Nathan Brine's Taoist Alchemy Youtube Channel

[Longmen Pai]

I couldn't find anything with a search for "Nathan Brine", so I thought that I'd provide a link to his Youtube channel. He has been putting out quite a few lately on a wide variety of internal alchemy topics, and hopefully he'll continue to do so. I very much like his gentle sense of humor and both scholarly and practical insight.

Brine is a student of Wang Liping, who is perhaps best known as the subject of the book "Opening the Dragon's Gate: The Making of a Modern Taoist Wizard" translated by Thomas Cleary. The book can seem a bit romanticized at moments but--at least in my experience so far--the techniques taught in the lineage are the real thing.

[Kiorionis]

Awesome, I’ll have to take a look at those videos later.

What do you think of Cleary? I personally have a hard time reading his books.

[Longmen Pai]

I wish I could give you a good answer to that, but it has been so long since I've read anything else by him I can't really say. (Although that in itself says that he has never really pulled me.)

I didn't like "Opening the Dragon's Gate" even though it's the kind of subject I would normally love. I read more or less the first 1/4 and the last 1/4 and skipped the rest. To be fair to Clearly, though, I'm not sure how much of it was him and how much the original authors.

I'm interested to hear what you find hard to read about him.

[Kiorionis]

To be fair to Clearly, though, I'm not sure how much of it was him and how much the original authors.

That’s fair to say.

I’ve read vol. 2 of his “Taoist Classics” as well as “Awakening to the Tao” and both of them seem like they come from the perspective of an academic rather than a practitioner. So I think that’s why I find him hard to read.

His Taoist Classics book wasn’t what I expected as well. Rather then a complete translation of the works included it turned out to be snippets and short passages (from what I can remember).

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But back on topic, just watched a bit of the Nathan Brine YouTube about “what is internal alchemy”. I like his definition, that it is a way of either developing an Elixir or an Embryo.

[Longmen Pai]

But back on topic, just watched a bit of the Nathan Brine YouTube about “what is internal alchemy”. I like his definition, that it is a way of either developing an Elixir or an Embryo.

Elsewhere Brine has referred to Dragon's Gate as an "art of energetic transformation" but I agree that defining it in terms of developing the Elixir or Embryo is more specific. Obviously practices like neigong in the internal martial arts are about energetic transformation but, in my experience and study anyway, don't involve things like the Elixir and Embryo.