On Healing Rituals and Such Matters
Among folk healing rituals, the most commonly used include "one bowl of water for ten thousand illnesses," inviting incense to bless water, reciting the Eight Immortals mantra, or Great Compassion water, and the like.
The general method is to hold a bowl of water, recite a mantra, and then have the patient drink it—in this way they can recover.
During the Qing dynasty, many folk societies practiced this too, though most of them were labeled evil cults because they liked to form cliques and factions.
Buddhism also likes to do this, because Buddhism itself has no talismans; the talismans in China were adapted after copying those of Taoism. Although early on there were some ideas of seed syllables and mantra wheels, they appeared rather late, and in any case they are not talismans. Yet missionary work always requires demonstrating some abilities to believers, so most choose pure scripture recitation or mantra-charged water and the like.
Later these practices were absorbed by folk societies, giving rise to many incongruous systems—typically lighting incense and reciting the Eight Immortals mantra to draw water for healing. Because they often worked, and the form was simple, they spread very quickly; of course, they were also suppressed quickly.
Evaluated objectively, the psychological effect accounts for a large part, the patient's spontaneous recovery for another part, and only the remaining tiny part has anything to do with the mantra.
The usual explanation for why mantras have some effect goes roughly like this: mantras are a kind of infrasound that resonates within the body, thus achieving the goal of healing.
This claim is somewhat problematic, because the sound wave range humans can produce is 85–1100 Hz, while the range the human ear can hear is 20–20,000 Hz; only what is produced below 20 Hz can be called infrasound.
Yet most mantras must be voiced aloud; once voiced, they fall within the range the human ear can hear, so they cannot be infrasound. If silently recited, the infrasound theory is even less applicable.
In fact, infrasound is constantly being produced in everyday life—for example, when a person waves a hand, there is no audible sound, but friction with the air does produce sound, and this generates infrasound.
So explaining things via infrasound is pure forced analogy. As for what the actual principle of mantras is, I will introduce it in a dedicated article later.
Strictly speaking, mantra-charged water for healing is the crudest method—much like firmly believing that drinking plain boiled water can cure ten thousand illnesses, and some illnesses really do get cured that way (the premise being firm belief).
What would be a more reliable approach? Put it this way: if you don't draw a talisman, you should at least write some sacred formulae, otherwise how could you expect any real effect?
If reciting scriptures could cure every illness, there would have been no doctors in the world long ago.
Then something more advanced must be discussed. The most famous and specifically effective method must first be the Thirteen Departments of Zhuyou—one of the healing methods officially recognized by ancient courts.
The Thirteen Departments of Zhuyou are described in general references. The commonly used explanation is: in Zhuyou (祝由), zhu means incantation, and you means the cause of the illness.
This interpretation was proposed by modern scholars and was once quite popular, but it is actually wrong.
Zhuyou arts actually comprise many systems. The Zhuyou systems common today—such as those in books like the Record of the Stele: Thirteen Departments of Zhuyou of the Yellow Emperor—appeared extremely late, already in the Yuan–Ming period. Some of their talismans actually come from the "Summoning the Celestial Physicians in Thirteen Departments" section of the Taoist Canon's Complete Book of Lingbao Guidance, Salvation, and Universal Deliverance, which itself dates to roughly the Southern Song.
Thunder rites were quite popular in the Song dynasty, so the Zhuyou arts actually in circulation appeared only after the Song—and strictly speaking should be considered a branch of thunder rites. Examined closely, the Thirteen Departments of Zhuyou contain content from the Xihe school (jujube incantations), the Shenxiao school, and the Lingbao Donghua school.
Although originating after the Song, this kind of Zhuyou should be called thunder-rite Zhuyou; it is actually different from the ancient Zhuyou arts.
And thunder-rite Zhuyou inevitably requires internal cultivation work before its effects can truly be brought forth.
The ancient Zhuyou arts will be introduced in a separate article if there is opportunity.
There is now a school that transmits a form of Zhuyou whose cultivation method is to practice writing the three characters pang, hai, and peng one hundred times daily. This method originates from the Li-family Zhuyou arts of the 1990s, whose materials explicitly state that it was received from an old man; judging by the wording, it seems genuine.
