Libertarian and Poetic Taoism – Fengliu - Walking with the Wind
“There is a path without master or dogma, without chains or submission. A wild spirituality, following paths unmarked by any religion. Where one advances listening to the wind, between beauty, silence, and oblivion.”
Introduction to Fengliu Taoism:
Fengliu (風流), literally “going with the wind,” evokes a way of being in the world that is at once elegant, free and unsubmissive.
It is a Taoism that is not expressed in formulas, but in gestures.
A libertarian Taoism, which is not recited in temples, but is lived between a cup of wine, a poem written at dawn, a disappearance into the mountain.
Neither doctrine, nor sect, nor fixed practice: fengliu is an aesthetic of freedom — a spirituality without injunction, where the beauty of simple things becomes the only ritual.
For more than ten years, I have lived between the roads, the mineral fairs, the remote peaks of Yunnan and the alleys of Asia with the scents of incense and rain.
I walk these territories with, in my bag, rare objects, a sketchbook, my head full of mala creations, stones engraved with light, and always this quest for an invisible balance – between presence, beauty and withdrawal.
Never really settled, never really elsewhere, I live according to the breaths, in the interstices of the world and the mind.
It was thus, without having named it, that I recognized - the day I read it - this word from ancient China: fengliu .
This blog is an invitation to rediscover this forgotten wisdom – a wisdom that doesn't care about being wise.
Through the figures of wandering poets, drunken monks, solitary aesthetes and paradoxical masters, I invite you to walk with me in the footsteps of the wind, at the crossroads of Tao , Buddhism , poetry and stripping away.
He said that to die here was to be reborn in the wind and mist.
人生如夢，一尊還酹江月。」
"Life is a dream, I pour a last cup to the moon on the river."
Su Dong Po
— Personal photograph.
I – Origins of a Free Spirit: The Roots of Fengliu
A. Ancient China: between withdrawal and naturalness.
Fengliu draws its roots from ancient soil, watered by mountain rain and the silence of hermits. Long before it was a word, it was a breath—that of the Tao forging a path through the foliage of the ziran (自然), that "natural" that cannot be learned, but reveals itself when one ceases to want.
In archaic China, the first sages were not founders of religions, but men who withdrew. They fled from courts, responsibilities, and ambitions, to live in the spontaneity of breath and gesture. The zhenren (真人), the true man, does not seek to correct the world—he attunes himself to it, as water takes the shape of rock without ever breaking.
At the heart of this path is ziran —that which is thus of oneself.
Neither impulsive nor careless, ziran is a spontaneity stripped of will. It is not "doing what one wants," but letting be what wants to be born.
In the Daodejing , it is said that the Tao itself "follows the ziran": it is therefore the ultimate authority — an authority without authority.
To be Ziran is not to oppose the flow. It is to live without masks, without pretension, without rigidity.
The wind does not justify being wind. Water does not make an effort to flow.
Likewise, the man in accord with the Tao projects nothing—he lets reality imprint itself on him like a reflection on the calm surface of a lake.
From this natural harmony stems another fundamental principle of Taoism: wuwei (無為), often translated as "non-action", but which would be better understood as "acting without forcing".
Wuwei is not passivity, much less inertia. It is the art of letting things happen according to their nature, without interfering, without imposing.
The man of fengliu does not refuse action: he acts as the wind moves a leaf, as water digs into stone—without noise, without the will to control.
He does not decide the path: he follows the invisible current of the moment, adjusting to reality instead of bending it to his desire.
Where Confucianism demands a constant effort to conform to the norm, fengliu , faithful to wuwei , dances with the moment.
This is why his actions are often considered absurd or rebellious: he drinks when people expect him to meditate, he moves away when people want him to teach, he laughs when everyone is crying.
But in this, he is free—and his freedom has no name. It has only the shape of the wind.
Fengliu is the heir to this tradition of luminous withdrawal. He is Tao Yuanming, the scholar who abandoned public service to cultivate chrysanthemums and write poems on the edge of the visible.
It is Zhuangzi, laughing and unfathomable, who dreams that he is a butterfly and then wonders if he is not the dream of a butterfly dreaming of being a man.
It is Liezi, who lets herself be carried by the wind, literally, and for whom lightness is not weakness but wisdom without weight.
All embody this active refusal of social burden, this choice to live in harmony with the world without ever imprisoning oneself in it. The fengliu , named thus much later, is already there, between their words and their silences.
乘物以遊心。
“To set one's mind on things and wander freely.”
( Zhuangzi, chapter 1 )
B. Counter-model of Confucianism
Fengliu Taoism was born in the background, as a subtle but resolute reaction to the dominant moral order of ancient China: Confucianism, with its procession of duties, hierarchies, and norms. Where Confucius advocated rectitude, rank, filial piety, and submission to rites, fengliu opposes a gesture of graceful, almost ironic withdrawal: it does not contest with force, but with beauty, with disengagement, with the elegance of not playing the game.
Confucianism is a vertical architecture: everyone has their place, their role, their moral function. It asks man to mold himself according to fixed social forms, to sacrifice the present to the good order of the whole. Fengliu , on the contrary, chooses wandering rather than status, lightness rather than duty, poetic intoxication rather than ritual gravity.
