Xu Mingtang Review: Zhong Yuan Qigong and Image Medicine

This article is dedicated to the following teacher: Xu Mingtang. We decided to write about him since he was one of our early teachers long ago. Being a novice cultivator is like walking in a dark, hostile forest without a light. The "Grandmasters" can take advantage of new students by claiming they know everything, would show you everything and are just short of being gods on this earth. A young cultivator needs to lower expectations of quickly acquiring power. Also, the young and naive fall for those schemes, and many teachers prey on the naive en masse.

Daoist training, also known as Daoist internal cultivation, refers to the practices and techniques used in Daoism to cultivate physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Here are some benefits of Daoist training:

1. Improved physical health: Daoist training emphasizes the importance of physical health, with practices such as Qigong and Tai Chi that can improve balance, flexibility, and overall fitness.

2. Reduced stress and anxiety: Many Daoist practices, such as meditation and breathing exercises, are effective in reducing stress and anxiety, promoting relaxation, and improving mental clarity.

3. Increased self-awareness: Daoist training involves self-reflection, introspection, and mindfulness, leading to a deeper understanding of oneself and one's place in the world.

4. Spiritual growth: Daoist training can help individuals develop a sense of spirituality, which can bring a sense of peace, purpose, and fulfillment.

5. Enhanced longevity: According to Daoist principles, following a balanced and harmonious lifestyle can help individuals live longer and healthier lives. Daoist training can provide a holistic approach to health and wellness, encompassing life's physical, mental, and spiritual aspects. It can help individuals cultivate a greater sense of well-being, harmony, and balance.

Commitment to a particular system or a teacher requires a leap of faith and a certain amount of time to try the system. It's just the principle of Kung Fu: cumulative effort leads to results. However, it's better to ask someone with experience to see whether the prospective teacher is knowledgeable enough or worth following. Mainly, the teachers sell the practice to you to paint such a rosy picture, promising you to self-heal any disease, become a happy person, and maybe attain superpowers. We will go over each teacher and their system in detail so that you can make your conclusion.

Xu Mingtang is a founder of Zhong Yuan Qigong. He is a legendary self-proclaimed Qigong Grand Master and Lineage Holder of Zhong Yuan Qigong; he is a Chairman, Director, Founder, and deputy CEO of multiple organizations. All these titles are there to give him leverage of authority and push his media persona forward as an expert in internal arts and cultivation. The system of Zhong Yuan Qigong is claimed to be multiple thousands of years old, and he came from a family of internal arts masters linked with Shaolin tradition and inherited all kinds of secrets and powers along the line. He quickly became international and expanded to Western Hemisphere, Europe, and the United States. Xu Mingtang did organize retreats and taught his students outside the Shaolin Temple.

Image Medicine is an invention of Xu Mingtang. He claimed to have healed hundreds of thousands of patients with it, including tens of thousands with incurable diseases, and he claims to treat cancer patients successfully. If that were the case, he would've been known as the best cancer doctor in the world. Yes, Chinese medicine has its place, but we found no evidence of mass miracle healing. This is something relatively new; back in 2007, he didn't teach any of this. Mingtang, for example, has banned his instructors from teaching Image Medicine so that he can only do it himself.

In general, we have a very negative opinion about Masters who claim healing ability; this is just pure quackery. Yes, if you do Qigong exercises, your general health will improve, but so can be said about any physical exercise like running. Xu claims that his imagination and thought forms will heal hard stuff like cancer. Just give me a break. 

Xu Mingtang became famous by showing his Qi Powers on television and the internet to some "experts" and scientists. He has been showing two of his most known tricks: breaking chopsticks and pencils with a paper bill and twisting spoons in his hands by "melting metal structure with his powerful Qi energy." Both of these demonstrations are cheap unadulterated scams and trickery.

It's easy to break a pencil with your finger when you stick it out for a split second behind the bill and then put it away. With spoons, you need to weaken the most narrow point with repeated bending load; this will produce beyond-yield stresses and warm up the metal. After that, you can twist the spoon easily and claim how you used "Fire Qi" to do it.

