Making a Homunculus

One of the things that separates Daoism from other religious world-views is the way it has traditionally posited that the human body is an important part of the spiritual man. In contrast, most other religions have tended towards a form of dualism where something like a "soul" inhabits a body like a human being driving a car. In philosophy this dualism is known as the "Cartesian Theatre".



The Cartesian Theatre seems like a reasonable hypothesis to the naive person, but suffers from being subject to an infinite regress. If the only way we can explain consciousness is by having a little man who lives in our heads (or a soul in the machine), then doesn't the "little man" also have to have a little man in his head (or, doesn't the soul itself have to be inhabited by a soul)?

In answer to this problem, modern psychologists have posited that human consciousness is a result of complex processes that take place in the entire body. And with a little reflection this should make sense to everyone. After all, a lot of our consciousness is controlled by hormones. Our sex drive makes us act in ways that has nothing to do with reason or logic, for example. In fact, almost all of our behaviour is ultimately driven by emotions that are instinctual in nature: fear, hunger, anger, lust, envy, jealously, etc.

Physiologists refer to the human sensory nerves by creating an image that they call a "homunculus". The idea is to draw a human being where the size of the various bodily parts corresponds to the relative density of nerve endings in that specific part.



By doing so, they are presenting a pictoral representation of how our body actually feels to the conscious mind. Since the process of neidan ("internal alchemy") involves becoming more and more aware of how the internal body operates, it actually involves changing the way we experience the body we inhabit. As a result, someone who had practised a style of internal alchemy for a long time, for example taijiquan, would have a different homunculus drawing to represent how they experience the world around them. A taijiquan player homunculus, for example, be shown with a much larger set of hips and spine, as the process of learning taijiquan involves learning to be much more aware of those parts of the body than is normal in our society. Modern science shows that this is possible because the human brain can and routinely does change itself in response to the behaviour of the individual. In the case of the internal alchemist, the hours and decades of disciplined practice changes the way the brain is organized.

Beyond the nerve endings that control our muscles and joints, there are also hormones that flow through our bodies. A homunculus rendering that attempted to show how our hormones affect our emotions would be a much more difficult thing to render, but it might be interesting to think about what it might look like. For example, I have a tendency to weep at the drop of a hat when I am overcome with strong emotions. (I cry buckets at sappy movies.) I can also become filled with rage at a drop of hat. (This is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.) This also has characteristic responses, such as clenching various muscles.


Through the ages different Daoists have noticed these sorts of things and have attempted to integrate them into their understanding of the human being. An early idea was that there were specific "gods" or "demons" that inhabited different parts of the body. The idea was that the alchemist should learn to control these different Gods by living a life that starved them of what they needed to become active. In the popular Daoist book Journey to the West, Monkey (who epitomizes the untrained human mind) has a terrible temper and when he "loses it" the narrator talks about the "brain worms" going wild in his head. Similarly, there are texts that talk about different "demons" or "worms" living in the heart, liver, etc-----organs that had their own specific influence on different elements of the human consciousness.

Daoists have also created their own homunculus diagrams in order to illustrate the way that various parts of the human body interact and work to modify our consciousness. The most famous one was copied from a stone carving in the White Cloud Temple in Beijing. It is called the "Neijing Tu". I have a copy on the wall of my hermitage's shrine room and have spent more than a little time looking at it trying to learn from it.


The version that I have is slightly different from the one above, but the main thing to remember about it is that it is the result of a tradition of people spending a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with the way their consciousness interacts with their body. The important point for the practitioner is not to learn how to decode the symbols that abound in the diagram, but to think about how their own experience of their body relates to the pictorial representations and what they might inform their own experience. That's because the experience of neidan is so personal that unless you find someone else who has made the same sort of efforts as you, it will be impossible to explain exactly what you are talking about without hopelessly confusing the other person. As such, the best you can do is what the person who carved the stele at the White Cloud Temple has done and leave a hint for the odd individual who will live in future generations.