It is a fluid counter-morality, which favors free action over codified virtue. Where Confucius asks the disciple to become "a good man," the fengliu scholar prefers to be a cloud or a blade of grass in the wind. He does not seek to raise the edifice of an exemplary life: he lets life pass like a wine shared under the moon.
This posture is found among the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest, emblematic figures of the 3rd century. Rejecting the constraints of imperial protocol, they retreat into nature to drink, sing, mock conventions, and compose verses without ambition for posterity. Ruan Ji, for example, celebrates the unpredictability of life, liberating intoxication, and surrender to the moment. They make wine a philosophy, poetry a shelter, and wandering an art.
Fengliu is not a political revolution—it is a conscious and stylized escape. A joyful erasure of the social self, a way of slipping into the margins of the world while refusing to be its guarantor. It does not fight power; it makes it ridiculous through its dance.
Thus, this Taoism without dogma also becomes a gentle rebellion against obligatory virtue. It shatters the rigid contours of the junzi (君子), the Confucian nobleman, to celebrate a more troubled, more flexible figure, close to the sacred madman or the vagabond poet.
Fengliu , in this sense, is less a system than a stylized insubordination: it laughs when morality grimaces, it marvels when the wise preach. It offers a naked, fragile, and superb freedom, like a silk dress fluttering in the wind—without seams, without weight, without destination.
“I walk alone, without knowing where to go. The universe is vast, why lock myself in walls?”
— Ruan Ji (阮籍)
C. Between breath and emptiness: Taoist-Buddhist syncretism of fengliu.
If fengliu is born from the Taoist matrix and asserts itself on the margins of Confucianism, it is enriched, from the Tang and Song dynasties, from another source: Chan Buddhism, this Chinese art of immediate emptiness, of awakening without concept and of bottomless laughter.
Chan—the ancestor of Zen—proposes a meditation without object, without expectation, without promise. It is not about rising, but about gently fading into the moment, until only the naked gesture remains, the word falling like a drop on a stone. This way of standing in silence deeply connects with the Taoist ideal of wuwei , but adds to it the radical emptiness of Buddhism: there is nothing to do, no one to save, not even a self to liberate.
Fengliu welcomes this breath from India naturally. It does not seek to decide between doctrines—it floats between the banks, allowing itself to be penetrated by the humor of impermanence. The figures change, but the wind remains the same.
Thus, Hanshan and Shi De, the mad poets of the cold mountain, laugh like children in the mists of Tiantai. They scribble verses on rocks, steal buns from monasteries, speak in riddles, and disappear as they came.
Later, it was the sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, who embodied this troubled freedom: monk, lover, nocturnal poet, drinker of shadows and wine, he wrote:
“Having found neither heaven nor earth in which to lay down my life,
I lay down on the wind.
In these trajectories, wandering becomes liberation. The Taoist hermit sometimes becomes a Zen beggar, a hilarious prophet, a ghostly presence. He no longer defines himself: he walks, he listens, he forgets. The poem becomes Gong An (later Koan in Japan), an enigma without a solution, a trace of wind in the dust.
The cup of wine is no longer an earthly pleasure, nor a social transgression: it becomes an offering without an altar, drunkenness without a subject.
This syncretism is never doctrinal—it is living, porous, floating. Fengliu then becomes a spirituality without a name:
neither purely Taoist, nor purely Buddhist, but suspended between two breaths,
intoxicated by the beauty of the world and inhabited by the emptiness of the heart.
He no longer seeks the truth—he walks through it silently, with open arms,
like a cloud passing between two pine trees, without leaving a trace, but leaving everything transformed.
山中何所有？
嶺上多白雲。
只可自怡悅，
不堪持贈君
What can we find in the mountains?
White clouds over the ridges.
They only serve my own delight,
I can't give them to anyone.
- Poem by Hanshan (寒山詩 n°44)
Thus the spirit of fengliu is outlined: born of silence, nourished by wandering, free between breaths. But who are those who embodied it to the point of becoming the wind itself?
II – Living as a poet: emblematic figures of Fengliu
A. Chinese poets
Li Bai: heavenly intoxication, sacred nonchalance.
Wang Wei, Bai Juyi, Du Fu: withdrawal, complaint, nature.
Fengliu is not a theory. It is a way of inhabiting the world—with intoxication, with withdrawal, sometimes with pain, but always with style. It finds its most natural form in poetry, as if free verse, the trembling brush on paper, were the only possible answers to the enigma of existence.
Among those who gave this path its immortal breath, Li Bai (李白) stands like a comet. He did not write: he danced with ink. He did not live: he blazed in the moment.
His drunkenness was not weakness, but access to heaven.
He called the gods to drink, laughed at the emperors, poured his wine into the river and told the moon to follow him.
His art was reminiscent of Taoist magic: by elevating himself through the cup and the poem, he abolished the boundary between man and the stars.
“In sleeping, I lose the universe;
by getting drunk, I find him again."
— Li Bai
In Wang Wei (王維), fengliu takes on another face: that of silence, landscape, and plant peace. A Buddhist monk and painter of emptiness, he wrote as one meditates, in a withdrawal that is not flight but fusion. His poems are hermitages of paper:
we hear the wind in the pines,
we see the shadow of the mountains on a bowl of tea.
