(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 23)
At a certain age, many of us suddenly crave to revive old familiarities.
It becomes haunting and vital to find out ‘whatever happened to’ this or that
schoolmate, to take a trip to the town and neighborhood where one spent the
first summer after graduation, met one’s first serious...and so on.
The Sentimental Journey
need not be physical. You can do it in the space of a single library. In my
case, a big part of it was to re-read, or even just take another respectful
look at the title pages of, some of the books that had introduced me to
Oriental Studies when I was just getting into my twenties. They included Spoken Chinese by Hockett and Fang,
books on Buddhism by Edward Conze and Christmas Humphreys, even the Joyce Chen Cook Book.
Looking back through
these Venerable Tomes, one finds things that in the light of later training and
experience are ‘incorrect.’ But as anyone who has lived in the Far East knows, the authoritativeness of the Teachings
does not depend on whether they are factually true, but only on whether they
are still circulated and quoted.
One of the books I went
back to was East Asia: The Great
Tradition by Edwin O. Reischauer and John King Fairbank. In the chapter ‘Classic
China: The Golden Age of Chinese Thought,’ on page 77, I stumbled on a passage
that would not have seemed strange to me as a student:
...all nature is made up of varying combinations of the “five
elements” or “five powers” (wu hsing):
wood, metal, fire, water and earth. The parallel to the four elements of the
Greeks (earth, fire, air and water) is striking.
After decades of further reading both inside and outside ‘the field,’
I have two comments on this. The first is that nowadays not many academics would
translate the hsing 行 (nowadays usually spelled xing) as ‘elements’ – that term sounds
too material and physical. The translation might be ‘energies,’ ‘processes,’
energetic transitions,’ ‘phases,’ ‘modi’ or whatever, but probably not ‘elements.’
This would already seriously undermine any comparison with ancient Greek
thought.
But even more
importantly – for the life of me I cannot see any ‘parallel’ whatsoever, let
alone a ‘striking’ one, between a four- and a fivefold system. In the Greek
grouping, there are indeed four radical constituents. This quaternity naturally
lends itself to a symmetrical presentation, whether as a circle divided into
four equal quadrants, a vertical and a horizontal axis each having two poles, a
bar or horizon having two elements above (air and fire) and two below (water
and earth), and so on.
In the Chinese fivefold
scheme, symmetry is more problematical. Sometimes the ‘elements’ are drawn up
as a circle with wood, fire, metal and water occupying points along the rim and
earth in the center. But often the five are equally spaced along the rim, or as
points on a pentagram or star. Their order is not always the same. They can
stand in various kinds of mutual relationship, so that it is not possible to state
that one is higher or lower than another.
In the writings of C.
G. Jung (I am not American enough to call him ‘Carl’ Jung, which he himself
never did in his publications), who was a tremendous influence on many young
people of my generation, the fourfold or quaternity idea is not only important;
it is raised to the status of a supposed ‘archetype’ inherent to human
consciousness. It underlies or constitutes the ‘mandala,’ a focus or ordering
device.
But if we are looking
for ‘archetypes’ that supposedly apply to the whole of humanity, then what
about a people, like the Chinese, who exceed the bounds of the fourfold and get
along perfectly well with their fivefold focus?
Perhaps the Jungian ‘archetype’
notion was more culture-bound than we had thought. Maybe there is no such thing
as an inherent quaternity to which consciousness is magnetically attracted. And
why should there be? The human hand, undoubtedly one of the unconscious models for
such things, has not just four fingers but five, if not – as in the writings of
Zhuangzi or the poetry of Zhou Mengdie – even more.
To be sure, many
scholars believe the Chinese fivefold goes back to an earlier fourfold (or more
accurately, four-plus-one) scheme. Supposedly there were originally four
Quarters (fang 方) surrounding a Center;
subsequently the Center was dislodged from its unique role and all five players
became equal.
But even if this is so, the change is supposed to have occurred several
centuries before the beginning of our era, and isn’t it then strange that the
Chinese, comprising such a huge percentage of humankind, should have merrily
proceeded to live an anti-archetypal and in that sense atypical life for the
past couple of thousand years?
But aside from the
validity or otherwise of a formal or structural ‘parallel’ between the Western
four and the Eastern five, we can also approach all this from the viewpoint of
content. Comparing the Greek and Chinese lists of ‘elements,’ what does the
five have that the four lacks?