Environmental Vow: Part Three

I'm still grinding away at my essay instead of working on the blog. I have lots of great ideas for blog posts, but no time. :-(




Exponential Versus Linear Thinking

Beyond the issue of positive feedback, there is one further element of the current crisis that increases our danger yet few people understand. It results from a specific bias that seems inherent to the way most people look at the world. That is to say that the environmental problems we are facing tend to be exponential in nature yet human “common sense” limits most people to intuitively seeing the world in a linear manner.


This problem can be illustrated by a old teaching story about the man who invented the game of chess. He gave a set to a king who was so impressed that he offered the inventer whatever he desired in return. The inventor suggested that he would like an amount of rice calculated according to the following formula. The first square of his chess board would have one grain of rice, the second two, the third 4, and so on. In effect, he was asking for grains of rice doubled to the 64th power.


There are two things that need to be pointed out to the naive reader about this story. First that because of the “miracle of compound interest” the resulting amount of rice on the chessboard is astronomically large: almost 37 cubic kilometers. If people were asked to intuitively guess at what the total amount of rice would be, they would almost invariably dramatically underestimate the total amount. The second important point to realize is that one half of that rice, 18.5 cubic kilometers, is on the last square alone (that is, because we are talking about doubling the amount.) Again, if asked to intuitively conceptualize the way the rice is distributed, people routinely miss this point. Indeed, the reason why this story about the chessboard and rice has been handed down through generations of religious teachers is because it gives an example of how the “common sense” way of looking at things can dramatically misleed us.


The only explanation that comes to my mind for this particular failure of complehension is to suggest that people have a bias towards seeing the world through the lense of “linear” growth. By using the term “linear”, I am relating the lived human experience of participating in an activity that can be expressed by a so-called “linear equation”. If you remember high-school mathematics, those are the situations that end up being shown by a straight line (hence the term “linear”) on a graph. These are situations where one of the key variables stays the same. One example is when someone has to shovel a load of gravel from one place to another---the shovel he uses stays the same size from the beginning of the job to the end. “Exponential” growth, in contrast, is expressed on a graph by a parabolic curve that starts slow and then explodes into something huge, like the story of the grains of rice on the chessboard. The two failures of the imagination I have identified above come from the fact that the majority of people usually only come across linear functions in their day-to-day life (the amount of gravel that the shovel moves per scoop only seems to get larger as the job progresses.) As a result, people's “common sense” fails them by thinking that the rice will grow the same way that pile of gravel gets moved. (I suspect that this is why so many people get into trouble with their credit card debt---they simply can't understand in their guts the way compound interest can balloon when you get behind in payments.)


This perceptual bias causes humanity a problem from an environmental perspective because two very important human processes have a profound impact on the environment---reproduction and economic growth---function in a exponential fashion. This means that the earth's population and our industrial activity, like the rice on the ancient chessboard, grow much faster than people intuitively expect them to. And also, contrary to people's naive expectations, one half of the growth happens in the last doubling cycle. This means that the problems that grow exponentially cease to be governable before people expect them to, which means that they take too long to take action.


With regard to population, the number of people on the earth has effectively doubled in my lifetime (starting at 1959) from three to six billion. At the current rate of growth, it could theoretically grow to over nine billion by the year 2050 (this is a reduction in the rate of growth, but it is still a very signficant increase in the numbers of people on the earth.) In a similar fashion, the rate of economic growth in Canada has averaged over the last few years at about 3% and in China's case has oscillated between 8% and an astounding 15%. If those rates continue, in the next 80 years the economies of Canada would be about 10 times bigger and China's a little under 500 times larger than they are now. Even if we assume that energy and natural resource efficiencies in the future will be such that a unit of economic activity then will only use one tenth the resources that it does now (and that is a pretty big assumption), this means that Canada will still be creating as much stress on the planet as it is now and China's impact will be at least fifty times larger than it is now. If we think of these two different economic growth rates in terms of doubling frequency, we find that at 3% Canada's economy doubles in size about every 23 years; and at 8% China's at about every 9 years. This means that if life continues as it has up until now (or, as our politicians and economists are basing all their long-term planning on!!!!), in the years between 2066 and 2089 Canada's economy will grow larger by an equivalence of five times what it currently is. Similarly, in the years between 2080 and 2089 China's economy would grow by an astounding 250 times what it is today.


