Daoists

Daoists aim to have physical immortality in this world. Perhaps, in Old China, life was so good that the elite wanted to live forever, in this world.

At the end of last month, May of 2014, Bratislav, of Croatian descent, had left the Lulu Island neighbourhood, he having bought a new house and abandoning his slender townhouse. One of our last meetings in the neighbourhood was at the Rideau School field. We discussed plenty. Russia and China had been "State Capitalist" regimes and not "Communist" as they claimed to be. There was an alien "spacecraft" hovering invisibly above the grassy field; oh no, it was some kind of "portal"; oh no, it was an "incorporeal being." Many East Asian logograms, or "Sinograms," had a categorizing radical along with a hinting phonetic radical; they were not all pictographic. Daoists, I said, liked to be like a simple driftwood. There were aliens aplenty, Bratislav repeated. That day on the field last month, the thousands of dandelions were abundant with cloudy tufts of their soon-to-fly seeds.

Born in the Philippines, I had the nickname Nonong, as my family intuitively knew that Orientalism imbued me from childhood. I grew up with the official name Victor like an Occidental in Batangas, Quezon City, and Lulu Island. Though I was nominally a Roman Catholic at birth, Buddha statues and wild bison attracted me as a child. Today, I am a Syncretist, but chiefly a Buddhist-Animist, and I believe in Science. I know that Buddhism is an advanced psychology and that biology can explain Animism. Of Buddhist kinds, I have encountered Zen from Japanese, Theravāda from Thais, and Pure Land from Chinese. Red Indians, Shintoists, Daoists, Oz Aborigines, Eskimos, Pacific Islanders, and other indigenous peoples have imbued my Animistic thoughts.