However, someone later secretly altered the art, adding the three characters hua-biao-zhu (ceremonial column), and claimed it as a secret lineage—in fact this was written long ago in the Li-family Zhuyou materials and is hardly worth mentioning.
But it must be said that the Li-family Zhuyou arts are not orthodox Zhuyou. They were originally a method of internal skill and finger technique. The version circulating now is incomplete—not only missing some key points, but also omitting various applications of techniques and certain special treatments. For example, the Tai'e sword formula can break a person's internal force at the Guanyuan point, and so on. Presumably because the art was closely guarded, it was never fully made public.
Judging from the pure methods, since it is only a technical skill, it is essentially not much different in efficacy from cultivating Golden Light Water or practicing Five-Element Water (or other methods).
So for ordinary folk ritual lineages, once a practitioner has passed the lineage threshold, the efficacy of the talismans and consecrated water they produce is no weaker than practicing this art. Although this art has its features, before a relatively systematic lineage it can only be called a chicken rib—of little real value.
There are also some transmissions called Zhuyou methods of the Heavenly Physician school, mostly concerning transferring illnesses and shifting diseases. These contents actually also come from folk ritual lineages—more precisely, from materials of the Wusheng school, including much of the Tiger Command Gate. I once looked into this a little; they seem to have been taught by ritual masters active around Jinhua in Zhejiang, and so they spread.
Thus many newer ritual arts are mostly modern people reusing earlier things, patching them together, and calling the result their own.
These behaviors, frankly, are really bad. Without copyright protection, this is what happens.
So how effective are these arts? Of course they are of some use.
But hoping that after learning them one can go around treating and saving people is impossible. Such arts only occasionally show remarkable effects; their efficacy is not stable, and if the treatment success rate were statistically compared, it might not be higher than taking medication.
However, the key point is this: for some illnesses where medication is ineffective, using these methods sometimes often produces remarkable results.
Although this does not mean they surpass medicine, it shows that these methods and drug treatment are mutually complementary. If combined and applied properly, they can raise the overall cure rate—a good thing for patients.
Only by correctly recognizing this can one make better use of them. That is to say, if someone falls ill: take medicine when medicine is indicated, go to the hospital when the hospital is indicated; if that fails to cure the illness, then consider ritual methods for treatment—this often yields remarkable results.
Never be foolish enough, after curing a few cases, to think one is omnipotent and then drag people away from hospitals. That is digging one's own grave.
When it comes to treating illness with ritual arts, one must understand that there are levels. If you are a beginner, comparing against the following levels will let you truly understand where you stand.
Level one: half-understanding or no understanding at all, occasionally learning some arts, trying them and finding the results rather good, with a few fairly miraculous cases—so one feels quite formidable.
This type is like a newborn calf unafraid of tigers, and easily exaggerates the ritual arts' healing effects at this stage. In fact, the success rate at this level of treatment may not be much higher than that of psychotherapy.
Level two: knowing considerably more, facing more people, yet discovering that what one knows and has learned is not omnipotent—often unable to handle serious illnesses and failing at minor ones. So one inevitably wavers, wondering whether something is wrong with oneself, and then studies hard to go deeper, with one's skill continually improving.
At this level it is easy to go astray—for example by classifying illnesses as yin illnesses or yang illnesses, claiming ritual arts can only treat yin illnesses and not yang ones, and so on. In the end one draws a circle and limits oneself, making further progress difficult.
Level three: having grasped the general patterns, clearly knowing what one can treat and what one cannot, which treatments yield good results and which yield poor ones. And being able to integrate Chinese medicine and establish one's own explanatory system, truly treating according to the illness—only then has one preliminarily stepped through the threshold of the healing way and can be considered a good physician.
After these three stages, one will either go deeply into Chinese medicine study and research, or focus on internal cultivation practice—because these are the roots. So different paths lead to the same destination; often one goes around and comes back again.
Some people will understand upon reading this: many people think ritual healing is stronger and more advanced than traditional Chinese medicine or ordinary internal cultivation. That is a mistaken view—a case of putting the branch before the root.
>Some may not care about what has been said above, and some who have learned ritual healing may not care much about the levels described here. Time will prove everything; as long as one does not regret it later, that is fine.