The impact of population growth on the regard the environment should be obvious to everyone. But some people do not understand (or, to be more accurate, are in denial with regard to) the way economic growth affects the environment. Strictly speaking, economic growth is usually measured in terms of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP is the measure of all economic activity---both production and services---in an economy over a year. In effect, the GDP number is arrived at when all the things made and done in an economy for money are added together. If that number increases by 3% in a year, then the economy is said to have grown by 3%. As a rule of thumb, whenever the GDP goes up, so does the use of natural resources and the emission of pollutants do as well. Some people make a huge fuss about this assumption by arguing that it is theoretically possible for an economy to grow without having a corresponding increase in pressure on the environment. But in actual fact, this has never really happened in human history so raising this point is not much more than a rhetorical attempt to divert people's attention from a very disquieting fact.


The important point to understand about this mathematical process is that the growth is dramatically faster than people intuitively expect. What this means is the human institutions such as government and civil society are almost inevitably going to be “blind-sided” by the rate at which these two human process---economic and population growth---cease to be theoretical concerns and become practical catastrophies. Human societies take a certain amount of time to understand and react to change. If change happens faster than a society can understand and deal with it, then the nation becomes overwhelmed and loses the ability to effectively govern itself. At that point it simply blunders through crises without developing any effective means for either prevention or adaptation. That is the fundamental problem that humanity faces because its perceptual bias towards seeing the world in a linear as opposed to exponential fashion.


I believe that if people honestly look at the last few election cycles this inability to adapt to a changing reality expresses itself in the sorts of issues that dominate political discourse. For example, for the last twenty years global warming has been probably the greatest threat facing our civilization---yet the issues that have dominated have tended, in comparison, to be laughably trivial: gay rights, the cost of living, education, taxation, medical insurance, etc. (Please note, I am not saying that these are not important issues with very dramatic impact on individual people's lives. Just that they pale into insignificance when compared to the dramatic importance of dealing with climate change which will have a catastrophic impact on everyone's life.) It is probably true that given enough obvious evidence of climate change that governments will eventually start seriously working on the file, but if action is left too late our last doubling cycle will create so much new stress on the planet (because of things like positive feedback) that it will probably end up being a question of too little too late.

Environmental Vow: Part Two

This is the next part of the book I am writing. It doesn't really have much directly to do with Daoism, but it does address the issue of why I am what people usually call a "religious" instead of a "philosophical" Daoist. I'm using the provisional title of "The Vow of Sustainability" for this essay---for reasons that will eventually become obvious as I work through it.


The Crisis We Face

The human race currently faces an environmental catastrophe that has several elements that make it particularly dangerous. First of all, it is unprecedented in the dangers it presents to human civilization. Secondly, due to the mathematical laws that govern the way it is progressing, the human race is almost doomed to not understand and react until it is too late to take the action necessary to avert catastrophe. Finally, the only actions that seem like they would be sufficient to avert catastrophe seem to dramatically undermine key biological and social imperatives.


There is no sense in writing yet another screed that explains the dangers of CO2 emissions. Anyone who hasn't heard the news is simply refusing to listen. But I think it is important to understand a few key points that many people may not understand. First of all, there is a significant danger that global warming may have a “tipping point” beyond which positive feedback will cause it to accelerate dramatically no matter what human beings do. “Positive feedback” is a phenomenon where a specific result of an activity is channelled back into the original process that results in that original activity being sped up or intensified. An example everyone has seen is where a microphone is held too close to a speaker in a public address system. The loud squeal is the result of the sound that microphone picks up being amplified through the speaker, where it is picked up again by the microphone and made louder by the speaker, and then fed to the microphone yet again, which gets louder again until the limits of the speaker are reached---or the microphone is moved or turned off.


There are several possible ways that positive feedback could dramatically speed up climate change.


