is best undertaken in spring and autumn, when temperatures are moderate. But this is not absolute: people in good health and those experienced in grain avoidance can fast at any time of year. As for frequency, long-term grain avoidance is best done two to four times a year; for the purpose of treating illness, the number can be increased somewhat. Short-term grain avoidance, such as three days without food, can be done once a month. As for the length of a single fast, a full fast lasts seven, fourteen, or twenty-one days, generally a multiple of seven. A full fast of more than twenty-one days is quite difficult and is mostly achieved only by people with a foundation in cultivation. A partial fast can last seven, seventeen, or twenty-seven days, or even one or two months or half a year. The length of a fast also varies from person to person; there is no single standard. A first fast should not be too long; one can start with a short, partial fast and, as one's skill in qi ingestion improves and experience accumulates, gradually lengthen the fast and raise its level.
3. Choosing Where to Fast
First, it is best to be far from the city, in a place with mountains and water, where the air is good, there is natural spring water, and the food is unpolluted. Second, the earth, like the human body, has meridians and acupoints. The grotto-heavens and blessed lands of Taoism are the acupoints of the earth, places where the earth's qi is good; cultivating there achieves twice the result with half the effort. Finally, it is even better if you can find like-minded practice companions to fast with, because the more people cultivating, the stronger the qi field there becomes. During the fast it is best to have little contact with people who do not support grain avoidance, since others' incomprehension and ridicule can be a great disturbance.
4. Preparing for Grain Avoidance
In mental preparation, one should remove psychological barriers and believe that grain avoidance does the body good and no harm. It must be undertaken with full understanding and complete willingness. In physical preparation, one should fast as far as possible when one's body is in fairly good condition; then one's mood is cheerful and one has confidence.
In material preparation, a full fast requires only spring water and a little honey. For a partial fast, prepare some dried or fresh fruit. You should also prepare loose clothing and trousers.
In addition, most beginners must ask an experienced person to guide and help them.
5. Some Phenomena During Grain Avoidance
First, body weight drops, especially sharply in the first week, and then more steadily. What is lost is the body's excess fat, muscle, and protein, which are converted into the energy needed to sustain physiological activity.
Second, grain avoidance causes the body to detoxify, with the result that unusual or foul odors appear. Finally, certain parts of the body may hurt; this is the reaction of qi breaking through the sites of illness. True qi circulates throughout the body, and wherever it goes it eliminates pathogens and evil qi, strengthening the body.
6. Ending the Fast and Resuming Eating
Generally speaking, one does not feel hungry throughout the fast. When, after a certain time, a distinct and strong feeling of hunger appears, that is usually the moment to end the fast. After ending it, one should resume eating gradually. The principle of resuming is: from thin to solid, from little to more, and from vegetarian to meat.
7. A Day in the Life of Grain Avoidance
Below I describe a day of my life while fasting in the mountains of Luzhou, Sichuan, in the spring of 2011, to give beginners a more direct feel for it.
1. Morning Practice
I woke at 5:30 a.m. with cold feet. After many days without food, my whole body felt cold, especially my feet. I took off my underclothes, lay naked on the bed, and began practicing “Pushing Blood into the Palace.” The first posture is to press the Huiyin point (at the perineum) with the middle finger of the left hand while massaging the lower abdomen with the right hand. The second posture is to press the Huiyin point with the middle finger of the right hand while massaging in a straight line between the lower and upper abdomen with the left hand. There are eight postures in all, used to raise the kidney qi.
After getting up I drank “yin-yang water”: a glass that is half cold, raw spring water and half boiled spring water, hot from a thermos. I drank two glasses, then went out, down five flights of stairs, to climb the mountain.
By 6:30 I was on a steep mountain path, walking slowly and resting after every ten or so steps. I felt no hunger, but I did feel weak and dizzy. After climbing more than a hundred meters, I stopped at a fairly open spot and, at about seven o'clock, facing east, began practicing qi-ingestion qigong.
Before sunrise I practiced for an hour. The first half hour was qi-ingestion qigong, including opening the practice, drawing qi, embracing qi, surging qi, gathering qi, massage, patting the body, and closing the practice. The second half hour was standing meditation (zhan zhuang): feet in a horse stance, arms raised to chest level, palms open and facing inward, the whole body like a turtle standing upright.
After the hour of practice, at about eight o'clock, the sun came out. The light was not very strong, just right for gazing directly at the sun with both eyes and drawing energy from the sunlight—this too is a Taoist method of cultivation. In front of me was a pine forest. To draw the essence and qi of the pines into the body, open the mouth as wide as possible, inhale sharply, and swallow the air, repeating many times until you feel a warm current enter the body.
Going down the mountain my legs shook and felt weak, so I had to descend slowly, resting once halfway. At the foot of the mountain there was a spring-water pipe; I filled a plastic bucket with spring water and carried it home. After drinking, I lay down on the bed to rest and would often fall asleep for an hour or two, waking full of energy.
2. Daytime Life
During the fast I worked as usual. My work is writing, so after getting up I started to write. First I wrote my cultivation diary, recording my daily practice and all kinds of experiences. Dreams, for instance, went into the diary, since dreams reflect the subconscious. Four days after arriving in Luzhou, I had an erotic dream, a sign that the earth's qi was tonifying my kidneys; I decided to begin the fast from the day of that dream, and indeed the results were good.
After finishing the diary, I worked on a monograph. Writing during the fast, my mind was clear and inspiration came often; I could write several thousand characters a day and made considerable progress.
