Qiu Chuji (丘處機) (Born 1148 in Chi-hsia, China — Died July, 1227 in Beijing, china), widely known by his Taoist name Chang Chun Zi (長春子), was a Taoist master who provided spiritual guidance to Genghis Khan and was appointed by him as the head of religious affairs in China. His journey from northern China to Afghanistan to meet Genghis Khan was recorded by his disciple Li Chih-Ch’ang and contains some of his dialogues with Genghis Khan. Besides his involvement with Genghis Khan, and politics, Qiu Chuji was one of the most major Taoist spiritual leaders in history. Qiu Chuji was a disciple of Wang Chongyang, the founder of the Quanzhen (Complete Reality) school. Qiu Chuji is at the origin of his own branch of Quanzhen Taoism called Dragon Gate.
Journey to Genghis Khan
Around 1219, Genghis Khan summoned Qui Chuji to come visit him. Genghis Khan was principally interested in extending his life, since he had heard talk of Qui Chuji’s abilities in this regard. Qui Chuji was located in Lai-chou in northern China when he received the summons. He tried to arrange for Genghis to visit him when he returned from his campaign in the West (Central Asia and Afghanistan), but to no avail. Qui Chuji received a letter from Genghis that highly praised him and Taoism, and implored him to come to Central Asia.
In 1221, Qiu Chuji set out on his journey. He first responded to a request to visit Genghis’s brother Temuge, who was interested in extending his life. Qui Chuji told him that these matters could only be explained to someone who fasted and observed certain rules. Then Temuge sent him on his way, with a request for him to return after he had seen Genghis.
During the journey, Qiu Chuji was treated well but not always given what he wanted; for example he was not allowed to stop and rest for the winter. When Genghis’s son Chaghatai invited Qiu Chuji to stay with him to the south of the Amu Darya, Qiu Chuji refused because he thought his vegetarian diet was not viable in that area. Qiu Chuji received a letter from Genghis, who was on his way back to the East and eager to meet the master.
Genghis met qui Chuji near the Amu Darya. According Arthur Waley’s translation of the Travels of an Alchemist, Genghis said, “Other rulers summoned you, but you would not go to them. And now you have come ten thousand li to see me. I take this as a high compliment.”
Qiu Chuji replied, “That I, a hermit of the mountains, should come at your Majesty’s bidding was the will of Heaven.”
Genghis asked, “Adept, what medicine of long life have you brought me from afar?”
Qiu Chuji replied, “I have means of protecting life, but no elixir that will prolong it.”
Genghis was curious and Qiu Chuji answered his questions, teaching him about Taoism. They had many meetings, which were attended by interpreters and two of the Mongol leaders who had brought Qui Chuji to Genghis. Genghis invited Qiu Chuji to have all his meals with Genghis, but Qiu Chuji declined because he wanted peace and quiet. Genghis was so pleased with Qiu Chuji’s teachings that he ordered for them to be written down in Chinese characters.
In a sermon that has come down to us under the name Hsüan Fēng Ch’ing Hui Lu, Qui Chuji advised Genghis to practice chastity and vegetarianism. Genghis took this advice to heart and tried to apply it to some extent. Qiu Chuji also gave him political advice: he told Genghis not temporarily avoid taxing some provinces so they could economically recover from the effects of war. He advised having a Chinese minister manage this, and pointed out that this method had worked well for the previous dynasty.
Genghis and Qui Chuji returned to Mongolia together. They continued to meet and talk throughout the journey. Qiu Chuji did what he could to save lives by feeding the destitute. He convinced Genghis to hunt and eat meat less, and Genghis stopped hunting for two whole months. As a farewell gift, Genghis exempted the master’s pupils from taxation.
After Genghis and Qiu Chuji separated, Genghis continued to write to him. He wrote (in Arthur Waley’s translation ) “I am always thinking of you and I hope you do not forget me.” He requested for Qui Chuji and his disciples to pray for his longevity, and he offered to let Qiu Chuji live wherever he wanted.
Qiu Chuji died on July 23, 1227. Genghis Khan died a month later. Qui Chuji left behind many disciples, poetry, and some of his sermons which were recorded. His Dragon Gate school benefited from Genghis Khan’s support and became the dominant branch of Taoism.
Quotes
“Sweep, sweep, sweep! Sweep clear the heart till there is nothing left. He with a heart that is clean-swept is called a ‘good man.’”