First of all, large areas in the earth's surface are composed of “permafrost”. These are places where the soil remains frozen all year around. They are a sort of permanent “deep freeze” which hasn't melted for thousands of years. (It is because of this permanent cold that we are able to find preserved woolly mammoths.) Many of these areas contain large quantities of frozen organic matter that if melted would release large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is many times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. If a great amount of methane is released, the earth will get warmer, which will cause more permafrost to melt. This will release even more methane, and so on. Some areas of permafrost are already melting.


Secondly, the area around the North Pole has traditionally been covered by sea ice. Ice is very good at reflecting the sun's energy. If it melts, then it is replaced by dark sea water---which is much better at absorbing heat. If the sea absorbs enough heat, then there are going to be fewer and fewer days when the sea is covered by ice. This, in turn, means that the sea absorbs more heat, which means that there are even fewer days when the water is covered by ice. The water around the North Pole is already clear of ice for longer times each year than at any time in history. So much so that nations around the world are scrambling to claim it for oil drilling and as a sea lane.


One final example involves temperate forests. As temperatures rise, insect infestations which are controlled by the cold of winter will become more widespread. As these insects move through forests, they kill off trees which then dry out and become tinder for forest fires. And when those trees burn, they release more carbon which then increases the CO2 in the atmosphere, which in turn raises the temperature over the winter, which allows more insect pests to survive. At some point global warming may result in massive forest fires across the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, which would release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is already the case that a current Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak in British Columbia is 10 times larger than anything recorded before. And this, in turn, has fed massive forest fires in that province.


Beyond the problem of positive feedback leading to an accelerating climate crisis, there are other significant ecological problems that are rarely mentioned in the popular press because the scientific and environmental community believes it is best to focus on the one issue of CO2 emmissions first. These include things like the acidification of the seas, the global accumulation of fixed nitrogen, transgenerational genetic damage caused by chemical pollution, and so on. Moreover, it needs to be remembered that because of the huge resources that have gone into studying climate change, many of these issues have probably also been starved of research funding, which means that there may be even bigger problems that we are don't even know about. (The so-called “unknown unknowns”.)

Environmental Vow: Part One

I've been a bit negligent in posting to my blog over the last few months. Primarily, this is because I have been working on writing a long essay about an issue related to Daoism, but not directly relevant. I've been on the horns of a dilemma about whether I should try to sell the manuscript that I hope will result or just give it out free as an e-book. I've finally made up my mind to put it out as an e-book. What convinced me was hearing several people tell me that nowadays it makes more sense to give away your writings for free and hope for some consulting work that might come out of it than to think that you can write a best-seller. With that in mind, I'm going to be posting bits and pieces of the essay for feedback. When I eventually get the thing finished, I'll post it in its entirety here so people can download it, share with others, etc.

What I'm posting today is a bit of a "teaser" that was written with the hope that it would raise some of the ideas that I plan to deal with in detail in the following essay. The idea is that people would get into the main body of the essay with some appreciation of the practical importance of the ideas being discussed.



The Example of Gandhi

One of the defining moments of India's independence movement was a symbolic act when Congress Party members piled-up all their clothing that was made from imported English textiles and set them on fire. This was a public declaration that from then on they would wear nothing else but an Indian-made form of homespun, known as “khadi”. By doing so, these people were both supporting the economic independence of their country as well as providing much-needed work for the hard-pressed class of agricultural labourers. (Who wove the cloth on small looms during the rainy season.) The impact of this movement on the development of Indian nationalism cannot be under-estimated. As a token, to this day, the Indian flag is forbidden to be made of anything else but khadi.


Mohandas Gandhi, who was the leader of Indian independence, was a remarkably successful politician in large part because he understood the importance of symbols and symbolic acts as ways of creating consensus amongst and motivating large numbers of people. He did this by appealing to the values and emotions of the people supporting the independence movement. He understood that for most people the intellect is a lazy fellow who almost never gets off his couch and does the “heavy lifting”. Instead, the labour and risk of life is almost invariably undertaken because someone becomes emotionally engaged.