Du Fu (杜甫), on the other hand, is more serious, more rooted in the world. He sings of ruins, famines, wars, but always with that inner accuracy that transforms complaint into offering, pain into lucidity. Even in misery, he retains a form of broken elegance—a melancholic fengliu.
Bai Juyi (白居易), for his part, was the poet of the happy medium:
withdrawn without denying the world, sensitive to injustice as to the beauty of a swan on a pond. He had a bittersweet outlook on life, tinged with discreet humor and tenderness for people.
These poets never wrote a treatise on fengliu —but they sketched its invisible contours.
They teach us that living as a poet is not just about writing:
It is walking in the world with an empty cup, a deep breath, and a gaze capable of seeing spring even in the mist.
偷採白蓮回。
不解藏蹤跡，
浮萍一道開。
A child pushes a light boat,
He secretly picks white lotuses.
Not knowing how to hide his trail,
It leaves an open path in the duckweed.
Bai Juyi
In contrast to the ascetic stereotypes attributed to Tibetan sages, Tsangyang Gyatso (1683–1706), the sixth Dalai Lama, embodies a paradoxical and atypical figure: monk and poet, spiritual leader and sensual fugitive, he is the champion of fengliu in its most subversive and embodied version.
Named Dalai Lama in his childhood, he rejected the constraints of the monastery from an early age. He preferred the nights of Lhasa to ritual days, songs of love to obligatory prayers. We see him wandering under the moon, drunk and dressed as a layman, composing poems of a moving simplicity. In his mouth, the quest for awakening passes through desire, loss, the evanescence of the moment.
"How can we reconcile the two paths in this world?
"Do not betray the Buddha or the beloved?"
This sentence alone encapsulates his entire destiny: torn between the emptiness of the Buddha and the warmth of the body, between the call of the Dharma and that of the flesh. He did not choose one over the other—he walked between the two, intoxicated by beauty and contradiction.
In Tibetan tradition, he is seen as a mystery, even a scandal. But in the light of fengliu , he becomes a master in his own right: he teaches through gentle transgression, through the fusion of the sacred and the profane, through awakening not above the world, but in the brilliance of what he offers and snatches away at once.
Exiled by the authorities, he disappeared in obscure circumstances, leaving behind a handful of poems and a legend: that of a Dalai Lama who did not want a throne, but a cup shared with the wind.
“Before I was born, who was I?
When I was born, who did I become?
It is in this naked questioning, carried by the voice of a man who has lost everything except his breath, that the fengliu reaches the abyss - and dances there.
C. Japan – the fury spirit
Saigyō: The Wandering Monk.
Bashō: Awakening in Haiku.
Ryōkan: love, simplicity, child's play.
In Japan, fengliu changes its name, but not its appearance. It is called fûryû (風流): the "flow of the wind," the refinement that embraces nature, the ephemeral elegance of solitude, of travel, of sudden flowering. Here again, nothing doctrinal: it is an attitude, a breath, a way of disappearing into beauty without seeking to grasp it.
🌸 Saigyō (西行) – The Wandering Monk
A former imperial guard who became a wandering Buddhist monk in the 12th century, Saigyō embodies this fusion of withdrawal and sensitivity. He leaves Kyoto to walk alone beneath the cherry trees, write to the moon, and sleep in the rain.
His Buddhism is not one of dry renunciation, but of a stripping away inhabited by flowers and seasons, always on the verge of tears and ecstasy.
Even among the cherry blossoms,
I am seized with a grief that I cannot name.
— Saigyō
🐚 Bashō (芭蕉) – Awakening in Haiku
With Matsuo Bashō, poetry becomes a minimal pilgrimage. His haiku is not an ornament, but a gesture of awakening. He walks thousands of kilometers across Japan, sleeps with fishermen, contemplates a rock, listens to a frog.
The haiku, in three breaths, captures the eternity of a moment:
An old pond —
a frog dives...
sound of water.
— Bashō
Everything is there: nothingness, everything, the passage, the silence. Bashō, a monk without dogma, friend of the grass and the wind, makes the world a living page.
🎒 Ryōkan (良寛) – Love, simplicity, child's play
The last of this invisible lineage, Ryōkan, a 19th-century Zen monk, is arguably the most tender. He lives in a hut, shares his rice with insects, plays hide-and-seek with children, writes poems to his beloved nun Teishin, and sometimes cries for no reason.
His awakening is human, fragile, luminous. He preaches nothing. He gives without counting. He lets himself be stripped by life, with a smile that is a little sad, a little crazy.
He who knows the intimacy of the wind
no longer needs a temple.
— Ryōkan
In them, fengliu becomes cherry mist, child's laughter, unfinished calligraphy.
They did not flee the world—they inhabited it like a house open to the wind,
where nothing belongs to anyone, and where one bows before an insect as before a god.
旅に病んで
夢は枯野を
かけ廻る
Sick while traveling,
my dream still runs
across the parched plain.
Bashō,
III – An embodied philosophy: the principles of Fengliu
A. A spirituality without dogma
Fengliu establishes no school, no dogma, no ritual to follow. It does not subscribe to any orthodoxy, does not identify with any institution. It is breathing, not prescription. Where religions build temples, fengliu sits under a tree, in the dust of the path, and watches the flowers fall.
