Dr Hsu is sending us best wishes from Shanghai and congratulates with The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival.
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Dr Hsu is sending us best wishes from Shanghai and congratulates with The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival.
How did Blue Mountain Institute get its name?
Blue Mountain is one of the 10 most sacred centers of Taoism. It is in Sichuan province. There are many temples on the Blue Mountain. One of top Taoist temples is also there. I’ve been there many times, I have a kind of special connection. So, I used the name Blue Mountain.
Chinese name of the mountain actually is Qingcheng. Qing (青) means green as well as blue. Cheng (城) – city, or temple. Because it is all green. So, I translated it as Blue Mountain, because the word Qingcheng does not make sense on the West.
I had many deep experiences on the Blue Mountain. About one of them I wrote in my book The Medicine Box, in the last few chapters. In that times there were no tourists on the Mountain. But now it is very busy.
I had many trips and experiences there. Once I decided I should go to Blue Mountain and learn something, what time this teaching should be spread to the West. So, me and professor Chung, my very good friend. He is a psychic, he can do automatic writing.
We wanted to find a hermit, find a master on the mountain. But we didn’t find a master. But we did learn something. Very interesting experience.
When we were leaving the mountain I thought “Gosh, I did not learn anything! We did not see a hermit.” There are many Taoism temples there and many Taoists. But when we asked there, they answered “We do not have such a person”.
Later when we went to Shanghai we visited some temples, and from my experience in Shanghai I realized that I did learn something. It is not like verbal or written learning.
After visiting Blue Mountain I decided to give the name Blue Mountain to our institute. The Institute was established in 1989. Even today there are a lot of Taoist master on the Blue Mountain.
Around the midpoint of my life, I found myself wondering whether I was on the right path. I considered whether I should change careers and set out on a new course. Around this time, I received a call from an old friend of mine in China who was a Taoist qigong healer. This friend told me that he had returned to the island where he was born, and he invited me to visit whenever I happened to be in China.
Fengshui talk with Dr. Hsu, Jenny, Taras & Justin via Zoom on May 12, 2020. All Zoom talks and Q&A sessions with Master Hsu you can watch here.
Many Blue Mountain feng shui students in different parts of the world are asking me “how do we see and handle the coronavirus pandemic from a feng shui perspective?” I was surprised at the question, as feng shui is about living environment design. It is about life design and has no obvious connection to this pandemic.
However, since the fundamental feng shui principle is based on natural principles — natural laws, the highest guidance for human living, then maybe we can try to see the pandemic from a natural law perspective.
Master Hsu is practicing Tai Chi in the snowy morning in China, Guangping, Hebei province, on Dec. 15, 2019. It is the brithplace of Yang Luchan (1799–1872), influential teacher of the internal style martial art Tai Chi Chuan (Taiji Quan), the founder of Yang-style Tai Chi Chuan:
In our previous note, we mentioned that water quality can be assessed through the form or image of the water.
In the 1960s, the German scientist, Theodor Schwenk, the author of Sensitive Chaos, developed a “drop picture method” for studying water.
In 1990, I participated in the first Water Symposium held in Washington State (in the US). About sixty scientists and inventors participated in a discussion of the question, “What is good water?”
Most people approached this from the point of view of physics: they talked about the pH, oxygen content, molecular size, purity, conductivity, surface tension, and so on. These are all things that can be measured and put into numbers.
What is beauty? What is the experience of beauty?
Philosophers, both in the East and West, have tried to address this subject: in the West, Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hegel; in the East, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Chuang Tzu, and more recently Cai Yanpei, Wang Guowei, and Zhu Guangqian.
We used to discuss what is beauty? – the subjective and objective sides of beauty, and the combination of both.
Regardless of the philosophy of the issue, we have to admit that pure art and architectural art are very different from each other. For one thing, architecture is a very complicated art form, because it has elements of many arts combined in it. But more important is how architecture relates to the public.