More to the point, Gandhi realized the importance of both the symbolic act and the public vow. People live their lives enmeshed in a symbolic milieau. We constantly look towards each other in search of cues that suggest that what it is that they are doing at any given time is right, proper, and fashionable. Are my clothes appropriate for my workplace? Is this joke appropriate for this meeting? Should I have dressed up just a little more for the wedding? Will my date “fit in” at this family occasion? Is my yard “up to standards” for my neighbourhood? Are my jeans “cool” enough for my crowd? Gandhi realized that while it is possible to change an individual person's opinion through reasoned argument (and he was a master at that), whole societies only change when the conventional understanding of what is right, appropriate and fashionable begins to shift. And the way to change those values is not done by argument, but by re-arranging the symbolic “signposts” that inform their community. And the way to do that, is by creating new symbols to shade-out the old ones and substitute for them.


Gandhi did this in several ways. First of all, he made a conscious choice to reject English-style clothing and adopted a traditional form of dress. He shaved his head, leaving only a scalp lock (shika), which identified him as an orthodox, if somewhat old-fashioned, Hindu. He also took to wearing a khadi loincloth (dhoti). The point was that up until that time most of the educated elite of Indian society (including Gandhi) took great pains to emulate the English in their clothing and much of their lifestyle. For a leader like the Mahatma to begin to dress and act like a lower-class, old-fashioned Indian was an act of great symbolic resonance. As such, he was trying to break down the barriers that existed between the small elite of cosmopolitan Indians who supported independence and the overwhelming majority of ordinary citizens who were disinterested. What this meant for the independence movement was that for the first time ordinary people began to see a nationalist leader that they could identify with as being “one of them”.


A second symbolic act that the Mahatama undertook was to create an Ashram, or spiritual commune, where people of all faiths and all castes lived together. Gandhi realized that the English had been able to govern their country by dividing the Indian people into different religious groups and play them off against each other. As long as Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jains, Parsis, etc, had more against each other than the British, they would never be able to throw out the imperialists. Gandhi attempted to move beyond these divisions on their ears by showing that people of all faiths could live together on his commune and by consciously trying to surround himself with representatives of all faiths. More to the point, by publically living with people from all religious faiths, Gandhi dissipated any fears that non-Hindus may have had about supporting him.


Moreover, Gandhi knew that the majority Hindu faith was itself divided by caste oppression. As long as the huge numbers of “untouchables” (Dalits) were oppressed by the other Hindu castes, it would be very hard to accuse the British of doing anything worse than what Indians were already doing to themselves. Gandhi worked to “short circuit” this sense of untouchability by publically displaying his unwillingness to take any of the traditional “cleanliness” taboos (i.e. what specifically separated Dalits from higher castes) seriously. In fact, at the first national conference of the Congress Party he ever attended he personally took on the responsibility of cleaning the latrines---a tremendously “unclean” task for a high-caste Hindu like himself. (The movie “Gandhi” references this fact by a scene where his wife is horrified to be asked to take her turn cleaning the latrine for the Ashram. Western audiences often miss the importance of this scene because they don't understand the subtext.) In addition, Gandhi's writings almost seem to revel in discussing toilets and latrines, and the poor state of Indian sanitation. Finally, on his “salt march” he had two porters walk behind him with a portable toilet. This seems totally inexplicable to modern Western readers until one realizes that he was symbolically taking on the issue of untouchability by doing so.


One of the images that is most deeply seated in our understanding of Gandhi is that of his sitting at a spinning wheel (charka). Not only are there many photos of him doing this, he used to spin at moments that would seem extremely innappropriate to Western audiences. For example, when he was the President of the Congress Party he once spent an entire 40 minute scheduled address in front of a huge number of supporters doing nothing else but silently spinning thread. Again, in the context of India at that time, this was a profoundly symbolic act. It was an act of clearly reinforcing the connection between the Congress Party leadership and the ordinary people of India. It was a way of reinforcing Gandhi's policy of trying to support economic nationalism by cutting the nation's reliance in the mills of England. Finally, it was a way of suggesting his concern about the struggling poor (what he called the “skeletons” in his writings) who needed that thread to be able to work weaving khadi during the rainy seasons (that is, when no longer needed for agricultural labour.) By the symbolic act of publically spinning, Gandhi was literally making a thread that connected his political movement to the ordinary people of India and suggested a way for the country to cut itself from from the economic dependency that tied it to England.

