Mantak Chia - A Modern Taoist Master
by Christopher Larthe
listed in interviews, originally published in issue 42 - July 1999
Famous for his books on cultivating male and female sexuality, Mantak Chia is probably the most quoted, misquoted and plagiarised of writers on esoteric sex. Less well known is his great work as healer and teacher. He founded the system known as The Healing Tao which today has over 700 certified instructors and thousands of practitioners throughout the world, teaching and practising the Taoist arts, from Healing to Tai Chi, offering benefits ranging from stress relief to immortality.
He was born in Bangkok to Chinese parents in 1944. His father was a Baptist minister, the first break in many generations of Taoist Healers. In a land of Buddhism, with strong Hindu and animist influences, Mantak Chia was brought up as a Christian. After twenty years in the West, he now lives and works at the Tao Garden, the home and healing meditation centre he has created in Northern Thailand.
In this exclusive interview for Positive Health magazine, he talks to Christopher Larthe about healing and magic, sex and religion, mobile phones and immortality.
The traditional Taoist masters taught one-to-one, never to foreigners, and closely guarded their ancient secrets. You have written ten books and you teach Westerners in a very Western way, with workshops and group seminars. Why break with the old traditions?
My teacher, the hermit White Cloud, was last of the long lineage of masters from Long White Mountain at Chang Bai San near Manchuria. Seeing the traditional way of the Tao being repressed in his homeland, he feared the secrets of long life and good health would be lost. In exile in Hong Kong, he saw how other masters charged too much money for these secrets, just giving to one or two pupils. He felt the way to keep the Taoist practices alive was to bring them into modern society so that many could benefit. It was he who instructed me to teach Westerners but first to prove my roots with my own people.
You taught first in your home city of Bangkok and then in the Chinese community of New York.[1] Your main work was healing, but it was the sexual practices that caught the attention of your Western students. These secret arts were originally taught to enable an Emperor to enjoy his harem of wives and concubines without depleting his energies. You were brought up a Christian. Did you not feel a conflict with the Christian ideas of sin?
No conflict, for sexual practices are healing practices, healing the self, healing relationships. It is only sin if you see it as sin. Sex is natural, not sinful. The human being has a powerful sex drive – and you cannot keep ping-pong balls under water. Sometime, somewhere, they pop back up, maybe as disease, maybe as emotional problems, causing energy blockages, leading to illness.
Are you saying we should repress nothing, have sex whenever and wherever, with whoever?
I say sex is your servant, not your master. Who am I to decide where and when, or who you do it with? This is between you and your conscience. I teach how to control and harness the sexual energy, energy powerful enough for a man to repopulate a continent with a single ejaculation. And every woman is born with enough eggs to generate hundreds of lives. Without reproduction all that power is wasted. If we are not using the hormones and nutrients of sexual activity to start a new life we can recycle it to make our own life longer, healthier, more enjoyable. Not repressing, recycling!
And the moral aspect?
All the churches make the morals, but they all say different things. Some religions say sex with corpses is a sacred path to enlightenment, with others you may have several wives at once, while in others you go to hell for impure thought. What is impure thought? Every man secretly imagines being Emperor, having many women, even monks and priests, even saints – Saint Augustine said "Lord give me chastity, but please, not just yet." Some churches try to make us feel guilty for thinking natural thoughts. Yet these urges make our human species so successful, so strong, survive so many generations. Imagine an enlightened being descending to earth now and telling us it is sinful to move our bowels. We'd all go pop! We cannot help moving bowels, it is a natural function. So is sex. In the Tao we say: no right or wrong, no good or bad, just recycling the energy.
Do you still consider yourself a Christian?
I do. These are not religious practices and you don't have to convert! You can be Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and still enjoy the benefits in the framework of your own belief system, if you have one. I am Christian, but don't belong to any church. I may start one here in the Tao Garden – we already married three couples. No, the churches teach about it being bad to do this, bad to do that. We don't have to be taught what's bad: it comes naturally. Or doing what comes naturally – they call it bad! The Western God is dominant male, very yang, enforcing law with fear of punishment, burn in hell. Society reflects this, with laws enforced by violence. Now there is imbalance between the yang of justice and the yin of compassion. True religion is about love and compassion.
What about the balance of the sexes? You have written a best seller, MultiOrgasmic Man.[2] What about multiorgasmic woman?
Woman naturally is multiorgasmic, and one of my earliest books was about cultivating female sexual energy.[3] Woman is yin. Yang and yin cannot exist without each other, so it is better if they are in harmony. Taoist practice is to promote harmony, because when the man lets go of semen, he is finished, but the woman is ready for more. When both are in tune, they have increased vigour, improved stamina, enhanced sensation, unlimited whole-body orgasms. Ideal is the multiorgasmic couple. The sexual practices are self-healing for couples.