It is not a violent revolt, but a gentle refusal. A refusal of moralism, first of all—this desire to judge, to correct, to force actions and thoughts to conform to an idea of good. Fengliu does not seek to be "good," still less to impose a virtue. He prefers the innocence of the right gesture to the weight of virtuous obligations. He knows that morality without poetry quickly becomes tyranny.
It is also a rejection of ritualism. Not that the fengliu despises rites: he sometimes sees their beauty. But he knows that their empty repetition can dry out the breath. What matters is not reciting the perfect formula, but living the moment accurately, with listening. The sacred is not manufactured—it emerges, between a cup of steaming tea and a child's laughter, in the rustling of a curtain lifted by the wind.
Here, wuwei (無為) becomes the invisible center of this spirituality: non-action, or rather, acting without forcing. Never forcing anything. Not pulling on a flower to make it grow. Not fighting against the world, but slipping between its breaths. The wuwei of fengliu is not inertia—it is the art of adjustment. It is preparing a meal without expecting praise. It is writing a poem without wanting immortality. It is knowing how to disappear when everyone else is showing off.
But what fengliu shares with the profound Eastern wisdoms—Chan, Dzogchen, Zen—is emptiness, experienced not as an idea, but as a poetic experience.
The void is not to be feared. It is the space where the world blossoms.
In fengliu, one does not seek to "realize" oneself—one lets oneself dissolve. Like a footprint in the snow, like a flame in the wind.
No awakening to achieve, no nirvana to conquer. Just moments.
A chipped bowl that we look at with tenderness.
A fallen leaf that we don't dare pick up.
The silence between two verses, which says more than words.
Thus, this spirituality without dogma becomes a silent dance between breath and emptiness.
She promises nothing—she offers everything, holding nothing back.
And the one who follows it has neither name, nor function, nor message:
there is wind in the branches,
shadow on the stone,
light presence that lets light pass through.
茶の湯とは
ただ湯を沸かし
茶を点てて
飲むばかりなる
The Way of Tea,
it's just heating water,
prepare tea,
and drink it.
— Sen no Rikyū (千利休), 16th-century tea master
B. An aesthetic of everyday life
Living with delicacy: the art of decorating, eating, loving.
Shen Fu and Li Yu as masters of a refined art of living.
Fengliu is not lived in asceticism, but in the discreet elegance of ordinary gestures. He does not reject the world: he caresses it. Where others seek the absolute in transcendence or escape, the fengliu man finds enlightenment in a bowl of warm rice, a branch of a blossoming plum tree, a garment well-matched to spring.
It is an embodied spirituality, which is expressed through the art of decorating one's room like a silent poem, of ordering the void around a vase, of tracing a line of perfume in the sheets.
Eating becomes a contemplative act, loving a dialogue without words. It is not about adorning one's life, but about inscribing a silent poetry—an attention.
This everyday delicacy is not precious: it is offered. It is born from the gaze, the breath, the care given to the present moment. Each object is chosen slowly, each silence contains a reverence. Fengliu transforms the smallest thing into an unceremonious ritual—a candle lit at dusk, a calligraphy suspended in the wind, a cup held in both hands like a fragile heart.
Shen Fu (沈復), in his Six Tales of a Floating Life , gives a moving account of this. He recounts his love for his wife Yun, the creation of a tiny garden, their shared readings under the lamp, their poverty inhabited by harmony. It is not a treatise, but an offering: that of an art of living where intimacy becomes a temple, sharing becomes music.
Li Yu (李煜), the last king of the Southern Tang Dynasty, embodies extreme refinement mixed with pain. A poet and aesthete, he lived in the dying luxury of a court doomed to disappear, where he composed verses of poignant tenderness, full of silk, moonlight, tears, and perfumes.
Even in captivity, he never ceased to embellish his days: he wrote as one breathes in dying incense. For him, elegance becomes resistance—not against the world, but to offer it one last song.
These figures remind us that living with beauty is not about possessing, but about choosing.
It is not about accumulating, but about purifying.
It is not about withdrawing from the world, but about offering it gestures that do not hurt anything.
In the aesthetics of fengliu, the everyday becomes a silent offering.
It is no longer a question of “making a success of one’s life” — but of making it habitable, even in the ephemeral.
Paint the moment with the colors of the heart.
And when all passes, retain nothing—except the beauty, sweet, which remains in the memory of the wind.
In fengliu, the arts are not an activity separate from life: they are life, transfigured by the elegance of gesture, the slowness of the gaze, the gratuitousness of beauty. Poetry, painting, calligraphy, music, the art of tea, gardens, or cuisine—all become the silent language of the vital breath, an extension of the Tao into the ephemeral. Painting a bamboo, writing a haiku, pouring a cup of tea, or improvising on the guqin: these acts have no other goal than to harmonize the being with the world, with lightness and precision. In this art of living, there is no need for temples or rigid ceremonies: a chipped bowl, a fallen leaf, a note suspended in the void are enough. It is neither technical prowess nor mastery that counts, but style—that subtle rhythm of breath that the ancients called qi yun (氣韻). Through the arts, fengliu teaches us to inhabit the world with tenderness, to celebrate silence like a melody, to let everything be what it is, in the fluid beauty of a moment that will not return.