“For ten thousand li I have rode on a Government horse; It is three years since I parted from my friends. The weapons of war are still not at rest, but of the Tao and its workings I have had my chance to preach.”
“Those who study Tao must learn not to desire the things that other men desire, not to live in places where other men live. They must do without pleasant sounds and sights, and get their pleasure only out of purity and quiet.”
References
The Travels of an Alchemist (1931), by Li Chih-Ch’ang, tr. Arthur Waley
Article originally published by LLE staff Taifun33 on the decentralized blockchain encyclopedia Lunyr. Free to modify and distribute under the Creative Commons 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
The Noble Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of Suffering gives us the Noble Eightfold Path which consists of eight limbs arranged in three groups: Sīla, Samādhi, and Paññā.
Verse 155: Not having led the Holy life, not having obtained wealth in their youth; such as these the unwise, pine away like aged herons in a life in which there are no fish. (Dhammapada)
Verse 184: Forbearing patience is the most excellent asceticism; Nirvana is supreme, so say the Buddha’s. He is not a recluse who harms another; nor is he an ascetic who molests others. (Dhammapada)
Verse 167: Do not follow mean friends (Sansualities). Dwell not in negligence. Cherish not face views. Be not merely for the worldly growth. (I.e.subject to repeated birth and deaths.)
. If you aim at the common good, do not lose compassion. . Be selfless. . If you want peace, live with life. . Don’t forget yourself. . Rejoice in the good of others. . Jealousy Don’t be short-tempered. . Take action that does not limit others. . Don’t mask the common good. . Be right in the direction of consciousness. . Do not aim for happiness. . Let him make no pretense of his vanity, and let him be without pretense of his sin. . bribes arising from work; public praise, popularity Don’t be cynical about history. . Always full of courage.
Taung Kalay Sayartaw 21-09-2018.
( Google လိုင်းပေါ်မှ ဘာသာပြန်ဆိုပေးမှုအတိုင်းသာ တင်ပြခြင်း ဖြစ်သည်။) (Translated by Google Translate without alterations)
. That sunny day The sky is blue All the world is quiet When it’s natural A tree that shows the divine process.
. He has The sound Aesthetic Passion Pride Without the laws of ignorance Spirit (no life) A little circle.
. However Because he doesn’t have those laws It is a beautiful prayer for the world I think so.
. Let’s say Human ego He has a human ego Pride It is true that there are no egos.
. But Spiritual To be a figure Does not fail Disintegrate The sun still shows.
. today For today Tree O Canyon He also lost his life He has a beautiful ego If it has consequences for the world He is me who There is always a story Ego tree? Pride tree? About him and his story Today is the tree canyon His story.
Taung ka Lay Sayataw (Aeè Koe ) Acting USA William Township. 17. September 2017
( Google ကနေတစ်ဆင့် ဘာသာပြန်ယူထားခြင်းဖြစ်သည် ) ( Translated by Google Translate)
A democracy is a political system in which the people periodically, by majority vote at the polls, select their rulers. The rulers then have absolute power to make whatever laws they please, by majority vote among themselves. In a constitutional Republic, the people also, by majority vote at the polls, select rulers, who make laws by majority vote among themselves; but the rulers cannot make any laws they please, because the Constitution severely restricts their law-making power.
The ideal of a democracy is universal equality. The ideal of a constitutional Republic is individual liberty.
Subversion of Language
In this century, great strides have been made toward the goal of subverting our Republic and transforming it into a democracy. One tactic of the subverters is subversion of language. By calling the United States a democracy until people thoughtlessly accept and use the term, totalitarians have obscured the real meaning of our principles of government.
Note the following passages from an article written by C. L. Sulzberger and distributed by the New York Times News Service (March 3, 1966 ) :
“Not only in the United States but in other leading democracies, recent years have seen perceptible growth in executive authority . . . .
“Amaury de Riencourt, a French intellectual, contends in his book, The Coming Caesars, that ‘as society becomes more equalitarian, it tends increasingly to concentrate absolute power in the hands of one single man.’ . . .
” ‘Caesarism is not …. brutal seizure of power through revolution. It is not based on a specific doctrine or philosophy. It is essentially pragmatic and untheoretical. It is a slow, often century-old, unconscious development that ends in a voluntary surrender of a free people escaping from freedom to one autocratic master.’ “
We are “escaping from freedom to one autocratic master,” trading our liberty for the promise of equality; but the operation is not an “unconscious development.”
