LaoHuGong: The Practice of Shamanic Tiger Qigong

Some have asked: Why the tiger?

I practice LaoHuGong (Shamanic Tiger qigong), a movement practice for raising bodily qi centered on the lower dantien as taught by Master Zhongxian Wu.

LaoHuGong is an at-least-once-daily practice for me, in combination with zazen (sitting meditation), kinhin (walking meditation), and chanting, creating a continuum of stillness, motion, expression, and action.

Soto-style kinhin is that super slow one-breath-per-step walking. LaoHu takes the stillness-in-motion even further.

I didn’t have the category of “qigong” in my reality until I was like 25 years old. It simply wasn’t part of the universe. And yet, when I learned the category, the first time I began to move like that, it was like learning the Earth was a place with a name, not just the ground.

LaoHuGong is important to a few Soto Zen-trained people I know. You’ve heard of “just sitting”? That’s us. You might wonder, what is the affinity with these movements? Is it despite all the sitting, or because of it?

There are always many factors that drive one to one’s home practice. So many that it’s senseless to call any one practice “best.”

But “schools” form when enough people are coming from similar-enough places that they begin to make sense to each other.

Shikantaza (“just sitting”) is not self-denying or body-denying. Hardly. It is nonthinking, only being the body sitting and breathing.

Those of us drawn to these instructions are still adjusting to being in THIS form, for the time being. We may have ALWAYS known it wasn’t “me.”

There is an uncanniness to this experience that I, at least, have always felt. “This” isn’t “me” from the absolute frame, but it certainly SEEMS like it from the relative frame.

Conceptual discomfort with that disconnect came later; first was just a clear FEELING of discomfort.

Zazen is simultaneously the exploration AND resolution of this discomfort.

The paring down of any experience other than the fundamental one: of being empty of discrete self-nature, just a conduit of universal exchange of qi.

Tiger and cave. Emerging and returning.

Stillness and motion interpenetrate each other. As the body moves, the world compensates. Equal and opposite. The terms cancel out.

Shikantaza and LaoHuGong correspond according to this principle.

In combining these practices, we accommodate relative body and absolute Body.

I also do sitting meditation directly after raising energy through movement practice (whenever I can). This has created an association between zazen and this high-energy state that is durable and co-arising.