The music that follows the Tao does not fill space—it listens to it.
Each note is born like a drop in the void,
not to seduce, but to fade gracefully into silence.
C. The Wind Man
Zhenren Ziran : Free, Marginal, Ironic, Elegant
He doesn't try to be different. He simply is—because he doesn't force himself to be like everyone else.
The man of fengliu is a zhenren ziran (真人自然): a true being, spontaneously attuned to the world. He claims nothing. He passes through the days like the wind passes through the pines—without leaving a trace, but awakening a vibration everywhere.
They call him marginal, but he doesn't run away from anything. He chooses the interstices, the untrodden paths, the silences between two sentences. He lives on thresholds: between nature and society, solitude and tenderness, poetry and withdrawal. He is not a thunderous rebel, but a discreet rebel—his weapon is style, his strength is non-attachment.
His irony is gentle: he laughs at pretensions, not at people.
His freedom is not a posture, but a deep relaxation—like an overly taut string that is finally allowed to vibrate in tune.
He is the one who walks slowly in the rain, the one who offers a verse to the wind, the one who disappears from a banquet without making a noise.
He knows how to love without possessing, to create without signing, to appear without dominating. His greatness is all the more real because it seeks neither gaze nor approval.
The man of wind lives without constraints or dogma. He inhabits the world without becoming attached to it.
Its elegance is never forced—it comes from the free heart.
He dresses for the weather, reads books as one breathes, and speaks little, because he knows that speech wears out what silence fertilizes.
This zhenren , this true being, has no ideology, no armor. He is simple like water that adapts to every vase.
But behind this simplicity, there is a rare radicality: that of not wanting to impose anything, not even oneself.
Sometimes he looks like a mad poet, a dreamy hermit, an elegant beggar. We don't always recognize him, but we feel his presence—like a forgotten perfume in an empty room, or like the trace of a wing in the fresh morning air.
《道德經》第二十三章
希言自然。
故飄風不終朝，驟雨不終日。
。
天地尚不能久，而況於人乎？
故從事於道者，同於道；
德者，同於德；
失於失。
He who does not speak (arrives at) non-action.
A brisk wind does not last all morning; a heavy rain does not last all day.
Who produces these two things? Heaven and earth.
If heaven and earth cannot endure for long, how much more so can man!
Therefore, if man gives himself over to the Tao, he identifies himself with the Tao;
if he gives himself over to virtue, he identifies himself with virtue;
if he commits crime, he identifies with the crime.
Dao De Jing Chapter 23
IV – Intoxication, sensuality and awakening
A. Wine as a path
Dissolution of the self in intoxication. Poetry, ecstasy, stripping away.
In fengliu, wine is not an escape—it is a passage.
It is neither addiction, nor vice, nor simple entertainment: it is a path to awakening.
A wine poured slowly, a cup raised to the moon, a moment of flickering—and already, the boundaries between self and world dissolve.
Fengliu intoxication is never boisterous. It is an inner haze, a gentle loss of mental rigidity, a joyful stripping away of the social mask.
It is the abandonment of the “I” in favor of the breath.
To drink here is to unlearn. It is to stop wanting to understand. It is to let oneself be intoxicated by reality.
Li Bai, the most celestial of Chinese poets, made it his path.
He drank to find the lost star of the Tao, to misplace his name among the clouds.
He wrote drunk, floating between mountains and palaces, throwing his poems like one throws laughter towards the sky.
「對影成三人」
I drink alone, my shadow and the moon keep me company.
In this sacred intoxication, the mind ceases to calculate. It opens itself, defenseless, to the vertigo of the world.
Poetry becomes breath. Breath becomes wind. Wind becomes silence.
Wine doesn't need a banquet. All it needs is a rock, a cup, a bird.
It does not seek to extinguish consciousness, but to raise it out of itself.
The drinker becomes wind among the pines, reflection in the water, pure moment.
Stripping begins there: not in dry renunciation, but in a naked, light ecstasy, where everything that weighed becomes transparent.
But wine is not alone in offering graceful forgetting of the self.
In some dark mountains, where silence is the color of jade, people still speak of mist mushrooms, of herbs of the immortal. Not to heal—but to dissolve.
They don't give visions—they erase them.
They don't open doors—they make them float.
Whoever takes them does not become clairvoyant.
It becomes wind.
A look without contours, a breath that caresses the pines.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,
but the stones recognize me."
— Anonymous echo of a missing hermit
It is not about seeking ecstasy, but about letting oneself be gently forgotten.
Sometimes it's not the substances that change the mind,
but the spirit which, ready, lets matter dissolve with it.
It should be noted that certain esoteric Taoist currents, notably in internal alchemy and ancient spiritual medicine, evoke plants called lingzhi靈芝 — so-called “spiritual” or “immortal” mushrooms. These mushrooms are associated with longevity, the transformation of the being, and even the luminous trance of the body.
These symbols can serve as a poetic bridge: it is not the alteration of perception that matters, but the mutation of the gaze.