Note the following from Page 9 of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma :
“In society liberty for one may mean the suppression of liberty for others … . In America . . . liberty often provided an opportunity for the stronger to rob the weaker. Against this, the equalitarianism in the [ American] Creed has been persistently revolting. The struggle is far from ended. The reason why American liberty was not more dangerous to equality [ in the early days of the nation] was, of course, the open frontier and the free land. When opportunity became bounded in the last generation, the inherent conflict between equality and liberty flared up. Equality is slowly winning “
And the following from page 13:
” [ In] America . . . . conservatism . . . has, to a great extent, been perverted into a nearly fetishistic cult of the Constitution. This is unfortunate since the 1 50-year-old Constitution is in many respects impractical and ill-suited for modern conditions and since, furthermore, the drafters of the document made it technically difficult to change even if there were no popular feeling against change.
“The worship of the Constitution also is a most flagrant violation of the American Creed . . . . Modern historical studies of how the Constitution came to be as it is reveal that the Constitutional Convention was nearly a plot against the common people.”
Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish socialist, was hired by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1 937 to direct a study of the Negro in the United States. Myrdal arrived in this country in September, 1938, engaged a large staff (some of them communists and pro-communists), and began his work. He was aided by several branches of the federal government, by some state and municipal authorities, by the NAACP, by the National Urban League, by private and public research institutions, by universities, by numerous individuals considered intellectual leaders of the day. An American Dilemma resulted, completed in 1942, first copyrighted in the United States in 1944.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its school-segregation decision, which deliberately violated the Constitution, reversed previous Supreme Court decisions, and lit a fuse touching off explosive lawlessness which has been shattering our society ever since. The Court cited An American Dilemma as one of the “modern authorities” on which it relied, in preference to the Constitution, for justification of its decision.
An American Dilemma provided a basic rationale for the conversion of our free Republic into an equalitarian democracy. Evidence of Gunnar Myrdal’s malignant and continuing influence on American life can be found in The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, prepared and published in March, 1965, by the Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor. This government study repeats Myrdal’s thesis that liberty and equality are incompatible, holding that equality must be our national goal. Note these passages from Pages 2 and 3:
“Liberty and Equality are the twin ideals of American democracy. But they are not the same thing …. nor … are they always compatible ….
“By and large, liberty has been the ideal with the higher social prestige in America. It has been the middle class aspiration, par excellence. (Note the assertions of the conservative right that ours is a republic, not a democracy.) Equality, on the other hand, has en joyed tolerance more than acceptance. Yet it has roots deep in Western civilization and is at least coeval with, if not prior to, liberty in the history of Western political thought.”
The Big Lie
Note that the government book unequivocally labels America a democracy, characterizing as merely an assertion the truth that America is a Republic.
Here again, we see the influence of the Swedish socialist, Gunnar Myrdal. Myrdal contends that the American Declaration of Independence ( 1776) proclaimed the ideal of an equalitarian democracy (because it contains the phrase, “All men are created equal”). Eleven years later ( 1787 ) , the Constitutional Convention produced the Constitution which created, not a democracy founded on the ideal of equality, but a Republic founded on the ideal of liberty. This is why Myrdal says the “Constitutional Convention was nearly a plot against the common people.” But he and those who parrot his ideas are either ignorant or dishonest.
The Declaration’s phrase, all men are created equal, means that men are equal before the Creator, regardless of their inequality in human society. The Declaration says that men are endowed with unalienable rights and that the purpose of government is to secure these rights. The unalienable rights of man enumerated in the Declaration of Independence do not include equality, but they do include liberty, along with life and pursuit of happiness.
Equality of all men in the eyes of God and before the law is a condition essential to freedom; but no other kind of equality is possible. Government efforts to achieve material equality will produce crushing tyranny, but will not make people equal.
The Great Truth
The continuity of ideals from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution is clear to serious students of American history. The fact that Madison, known as father of the Constitution, was a disciple and lifelong friend of Jefferson, author of the Declaration, should be enough to squelch the assertion that there is conflict of principles in these two documents. The Constitution was ordained in 1787 specifically to safeguard the principles of liberty proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The writers of the Constitution were anxious to safeguard liberty against dictatorship (monarchy, they called it) ; but their chief anxiety was to protect the country against democracy.
Edmund Randolph, delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Virginia, said the “general object” of the Convention was to “provide a cure for the evils” which beset the country, claiming that “in tracing these evils to the origin,” every man had found them to be in the “turbulence and follies of democracy.” He urged the Convention to produce a means to “check … and to restrain, if possible, the fury of Democracy.”
