Teacher.
Practitioner.

Ian Burgess 理山

Ian is a Daoist teacher and internal arts instructor based in Edinburgh, teaching between there and Linlithgow. His approach developed through martial arts, meditation, Chinese internal practice and long-term engagement with Daoist philosophy, religion and classical texts. His Daoist name, Lǐ Shān 理山, was given to him by Abbot Lao Zhi Chang.

Daoist study

Ian's seminary training began with Abbot Lǎo Zhì Chǎng 老至昶, a twenty-first-generation Dragon Gate 龍門 abbot and priest, who gave him the name Lǐ Shān 理山. He is now a seminary student with the American Daoist Seminary, formed in the Complete Perfection 全真 and Dragon Gate traditions.

His practice is informed by the tradition-based approach of the Daoist Foundation — the work of Louis Komjathy 康思奇 and Kate Townsend, with whom he has studied — alongside other teachers and connected traditions. Internally Still is an independent gathering in Scotland, not a chapter of theirs, and the Daoist teaching here is described as tradition-based rather than as a claim to a single inherited lineage.

Eighteen Lohan Palm

Ian studied the Eighteen Lohan Palm with Sifu Neil Ripski and is an authorised instructor in the system, which comes down through Grandmaster Chen Qiming 陳其明 (1953–2022). Lohan is taught here as a complete system of cultivation and a distinct transmission, not folded into anything else. See the lineage in full.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan

Ian teaches traditional Yang-style T'ai Chi Ch'uan. The material includes the five loosening exercises of Huang Sheng Shyan 黃性賢 and the 37-posture form of Cheng Man-ch'ing 鄭曼青, and his own training has included study with Adam Mizner and many other teachers.

Translation

Alongside teaching, Ian works on translation from classical Chinese. He has completed a full bilingual translation of Grandmaster Chen Qiming's Secrets of Longevity Revealed, and is engaged in a long-term translation of the Longmen anthology gathered by Mǐn Yīdé 閔一得 (1748–1836), the Gu Shuyinlou Cangshu 古書隱樓藏書. Mǐn's doctrine of healing the world 醫世 has been particularly generative for him. That work feeds directly into the study side of the school.

Teachers

Named plainly, because it should be possible to see where any of this comes from. These are people Ian has actually trained with, rather than a lineage chart.

• Abbot Lǎo Zhì Chǎng 老至昶

  One of Ian's main teachers before his passing, he gave him the name Lǐ Shān 理山. A twenty-first-generation Dragon Gate 龍門 Daoist abbot and priest — which is where the Longmen thread running through the Daoist side of this school begins.

  He founded the Four Dragons Institute, which sits under the Qingcheng Mountain 青城山 Daoist Association's Houston branch. Its Daoist tract draws on the teaching of Abbot and Master Zhang Ming Xin of Qingcheng Mountain in Sichuan, and of the Chan and Daoist monk Shi Su Wen of Henan. The Institute is affiliated with both Quánzhēn 全真, the Complete Perfection school of northern Daoism, and the southern Zhèngyī 正一, or Orthodox Unity, school — an unusual breadth that includes the study and integration of Confucianism, Buddhism, and other traditions.

• Louis Komjathy 康思奇 and Kate Townsend 唐鄉恩

  Founding co-directors of the Daoist Foundation: tradition-based, non-sectarian Daoism centred on clarity-and-stillness 清靜, and a scholar-practitioner path rather than technique consumed as a product. Ian has studied with them and continues to.

  Komjathy is a scholar and translator of some forty Daoist texts and an ordained priest of the twenty-sixth generation, with the Daoist names Xiūjìng 修靜 and Wànruì 萬瑞. Townsend is a licensed acupuncturist and an ordained priest of the Huàshān 華山 lineage of Quánzhēn Daoism, with more than thirty-five years in cultivation and yǎngshēng; her names are Bàojìng 抱靜 and Wànqīng 萬清. Together they established the Clarity-and-Stillness Order 清靜道, drawn from the eighth-century Qīngjìng jīng 清靜經.

• Sifu Neil Ripski

  Inner-door disciple of Grandmaster Chen Qiming and holder of the Eighteen Lohan Palm transmission. Ian trained in the system with him and teaches it under his authorisation.

  Four decades in Chinese martial arts, internal and external — qìgōng, taiji, bagua, xinyi and northern Shaolin — and a recognised authority on the rare Zuìquán 醉拳 or Drunken Boxing, which he runs as a full-time programme in Canada. He is the author of three books and the founder of Red Jade Martial Arts, now with schools in Canada, the United States, Israel, Switzerland and Taiwan, each run by a student he taught himself.

  Drunken Boxing is not taught here. Ian's training with Neil is in the Lohan system.

• Adam Mizner

  Founder of Heaven Man Earth Internal Arts, teaching Yang-style in the Yang Shao Hou, Tian Zhaolin and Huang Sheng Shyan 黃性賢 traditions, with eight primary teachers across those lines. He is also a senior lay disciple of Ajahn Jumnien in the Thai Forest tradition, having spent around a decade going in and out of monasteries.

  The HME system opens with Huang Sheng Shyan's material as the doorway into the internal work, concentrating on sōng 鬆 and tīng 聽 and on giving up external force 力 — which is the ground the syllabus here is built on. Part of Ian's own training, and a continuing reference point for what the internal work is supposed to feel like rather than look like.

• Robert James Coons

  Writer and teacher of Daoist meditation and internal alchemy, author of Internal Elixir Cultivation: The Nature of Daoist Meditation, and a historian of China by training — a degree from Guelph and five years working at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He teaches internal alchemy, qìgōng and the internal martial arts online from Ontario with Lin Zhang, and has lectured to this community on Daoist qìgōng and meditation as a genre, including why the tradition has historically preferred stillness gōngfū 靜功 to active 動功.

  His practice descends through Beijing's White Cloud Temple 白雲觀 — the seat of the Chinese Daoist Association — by way of Cao Zhenyang 曹真陽, abbot there and a leader of the Dragon Gate 龍門 stream of Quánzhēn, to Yang Hai, and from Yang Hai to Coons. He is careful to describe himself as a lay student rather than a priest, and his teacher likewise as a lay disciple — a distinction worth keeping, and one we make here too.

• Teachers across the internal arts

  Beyond the named lines above, a good deal of what is taught here was picked up in other people's classes, seminars and training halls over many years — teachers of taijiquan, qìgōng and the wider internal family who gave a correction that stuck, or a way of explaining something that finally made it land. Not all of them are named here, and some of them would not want to be, but the debt is real and worth stating.

Read rather than met

• Mǐn Yīdé 閔一得

  The Longmen priest (1748–1836) whose anthology Ian is translating, and whose doctrine of healing the world 醫世 has been particularly generative.

• Jiāng Wéiqiáo 蔣維喬

  Creator of the Yinshizi 因是子 quiet-sitting method, still the clearest practical entry into seated practice available, and the one Ian works from.

• Liú Yīmíng 劉一明

  The Qing alchemical commentator whose writing on discerning the true from the false runs through the study sessions.

Teaching approach

The emphasis is practical: understand through doing. Students are encouraged to test, ask questions, compare theory with experience, and recognise where traditional explanation, direct perception and verifiable fact are different kinds of knowledge.

Classes are taught plainly, one thing at a time, with room to ask and no expectation that anyone performs understanding they do not have.

Some things can be demonstrated immediately. Others take years. Part of practice is learning the difference.