《月下獨酌》其二
"Drinking Alone Under the Moon" – II
花間一壺酒，
獨酌無相親。
舉杯邀明月，
對影成三人。
月既不解飲，
影徒隨我身。
暫伴月將影，
行樂須及春。
我歌月徘徊，
我舞影零亂。
醒時同交歡，
醉後各分散。
永結無情遊，
相期邈雲漢。
A pot of wine among the flowers,
I drink alone, without companion.
I raise my cup, I invite the moon,
And my shadow, here we are three.
The moon does not know how to drink,
The shadow follows me without saying anything.
But for a moment I take them as companions:
Let's enjoy spring before it's gone.
I sing, the moon wanders.
I dance, my shadow disperses.
Lucid, we share the joy;
Drunk, everyone goes their separate ways.
But may this journey without attachment last forever,
Go beyond the clouds, to the Milky Way.
Li Bai
B. Sexuality and Tao
Fangzhongshu: union as alchemy.
Refined eroticism: between pleasure and emptiness.
In fengliu, sexuality is neither taboo nor sacralized. It is a way—a breath—a subtle art of inhabiting the body without being confined within it. Where moral dogma confines desire to shame or self-control, fengliu welcomes it like a breeze among others: sometimes strong, sometimes gentle, always fleeting, always precious.
Fangzhongshu (房中術) —literally, the arts of the bedroom —is one of the oldest traditions of bodily Taoism. Practiced since antiquity in certain schools, this art aims neither at raw excitement nor heroic retention, but at the circulation of vital breath between bodies. Pleasure becomes alchemy, not through complication, but through attention.
The act of loving is not domination or abandonment: it is adjustment.
As in wuwei, it is not about forcing, but about blending in.
Bodies don't take hold of each other—they agree.
It is said that at these times, Qi circulates freely, light awakens between the kidneys and heart, and the two breaths become one. But fengliu does not seek to freeze these experiences in diagrams or recipes: it prefers suggestion to prescription, tenderness to control.
Fengliu sexuality is erotic, but never vulgar.
She loves sighs, silences, looks.
She prefers the scent of a neck to the conquest of a body.
This is not a disguised asceticism. It is a light, sometimes profound game, where pleasure is neither exalted nor rejected, but lived as an experience of emptiness: it rises, it blossoms, it fades. It leaves nothing, except a warm trace in the air and a smile in the shadows.
Like wine, physical love can open doors—but only if you don't try to force them.
In ancient poems, desire is often whispered, in a low voice:
a dress slipped onto a tatami,
a trembling lock of hair,
a hip brushed under an oil lamp.
This is where fengliu reaches its ultimate refinement:
when pleasure becomes poetry,
and that enjoyment vanishes into a haiku.
But Taoist wisdom was not alone in sensing the power of union as a path.
In the heights of Tibet or the caves of ancient India, another tradition, Tantra, opened itself to the same truth: that awakening is not the enemy of the body—but its secret.
In Tantric Buddhism , sexual union—sometimes symbolic, sometimes real—becomes a ritual of awakening.
Not to prolong the pleasure, but to dissolve the duality.
The lover and the mistress are no longer two.
They become a union of emptiness and form,
of movement and silence,
fire and space.
In this vision, sex is not to be fled from—it is to be transfigured.
This is not a path for everyone—it requires mastery of energy, acute lucidity, a clarity of mind where desire no longer leads to lack, but to transparency.
Pleasure is no longer a goal, but a tool of revelation.
It illuminates the knots of the self, it melts fixations, it reveals the beauty of the world as pure impulse.
This is why, in the Tibetan yab-yum , the Buddha unites his peace with the incandescence of a goddess—not to enjoy, but to reintegrate the world as an offering.
The tantric tradition and that of fangzhongshu , although born from different contexts, come together in the same presentiment:
Union, when conscious, can become a path.
Not to transcend the body, but to inhabit it without fear —
So that the embrace becomes an offering,
And the orgasm, silence.
"If you are aware, you will realize that sexuality is not just sex.
Sex is the outer layer; further inside, there is love…
Even deeper inside, there is prayer…
And ever deeper within, there is the divine.
Sex can become a cosmic experience.
So we call it Tantra."
— Jolan Chang, The Tao of the Art of Loving
C. The floating world
Ukiyo (Japan), Fusheng (China): the beauty of impermanence
Aesthetic response to suffering and emptiness.
In fengliu, the world is not an illusion to be fled—it is a dream to be traversed. A fragile, shifting, ephemeral dream.
Far from wanting to detach himself from it by rejection, the man of wind chooses to walk there as a poet: he celebrates impermanence instead of cursing it. He makes the transience of things not a pain, but a beauty.
In China, we speak of fúshēng (浮生) — the "floating life": this light and uncertain existence, similar to a bubble on the water. An image borrowed from the Zhuangzi , where human life is compared to an unanchored dream, a fleeting dance.
In Japan, this concept became ukiyo (浮世)—the “floating world”—which denotes both the impermanent nature of life and the refined culture that accepts it with grace.
Ukiyo-e prints, haikus, scenes of pleasure and melancholy are the most famous manifestations. We see ephemeral courtesans, falling flowers, faces bathed in moonlight - as if to say: "Since everything passes, let us make everything beautiful in passing."
