Motherheart Dragon Priest

Chapter 10f - Three Treasures Empty Stillness

And so the days passed. Each one revealing some new ritual the witches had devised for their own seeking of Dao. Each day bringing some new attempt to break his facade of being the Woodsman. They knew he wasn’t one. He was too skilled in his responses to them, yet he did nothing but his chores and some basic daily qi gong and his wood style fighting forms. Did they sense his meditations, could they see the emanations of his shen as he daily transmuted his jing into qi and then into shen?

If so they made no attempt to interfere with his meditation, except for their nightly forays to his sleeping quarters. They came sometimes individually sometimes together, but always to try and caress him with their hands and their mouths. He feigned sleep or indignation and so kept them at a distance. Then toward the end of his half moon stay the attempted seductions became more vigorous and he at last joined with them when one night they both arrived to taunt him.

Laughing Moon sat in the middle of his sleeping hut. It was four days after the spring equinox full moon and the night was still dark as it awaited the caress of the moon rise. A silk mosquito net was suspended from the roof of his sleeping quarters and this formed an inner temple within which Moon meditated and transmuted his qi. His breathing was slow and deep, his body rippling with the tremors that spread out from his belly. The fire of his heart was streaming upward and his mind’s eye pulsed with violets and blues as his shen moved in and out of embrace with his Dao.

The bamboo door opened just as the moon rose over the scrub of the shore. It was still tinged the soft yellow reds from its time of embrace with the sun and now the moon came to caress and cultivate the forms of the resting Mother. And so the heavenly example of the Three Treasures–sun, earth and moon, moving in continual cycles of caress and cultivation–showed the way for all those who could see and learn.

Awakening to the Dao was thus seen as the learning of these cycles. Sometimes as one alone, daily as two together in loving embrace and again during the day for half the month as three together. The witches entered leaving the door open and the moonlight flooding his private sanctuary. The presence of all three of them at night was heresy for Father Sun was not present so the two priestesses again flaunted the Laws of the Three Treasures for it was only during the light of the sun that Consort Moon was also present with the Father and the Mother.

The two priestesses wore the waist to ankle skirts of a high priestess. Their oiled upper bodies glistened, while painted spiral designs swirled around their breasts, up their necks and across their faces to finish in the spirals of their pinned and plaited hair. They stood on either side of the netting and a barely audible chanting seemed to thicken the air and fill the room with an unfamiliar qi.

Moon returned his shen awareness to his forehead Yellow Castle, the upper elixir field in his head; his qi virility to his Red Palace, the middle elixir field in his chest; and his jing essence to his Black Pearl Chamber, the lower elixir field below his navel. He raised his hands in response to their arrival to double “ward off”, breathed into his palms and reinforced his defensive wei qi.

As his wei qi quickened he moved his hands into push mountain posture, one to each of the priestesses. With his out breath he felt the palm of each of his hands warm and he visualised righteous qi rush forth from his palm and join with the heart qi in the chest of each priestess. He heard them both gasp at the arrival and their chanting stopped as his qi merged into theirs.

A transmutation began, one that had been drummed into them since their very first meditation training. The arrival of righteous qi transmutes accumulated fire in the Red Palace elixir field into the light of Dao shen.

The priestesses realised what he had done too late to counter it. All their previous training would come into play with this action of his and they would be thrown into Three Treasures Meditation and they would yield to it as this is what they had practised for years. Their bodies would respond without directed thought and then...

There was no time. There was no thought. There was only being. A silence of being. An inner silence so total that no thought or prethought disturbed the surface of the lake of their being. Their breath was deep and almost non-existent as each was dissolved into the emptiness of the eternal.

This had been no mere warding off gesture as he had done on each of the previous occasions of their attempted seductions. This time it had been the capture of their heart shen qi in such a way as they could not even contemplate. He knew that they both now realised the depth of his skill, of how they had been but children at play under the gaze of their guardian.

The silence seemed to linger forever as the priestesses imagined his qi melding with theirs and they began to feel the assisted transmutation continue. Laughing Moon began a bass droning dirge deep in his throat, its tone and pitch such that one’s focus was directed to the lower abdomen and the elixir field within.

Now was the time of danger. For now was the time when the body would be flooded with the sensations of ecstasy, the mind with insights and the heart with the fire of self importance.

Their minds reeled at these impacts, as waves of shen qi flooded out from their Red Palace, much as waves spread from a stone that had been cast into a pond. Here though, the arrival of his qi was no mere stone but a boulder that would displace all the self-centred pettiness that they had each attached to themselves.

No matter how skilful they were at all their arts, it all amounted to nothing if their Red Palace was occupied only by their personal awareness. True skills develop, and the ultimate power of oneness with the universe is acquired only when an individual’s awareness, their shen, merges with the daoshen, to produce universal awareness.

A murmuring came from the lips of the two Priestesses. The chant began anew, but this time different. It was still something of their own, but it was in harmony with his dirge and so an expression of their newly harmonised heart qi. Moon heard the netting lift and felt the two of them sit near him such that the three of them formed a triangle.

He moved and sat with the heel of his left foot sealing his lower gate in his perineum and the heel of his right supporting his yang kidneys, his testicles. The priestesses each sat so that a knee of his touched their lower elixir field. He drew his hands in toward his Red Palace and then with the out breath rolled them out to rest one between the breasts of each Priestess.

Their breathing patterns quickly united and they then placed one hand on him and the other on their sister. The breathing deepened and slowed gradually to stone breathing. Barely audible and barely noticeable. Time slowed as their bodies slowed. Their awareness merging and melding as each journeyed into the other to see that which they needed to see so as to complete themselves. In this way they passed the night, bodies blurred by the breathing and the impact of meditation threefold stronger than each had ever experienced before.