As it turns out, things
are more complicated. The Chinese model contains two factors that the Greek does
not – wood and metal – but at the same time, it importantly lacks the Western
element of air.
I say ‘importantly’ because
in Western culture, the ‘air’ element symbolizes mind, spirit, consciousness,
or communication, and that factor is often considered the specifically human dimension,
the crucial difference between mankind and the non-human world.
It would go beyond the
scope of this Scrapbook to expand on the cultural associations of the Chinese
non-air elements of wood and metal. But could we just make a wild leap and
surmise that the functions of ‘our’ air, in ‘their’ system, are perfectly well
present but divided between wood and metal?
We cannot. Even the
assumption that more or less the same ‘functions’ must be operative for ‘them’
in more or less the same ways, is a wide one. It smacks of archetype-mongering,
and I personally do not believe it. In traditional China, people
would have had no problem with there being no specific sector reserved for ‘consciousness’
as such. In the fivefold grouping of inner organs which is one of the conceptual
mainstays of Chinese medical theory, thought or ‘ratiocination’ is treated as
one of a group of ‘emotional states’ in which both ‘grief
and worry’ and ‘joy’ are
assigned to entirely different organs. I am inclined to agree with Chad Hansen
that most ‘Chinese thinkers treat mind as an action guide’ and ‘we may even
doubt that an intelligent, rational philosopher working in the ancient [Chinese
– LH] conceptual scheme has any reason to postulate consciousness.’ A. C. Graham,
discussing the two Cheng 二程brothers who were among the most influential neo-Confucian
philosophers, says they ‘do not regard the mind as an organ of knowledge
distinct from what it knows.’
Even linguistically,
offhand I cannot think of a word in Classical Chinese that would have meant ‘air’
with the same monosyllabic obviousness and plausibility of the jin, shui, mu, huo and tu 金水木火土
that are in standard use for metal, water, wood, fire and
earth. The modern word for ‘air’ is kongqi,
but neither kong nor qi would have unambiguously meant ‘air’
as opposed to ‘emptiness,’ ‘unreality,’ ‘sky,’ ‘ether,’ ‘energy,’ ‘atmosphere’
or various other things.
It is true that
traditional Chinese medicine includes, in addition to the five phases or
elements or whatever, another standard list of factors, this time sixfold, in
which ‘wind’ is one of the players. The six are called the liu qi 六氣or six...aaah, but yes, six what?
Donald E. Kendall, a well-known author in the Chinese-medicine field from whose
work I have profited, calls them the ‘airs,’ ‘sky-airs,’ or ‘atmospheric airs.’ Nathan Sivin,
whose translations I think mostly have the ring of sinological reliability,
calls them ‘climatic configurations.’ In any case, I
think it is clear that ‘wind’ as a ‘configuration’ or as one of the possible ‘airs,’ is not the same as ‘air’
pure-and-simple.
Still, I must admit
that having mentioned it, I am intrigued by my own thought that maybe ‘wood’
and ‘metal’ have something to do with my mind. Tree-shapes stirred by a breeze
at dawn, shadows reflected in a metal-framed mirror at the approach of evening:
maybe these Chinese-sounding images have more to do with ourselves than we
think. And maybe we think about them more, or in different and less ‘mental’
ways, than our culture has taught us to think that we think.
And come to think of
it, there is at least one important area of Chinese culture in which the ‘elements’
are explicitly features of mental activity. This is the whole family of
meditation techniques in which the mind is indeed an ‘action guide,’ directing
the imagination or attention through a fixed sequence of foci or loci or
stations which are associated with organs of the body. To make this
just a bit easier to – what shall we say, ‘imagine’? – I will give a brief
description of one of these techniques, practiced by quite a number of people
in Taiwan,
which I learned earlier this year from an 82-year-old retired actress and opera
singer whom I will call Teacher Zhang (her real surname).
Sitting with crossed
legs (if possible in what yoga practitioners call the lotus position), we start
by letting our hands rest easily on our knees, with the thumbs lightly touching
the index fingers and the other fingers loosely open. The left hand lies
palm-up, the right palm-down, so that we have a ‘yin’ and a ‘yang’ hand. Then
we check to see that three important points are vertically in line above each
other: (1) the ‘yin opening’ or yinqiao
陰竅, an
imaginary point nearby the anus and/or slightly in front of it, (2) the ‘heart
opening’ or xinqiao 心竅, thought of as between the
breasts or nipples, and (3) the ‘general assembly point’ or baihui 百會at the center of the crown. We think of our body as connected with ‘heaven
energy’ via the ‘general assembly’ and with ‘earth energy’ via the ‘yin opening’;
the ‘heart opening’ in between is to direct or supervise what will go on in our
body.