In this vision, beauty is never perfect: it is fleeting.
It appears, trembles, then disappears—like a leaf in the wind, a burst of laughter in the rain, a kiss in the shadows.
The world is not to be corrected, nor to be fled: it is to be loved in its very trembling.
The floating world is also a response to emptiness.
Instead of filling the absence, we inhabit it. Instead of denying impermanence, we celebrate it.
It is an aesthetic of the fragile, a spirituality of gentle dissolution.
He who lives according to the spirit of fusheng does not expect lasting foundations.
He builds mist gardens, writes verses on fans, watches the leaves fall without wanting to hold them back.
He knows that beauty is born precisely because it passes away.
He does not hope for eternity—he seeks the pure brilliance of the moment.
In the floating world, everything is an offering:
A flower fallen onto a cup of tea.
The rustle of a curtain lifted by the wind.
The silence that follows a poem.
And this is how Fengliu Taoism, between laughter, withdrawal, and the tenderness of the gaze, makes impermanence a light dwelling, where even emptiness has the taste of shared tea.
「泉涸，魚相與處於陸，相呴以濕。」
“When the spring is dry, the fish pile up on the ground, moistening each other with their breath or their foam. It would be better to forget oneself in the lakes and rivers.”
Zhuangzi
V – A contemporary path? Fengliu today
A. Three modern figures
Chögyam Trungpa, Taisen Deshimaru: eccentric awakening, paradoxical incarnation
The Mahasiddha: The Holy Madman
Fengliu is not a frozen memory of ancient China. It is a spirit—a wind—that crosses the ages and takes on new forms when the times call for it. In contemporary times, it finds surprising echoes in figures who, without explicitly claiming to be its own, nevertheless embody its essence: inner freedom, rejection of rigid norms, alliance of the sacred and the profane, and a way of disrupting conventions to better reveal the essential.
Chögyam Trungpa – The Master Without a Tie
Born in Tibet, Chögyam Trungpa was recognized as a tulku at a very young age, trained in the rigor of Tibetan Buddhism. But after his exile, he moved away from the institutional forms of tradition to open a unique, subversive, and dazzling path. Having come to the West, he taught the Dharma in a suit, smoked, drank, and seduced—but remained incredibly clear when he spoke of emptiness, presence, and the World Cup.
Trungpa embodies a radical inner freedom. He shocks, disturbs, but hits the mark. He creates new forms, such as the concept of the "spiritual warrior," founded Naropa University, and initiated an aesthetic of the sacred in everyday life (tight sheets, gracefully served tea, direct gaze).
Like the sages of the Bamboo Forest or the poet hermits, he never separates content from form: he teaches through his way of being, sometimes provocative, always burning. He embodies a 20th-century fengliu – a breath from the void, passed through the cup of wine, arrived in the West by tearing monastic robes.
Taisen Deshimaru – The Sandal Monk
A Japanese Zen monk sent to France in the late 1960s without official support, Taisen Deshimaru arrives in Paris with only his practice and an uncompromising simplicity as baggage. He has no temple, no disciples, no plan—but he does have zazen: sitting motionless, naked, sharp as a silent saber.
Deshimaru embodies a harsh and direct form of spirituality: unadorned, uncompromising. He speaks of posture, of breathing, of life as a leap into the void at every moment. He laughs, smokes, sometimes curses, but he always returns to the empty cup of the present moment.
In his offbeat style, in his way of subverting codes without betraying them, he recalls the wandering Ryōkan, or the Chan mad about the mountains. He doesn't seek to please - he seeks to awaken. And often, this awakening takes the form of a gentle slap, of mud bursting into silence.
He planted Zen in French concrete like a pine tree in an industrial wasteland – and he watched the buds grow, without ever forcing them.
The Mahasiddha: Between Fire and Madness
In the tantric traditions of India and Tibet, mahasiddhas are the realized masters of strange forms: cemetery yogis, laughing beggars, loving ascetics, silent prophets. They defy expectations, destroy idols, live on the margins, and make their own lives into a gong-an without solution.
They are enlightened people who do not teach with words, but with gestures, absences, flashes of insight.
We find them in myths, in legends – but also, perhaps, in these modern masters who walk in crumpled suits, who teach while smoking a cigarette, who look at the moon without trying to understand it.
Fengliu, in their wake, is no longer an ancient memory – it becomes a current possibility.
A style of awakening.
A joyful rejection of spiritual boxes.
An inner fire, gentle, irreducible.
Don't project, don't think, don't analyze
Do not cultivate, do not act, have neither expectation nor fear
And the mental patterns that attribute reality to it will disappear by themselves.
You then come across the nature of phenomena .
Tilopa-
Dohākoṣa of Tilopa - Verse 9
B. My personal path
The Wandering Gemologist: Beauty, Solitude, Creation, Presence
I am neither a monk nor a master. I have never founded a school nor claimed to teach. But I have walked. Slowly. Far from straight roads.
Between the Tibetan mountains and the mineralogical salons of Europe, between a necklace of cut turquoise and the unpredictable curve of an amethyst geode, I followed what some call chance, others destiny—and which I simply call the wind.