Master Xu's lifestyle is not temperate, and his physical condition does not reflect the vitality the practice promises. If you look at some pictures of him throughout the years; you can see his health is deteriorating steadily without any regard for the practices that he does. He's not even 60 years old, yet he has to dye his hair black like other Masters to appear more healthy. While people can affect their subjective perception of themselves of their health, it does not mean they can change the objective reality and physical state of complex organisms and organs in the body. Thinking and believing you are healthier does not mean you actually become healthier. It is just a pipe dream, bullshido to believe in. One of his favorite foods is pancakes with caviar.

Xu Mingtang claimed he had a great and holy aura as he went to some person's home, and every living thing there was subconsciously attracted to him. The child was playing with him, and the cat came to cuddle. All of this is an example of attribution bias, as anyone could find himself in a similar situation. People generally can't feel subtle energies; visions, sounds, emotions, and material things can trigger a response. Any person with a presence and a good mood can uplift others; after all, there's a reason why music shows are so popular.  

More about Xu Mingtang's absurdity. The followers enthusiastically recount to each other the following incident: One overweight woman asked Xu Mingtang, "How can I lose weight?" Xu Mingtang said, "You should eat less." With a roar of delight, this is presented as the great wisdom of the teacher in simplicity and great simplicity in wisdom. But there are people who need some exercises to strengthen the nervous system in order to stop overeating. And there are people with metabolic disorders who eat little and "swell from the air." And a sane and knowledgeable master would just advise suitable exercises. If it were so simple, "you need to eat less," then there would be no fat people on the planet, and people would not die of obesity and heart disease.

At the highest level of the Zhong Yuan System, you learn some basics of beginner Qigong practices like Zhang Zhuang in Zhong Yuan style. Still, some are taught improperly and incompletely because the GM doesn't know the qualities and skills required to undertake cultivation. His program consists of mainly useless visualization-manifestation practices and supporting exercises.

Zhong Yuan Qigong has three basic levels and a more advanced 4th level, after which you can buy yourself the status of instructor. The higher the level, the fewer actual Qigong practices there are, and the more mysticism and esotericism there are. You move from doing regular sitting and standing practices to imagining Dantiens, channels, and external energy. He uses visualization improperly as he tries to invoke action using visualization. For example, he has an exercise called "reverse aging by imagining yourself as a newborn baby." He thinks it's easy to start the anti-aging process by thinking that you're extremely young. In the end, it comes down to wasted mental effort creating useless illusions. Image Medicine is also based on this nonsense. Mingtang tries to be a wizard without really understanding how the energies work.

And then again, since he has such a large school, he has instructors teaching instead of Mingtang to most of his student base. There have been multiple complaints that the instructors try to teach with their own style, not Xu's way. A lot of them are very arrogant and scared of perceived competition, so new talented students wouldn't take part of their income by becoming an instructor themselves. Initiation into the teacherhood did cost about 1000 dollars back in 2005.

One instructor of the ZYQ school and one of the first students of Xu Mingtang became unwell and unstable and stated in an email newsletter that it was difficult for her to manage the creation of a parallel and happier universe alone, so Xu Mingtang gave her the authority to conduct seminars for teacher assistants. Very slowly, she was deprived of instruction. She also had a friend in a similar state. Mingtang never kicked her out. He saw everything, but his hands were tied: if you openly recognize one of your main instructors as having lost her grip and deprive her of instruction, then you will have to openly put an end to the project under the name of Zhong Yuan Qigong and admit that nothing works. After all, everyone will see that people in the school, even those of such a high rank, are in no state to teach; they literally went rogue.

There is no discernment at the start of the path between teachers. You have to start from something and make a leap of faith in practice. It is easy to get trapped into an authority bubble, with many others fuelling confirmation bias about someone famous and influential being the "Master" of one or another Art.  

The reality and opening the truth require work, critical thinking, skills, and abilities.

Xu Mingtang has developed a profitable business model, and a little lie has gone a long way to promote himself. Showing simple tricks with spoons and chopsticks but claiming it is a result of his Qi cultivation. He eventually becomes a self-perpetuating cult where he is revered as a godly figure.

Both Xu Mingtang and Mantak Chia are thought to be quacks and scammers.

The truth may not be easy to take for many and is not a sweet one. We would all like to be surrounded by advanced masters and spiritually developed beings. On the other hand, there's always something worse. At the very least, neither Xu Mingtang nor Mantak Chia is promoting smoking cigars and alcohol as a lifestyle choice.