Sitting and forgetting.
The Zhuangzi's cook cuts an ox for nineteen years without dulling his blade — expertise so complete the self steps out of the way. That, scaled to a life, is the goal.
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The inner audience.
While performing the outward rite, the priest holds an interior visualisation — the body's own spirit officials assembled, the memorial carried up, the celestial court in session. The two are held to be one act. A priest doing only the visible half is, in the tradition's own view, doing nothing at all.
held by most
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Qi moving.
Warmth gathering below the navel, then movement along the spine that practitioners describe as involuntary and unmistakable. The literature spends as much space on the failure mode as the goal: zouhuo rumo, fire runs and demons enter, describes what happens when the practice is forced, and the symptoms listed are specific and clinical.
⚖ contested within
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Ling — it works.
The operative word in Chinese popular religion is not belief but efficacy. A god that answers is ling, its temple fills, and its network spreads; a god that stops answering quietly loses its crowd. Worshippers will say frankly that they go to a particular temple because that one works, and they will change temples.
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Absorption.
The state Cook Ding is describing: long practice at one ordinary thing until deliberation drops out and the work does itself, at speed, without strain. It is Taoism's picture of a life well spent, and what is notable is that it is set in a kitchen rather than on a mountain.
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