I slept in abandoned temples, under the tents of Asia, in train stations where the ancient voices of travelers can still be heard. I worked stones with my hands, carved malas with my heart, and sold my creations without ever really giving them a price—because they carried within them a fragment of the journey.
Gemologist, yes. But no laboratory. I seek the light in the stone, the soul in the material, the silence in the crystal. Each inclusion, each fracture, each rainbow reflection is a lesson for me. I don't collect: I contemplate. I don't sell: I transmit. Or rather, I let things circulate.
I encountered fengliu in the gaze of an old Chinese craftsman, in the breath of a lake in Yunnan, in the grain of the wood of a portable altar, in a cup of tea shared with a stranger. I didn't learn it—it brushed past me. Like the wind touching a rock without breaking it.
For me, creating isn't about adorning. It's about listening. Listening to what the material demands, what the moment allows. Each piece of jewelry, each object I create is a trace, a frozen breath that has become an offering. And I never know if it truly belongs to me. I'm more of a ferryman than a sculptor.
Solitude doesn't weigh me down. It's my nomadic hermitage. I speak little, but I watch. I spend hours in front of a cloud clinging to a ridge, in front of an obsidian that keeps its reflections secret until the right angle of light. It's not patience—it's presence.
I live between two worlds: that of visible commerce, and that of inner silence. I belong neither to the shop nor to the monastery. I sell, yes, but I also give. I pass through, but I don't settle anywhere.
I don't have a fixed address—I have stones waiting for me somewhere, and people I meet on the road. That's enough.
Fengliu is not an ancient concept for me: it is a breath that still guides me. It tells me not to force anything. To prefer elegance to power. Sincerity to demonstration. Silence to speech.
Perhaps I am a hermit without a cave. A monk without a temple. A poet without a book.
But I know how to recognize beauty when it arises. And I bow.
Put an end to spiritual injunctions.
Dare poetry, the wind, inner silence.
In a world saturated with injunctions to "awaken," to "transform," to "vibrate higher," fengliu offers nothing. It simply invites us to breathe. It does not promise peace—it attunes to the tumult without contracting. It does not trace a path—it follows the currents, the detours, the mists.
There is nothing to achieve. Nothing to improve. Nothing to purify.
Free elegance begins here: when we stop forcing ourselves to become, and finally inhabit what is. Not as a victim, not as a warrior, but as a poet. It is not measured by discipline or progress, but by the quality of attention: by the light on a bowl, by the fatigue of the evening, by the shadow of the wind on the wall.
It is spirituality without performance, wisdom without spectacle.
No need for mantras or courses.
No need to fix yourself: just listen.
And in this lucid abandonment, something opens.
Not a lightning flash, but a gentle shudder:
the taste of tea, dust in a ray of light, the slowness of a hand.
Fengliu, today, is not a relic—it is a subtle necessity.
In a world that is busy trying to “heal,” it offers the healing of no longer wanting to heal.
In a world obsessed with goals, it offers a bench under a tree.
Poetry, here, is not a luxury but a remedy.
Silence is not empty but refuge.
And the wind? The wind is master.
He who dares to seek nothing discovers a lost art:
that of living without clinging, of loving without grasping, of walking without a map.
It's not escape — it's return.
A return to a supple elegance, to a discreet beauty, to a vibrant nothingness.
Fengliu doesn't impose itself. It offers itself—like a breeze, like laughter, like a lock of hair over the eyes.
Whoever is taken in by it will no longer need belief or effort:
he will have regained the simple dignity of existing,
in its place, in the silence of the world.
In this knowledge of the immediate, nothing interferes. Everything coincides, everything is in accordance with the ordinary. It is like leaving your home and seeing clouds floating in the sky. We then know that all established philosophy is derisory. We take our staff and go peacefully along the paths of the world.
Antoine Marcel - My Life in the Mountains
CONCLUSION – Go with the wind
Fengliu as the art of disappearing into beauty
At a time when everything pushes us to show ourselves, to define ourselves, to rise up—fengliu offers a disappearance. Not an escape, but a gentle erasure, a way of inhabiting the world without erasing it with one's mark.
In an age saturated with recipes, performances, and spiritual promises, he offers wisdom without a goal, a path without a map, peace without a spectacle.
He doesn't shout anything. He doesn't expect anything.
It blows, simply, like a breeze across the surface of a bowl of tea.
Being fengliu is not about trying to become wise —
It is daring not to harden.
Do not get stuck in a posture, a role, a truth.
It is walking without a destination,
create without signing,
to love without wanting to keep.
It is to offer a cup to the void,
and smile when it overflows from silence.
This is not a path to fulfillment —
but to lighten to the point of erasure.
Where there is nothing left to prove,
maybe there is finally something to love.
And if you ever look for me,
don't look for any trace.
I will be in the radiance of a forgotten jade,
or in the silence of a hand that expects nothing.
3 comments
Merci jeremy,
Merci pour ce souffle partagé,
Merci.
Voglio pensare di essere anch’io…. fengliu
Grazie per il tuo scritto
La mia vita ha più valore
Merci Jeremy. Nos nombreux échanges nous amènent souvent à cette évidence, il est bon de vivre les phénomènes de cette existence sur le souffle du vent.
Il est toujours bon de te lire.