When these three are in
line (as much as possible), we direct our thought to the lowest point, the ‘yin
opening.’ We stay there until we have a feeling, a consciousness, or a sense of
‘something’ being there. Directed or accompanied by our thought, the ‘something’
then gradually rises along an imaginary mid-line of the body until it reaches
the ‘heart opening.’
From there, again led
or accompanied by our thought or imagination or attention, ‘it’ divides to left
and right, going into the lungs on both sides. We think of ‘the Metal of the
lungs’ and stay there with our attention, but without straining too hard to
avoid extraneous thoughts, which will arise in any case. We do not necessarily
keep repeating the words ‘metal’ or ‘lungs’;
in the fivefold system, metal is simply the ‘element’ associated with the
lungs. We sustain a relaxed awareness of ‘it’ being present in the lungs.
When we feel it has
been enough for now, we let ‘it’ return from left and right into the ‘heart
opening’ in the center. From there it proceeds backward through the body to the
spinal column and then goes down the back to the level of the kidneys. Again it
divides to the left and right, going into the kidneys on each side. We are
aware of ‘the Water of the kidneys’ and stay with this until we feel it has
been enough for now.
Again ‘it’ returns from
both sides to the mid-line of the back at about kidney level, and from there
proceeds forward and down through the interior of the body, to the so-called
Cinnabar Field or dantian 丹田. The dantian is not an organ but a theoretically present point. Because
of its importance in the so-called Inner Alchemy of Daoism, in English it is
often called the ‘Lower Elixir Field.’ Another name is qihai 氣海, the ‘Sea of Energy.’ Skipping all possible debates over the exact
location of this point (if there is one), let’s just say for now that it is
slightly under and slightly behind the navel.
We let our attention
rest briefly in the Cinnabar Field, then let ‘it’ rise again along the original
mid-line to the ‘heart opening.’ This time, from the ‘heart opening’ we direct
it to the right and slightly downward, into the liver. We consciously think of ‘the
Wood of the liver’ and let it remain there, circulating or being present in the
liver.
When we are ready, we
then have ‘it’ return to the ‘heart opening’ between the two breasts, where it
now stays for a while. We think of ‘the Fire of the heart.’
Finally, to round off the
sequence of five ‘organs,’ we let ‘it’ sink from the heart downward into the tummy
and belly area which in a general way is associated with the spleen. Thinking
of ‘the Earth of the spleen,’ we imagine ‘it’ being in this region. When we
feel we are finished, we have completed one cycle of meditation.
What I have just described is one particular version of what I call
a ‘family’ of meditation techniques which utilize the fivefold system of inner
organs as foci in a mental process which is said to be beneficial to physical
health. Sometimes that mental process is explicitly called neishi 內視 or ‘inner viewing’; sometimes the practitioner is encouraged to
think of specific colors, animals or other attributes while dwelling upon each
of the organs. Interestingly, though the fivefold group of organs is perennially
the same, the order in which they are ‘innerly viewed’ is not always identical.
In my description above, I have indicated the order which I learned from
Teacher Zhang, but in other sources on paper or the internet, I have seen two
alternative orders.
Now a question: does
the order really matter? I don’t know if it does. I personally see no reason to
deviate from what I have been taught, but I could very well imagine that the
order doesn’t matter much, as long as one respects and takes seriously the
overall procedure and, especially, the reasons for which one took it up in the
first place. I could even imagine...but now I’m getting very Western
again...that the number of these not-really-physical
‘organs’ is just a convention which could perfectly well be changed. If two
weeks from now I consulted a new Teacher and was told that the heart and spleen
were so closely related that I could henceforth collapse those two stations
into one, I would believe it.
But I would not do it. True,
to do it would be to reduce the five to the supposedly ‘archetypal’ or ‘original’
four. But could my Spleen, or the Earth that is my belly, really Ratiocinate
itself into being happy with going back and giving up, relinquishing, saying
goodbye to the warm dawn energy gleaming through the branches of Wood, to sunset
mirrored in the dream-rich peace of Metal, in return for the restoration of mere
thin...Air?
--Lloyd Haft