Although I did not eat lunch at noon, I took my usual nap from 12 to 2 p.m. From 2 to 4 p.m. I read books and newspapers, or chatted if friends came by. At 4 p.m. I went walking. In the first week I walked vigorously, about five kilometers a day, singing all the way, in a particularly happy mood.
In the second week my strength gave out and walking became too tiring, so I dropped the afternoon walks and the morning climbs and stayed home all day.
At home I would feel dizzy when standing up from a squat. This is normal; one should avoid getting up too quickly. My body also felt somewhat light and floaty, which is also normal, since I had not eaten for many days.
During a fast one should reduce socializing, though when it does come up one should not run away from it.
On the fourteenth day of the fast, two of my doctoral students came from Wuhan University to see me, and my friend Chen Jianmin, a practitioner of Chinese medicine, treated them to hot pot in the evening. I took a bus half an hour to the restaurant to meet them. I sat by the hot pot without the slightest craving or hunger, and could still join in their lively conversation.
Every day around six o'clock I strolled indoors, conversing with my stomach and intestines as I walked. A professor in the West has written a book saying that besides the brain in the head, people also have an abdominal brain. The abdomen has nerve centers and memory cells similar to those of the brain, no less in number and quality. In the vast majority of people the abdominal brain is in a stupor, and grain avoidance can wake it up.
During my fast I found that once the abdominal brain wakes up, it makes its own requests and wishes, and the faster should be good at listening to it and communicating with it.
Before the fast, I was always extremely hungry before meals and ate a great deal; afterward I would be dizzy and bleary-eyed, as if drunk—a phenomenon called “food drunkenness.”
After the fast, whenever I eat, once I am about seventy or eighty percent full, the abdominal brain tells me, “That's about enough,” and so I stop eating. Or again, I used to be especially fond of big servings of meat and fish; after the fast I no longer wanted them and gradually came to prefer vegetarian food. This too is the wisdom of the abdominal brain.
3. Evening Meditation
At seven in the evening I sat in meditation while watching television. This is a convenient method, not formal seated meditation.
At nine I got into bed for formal seated meditation, closing the door and turning off the lights to reduce information and disturbance. I sit neither in the half lotus nor the full lotus, but with the legs naturally crossed, which is called the loose cross-legged posture. Buddhism requires the half lotus, ultimately reaching the full lotus. Taoism advocates naturalness—sit however feels natural and relaxed—and most sit in the loose posture.
I have kept up seated meditation for many years, an hour at a time. I first learned it from Zhang Shangde, a master of Chinese classical learning in Taiwan who once served as president of Taiwan's Society for the History of Chinese Philosophy and later founded and headed the Bodhidharma Academy.
In 1997 he visited the Department of Religious Studies at Wuhan University and asked to visit the Fifth Patriarch Temple in Huangmei. I drove him there and shared a room with him. During that time he taught me seated meditation in the Chan tradition, and once I had learned it I kept it up for many years.
In 2007 I joined a true-qi cultivation class in Wuhan run by Li Shaobo, a well-known Chinese medicine doctor from Gansu. We meditated every day, opened the Microcosmic Orbit, and practiced inner alchemy (neidan). From then on I began meditating according to Taoist methods, and I have kept it up to this day.
Seated meditation brings a person into stillness. Those experienced in meditation can enter stillness quickly and pass into another space, another state. The first requirement for one who practices grain avoidance is stillness: once the heart is still, the fast is half successful. If a person is fasting while his heart is on fame and fortune, rising and falling stocks, promotion and wealth, then, as the saying goes, his body is in the Cao camp but his heart is with the Han. With body and mind apart, the fast will have little effect.
I meditate every day and can enter stillness in a few minutes. After ten minutes there is a sense of rising, as if my body were leaving the bed and slowly floating up. After thirty minutes, the people, affairs, and things around me all feel far away. Matters that usually seem huge now seem insignificant. This is the sense of transcendence: going beyond reality to reach the unity of self and things, the unity of heaven and humanity.
8. The Effects of Grain Avoidance
The Tao is the original mother of heaven, earth, humans, and things. Its solid and manifest state is heaven, earth, humans, and things, belonging to visible matter and visible energy; its gaseous and hidden state is the void, belonging to dark matter and dark energy. The state a meditator reaches upon entering stillness transcends his own solid, manifest state and enters the gaseous, hidden state, merging with the void and returning to the embrace of the Great Tao, the original mother. The Great Tao, the original mother, warms the weary body and mind of the wanderer with a mother's love and infuses you with fresh essence, qi, and spirit. Powerful essence, qi, and spirit swirl through the body, removing fat where there is fat, removing blockage where there is blockage, and removing illness where there is illness, going everywhere and sweeping all before them.
The above is my experience of the methods of grain avoidance, which scientific testing has shown to have a very good therapeutic effect. Before the fasts I had “four highs”: besides high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and high blood lipids, I also had an abnormally high white blood cell count. A normal white blood cell count is between 3,000 and 10,000; mine once reached as high as 130,000. Before the fasts my white blood cell count was 25,000. After the first fast it fell to 15,000; after the second, to 14,000; after the third, to 9,000, within the normal range. Before the fasts my blood sugar was 10.8; after three fasts it fell to 7.4, close to normal. Before the fasts my blood pressure was 90–142, on the high side; after the fasts it fell to 70–120, completely normal. Before the fasts my blood lipids were high; afterward they returned to normal.
Grain avoidance is a natural therapy and a self-therapy. I have personally benefited greatly from it and have vowed to promote this excellent Chinese Taoist method of health cultivation, which is why I wrote this article. I hope it can help beginners in grain avoidance.
(Gong Zhebing, professor, School of Philosophy, Wuhan University)