Elbridge Gerry and Roger Sherman, delegates from Massachusetts and Connecticut, urged the Constitutional Convention to create a system which would eliminate “the evils we experience,” saying that those ” evils . . . flow from the excess of democracy.”
Alexander Hamilton, delegate from New York, said :
“We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is neither found in despotism nor the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments . . . . if we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”
John Adams (not a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, but one of the giants of the American revolutionary period) said:
” … democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all; and when by chance it happens to get the upper hand for a short time, it will be revengeful, bloody, and cruel ….
Speaking of “pure democracies” (in which the people, by majority vote, act as their own lawmakers, instead of electing representatives to make laws) , James Madison said:
” … such democracies have ever been … incompatible with personal security or the rights of property . . . .
“A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking . . . .”
Madison did not, however, think the “scheme of representation” was enough to protect the people from tyranny. He knew, and said, that “enlightened men will not always be at the helm” of government to serve as “proper guardians of the public weal.” He knew that unlimited political power cannot safely be entrusted to the nation’s elected representatives, to use as a majority of them see fit, because, he said, a majority of a group of men is far more likely to be tyrannical than one man is.
In a democracy, if a majority should develop hatred for all blue-eyed babies and order them eliminated, the babies could be legally executed, because whatever a majority wants, at any given moment, is supreme law of the land, in a democracy.
Our Constitutional System
How can liberty be safeguarded against the mindless, soulless tyranny of majority rule, when government is founded on the principle of majority rule – when the men who govern, elected by majority vote of the people, make laws by majority vote among themselves? Jefferson answered the question succinctly:
“In questions of power . . . let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
In short, America was founded not as a democracy but as a constitutional Republic. We pledge allegiance to the Republic for which our flag stands, not to a democracy. The Constitution requires a “republican form of government” for all states, but does not mention democracy, and neither does the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution is a binding contract, specifically enumerating limited powers which the federal government can legally exercise, prohibiting it from exercising any powers not granted in the contract. It denies federal officials the power to do whatever they claim to be necessary for the general welfare. Federal action not clearly authorized by the Constitution is illegal even if approved by an overwhelming majority of the people, because all the elastic powers of government are left with the states.
Ultimate power to change the organic structure of government was left with the people; but the means of making changes (amending the Constitution) were carefully prescribed to militate against hasty, unwise decisions by the people.
As Benjamin Franklin left the State House in Philadelphia on the closing day of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked him what kind of government the Convention had given America. Franklin replied:
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Benjamin Franklin
Very old and very wise, Franklin saw through the mists of time to the day when Americans might trade their freedom in a constitutional Republic for the promise of government-guaranteed equality and security in a democracy – and beyond that, to the day when democracy inevitably degenerates into dictatorship, guaranteeing nothing but poverty and serfdom for the people it robs and rules.
The American constitutional system, unique in history, enabled Americans to develop a backward continent into the most magnificent nation of all time. The system was designed to prevent both tyranny by government and reckless rebellion by the people. We must restore it and keep it.
SUGGESTION: Distribute copies of this Report to students, teachers, libraries – and to anyone who calls the United States a democracy.
THE DAN SMOOT REPORT is published weekly by The Dan Smoot Report, Inc., Box 9538, Dallas, Texas 75214 (office at 6441 Gaston Ave.). Subscriptions: $18.00 for 2 years; $10.00, 1 year; $6.00, 6 months; first class, $12.50 a year; airmail, $14.50. Dan Smoot was born in Missouri, reared in Texas. With BA and MA degrees from SMU ( 1938 and 1940), he joined the Harvard faculty ( 1941) as a Teaching Fellow, doing graduate work in American civilization. From 1942 to 1951, he was an FBI agent; from 1951 to 1955, a commentator on national radio and television. In 1955, he started his present independent, free-enterprise business: publishing this REPORT and abbreviating it each week for radio and TV broadcasts available for commercial sponsorship by business firms.
Copyright by Dan Smoot, 1966. Second Class mail privilege authorized at Dallas, Texas No Reproduaioo5 Pennitted.
The Dan Smoot Report The true form of the US Government is a Republic, Not A Democracy. Not merely a symantic difference. The Founding Fathers despised democracy. They formed a Republic to guard against rule by majority. First we were told we were a democracy, then the republic was transformed into a democracy. Now we are witnessing the democracy collapse into dictatorship.