Milestones in the Practice of Taijiquan

People who practice the Japanese martial arts have a ranking system that gives them some sort of feel for their progress in learning the system. Taijiquan is different. Most practitioners are not interested in learning how we compare to other people but how what we are now compared to how we once were.



The loss of muscle definition:

When I took my first taijiquan class I was probably in the best “shape” I'd ever been in my life. I had just finished a very intensive self-imposed exercise regime in an unsuccessful attempt to qualify for a career in the armed forces. I had built myself up to the point where I could run three miles every day, could do seventy-five “marine style” push-ups (you bounce up off the floor and clap your hands together in mid-air) at a time, was doing regular laps in a swimming pool, etc. I have never been an athlete, but for once I had some of the attributes including significant muscle “definition” on my arms.

When I began taijiquan I focused on my arms because even though I though I was in pretty good shape I found some of what looked like some “easy” exercises maddeningly difficult. In particular, I found it very hard to do one that involved simply holding my hands up and rotating them and my fore-arm back and forth 180 degrees back and forth on the the axis that extends from my elbow to the tip of my middle finger. So I set myself a goal of doing this one for fifteen minutes a day---even if I had to do it in fifteen one minute increments. Eventually I was able to do the whole time at one go but in doing so I noticed a very significant change. I had lost all the muscle definition in my arms!

This experience puzzled me for years until I heard that there are two different types of muscle fibers: “long-twitch” and “short-twitch”. Reading up on these two different types of muscles, it became clear that “long-twitch” muscles are the ones we use for taijiquan whereas “short-twitch” ones are those used by weight lifters. The transition from one type to another may explain the difference in look. Moreover, this decline in definition explains the reason why people often suggest that men who practice taijiquan develop a “feminine” look. They lose their muscle definition which smooths-out the lines on their body---not because of the woman's thin layer of fat that they naturally carry under the skin, but because the skeletal muscles on the man are less well-defined. I believe that it is also partly the basis of the claims that someone who practices internal alchemy is able to reverse the process of aging and develop some of the physical attributes of a baby.


The Beginners Plateau:

The second real milestone was the fact that after some very significant physical changes in my body while I was first learning the gross movements of the open hand set, I stopped seeing any results from continued practice. I had “learned” the set, and now all I seemed to be doing was going through the motions. Being an obstinate sort of person, I stuck with my practice even though it seemed to be going nowhere. Whenever possible I tried to augment my practice by doing things like learning weapons forms, push hands, tumbling, more and more warm-up exercises, meditation, and even some sorts of odd variants in practice such as doing the set on the side of steep hills, backwards or in “mirror image”.

This “dry spell” went on for years and years until I decided to actually give up doing taijiquan as a New Years resolution. When I stopped, however, I found that I started getting migraine headaches again. I had had these on and off for years before I started my regular practice but they almost completely disappeared when I began to regularly do taijiquan and I'd forgotten about them. But with the prospect of their return, I went back to regular practice. This brought back a saying that had been common in the club where I learned the art: “the only people who stick with taijiquan are the sick ones”.

Eventually I realized that the practice of taijiquan is not about constant dramatic improvement, but more about living a specific type of life. The school of Soto Zen suggests that the meditation is itself enlightenment. In the same way, the goal of taijiquan is itself taijiquan. And once I began to chip away at the goal-oriented attitude that I had brought to the art, I began to realize that there were subtle changes taking place in me that I had been too obtuse to notice. Eventually I realized that taijiquan is not just about changing the body, but it is also about changing the mind. And part of that change is learning to be much more sensitive to the nuances of being a human being. Once I came to this realization, I could see that I had been making progress all along.


Strange Body Sounds:

There came a time in my practice when I started to get weird sounds in various parts of my body. For example, for about a month or two I noticed that I when I flexed my chest it created very loud “crunching” sounds. They were very noticeable to those around me and sounded like someone breaking a bundle of dry sticks over their knee. Eventually it went away. For another period of time my hip started making an odd “clunk” whenever I did a “separation kick” or a “snake creeps down”. Eventually that too went away. And twice I had a very odd feeling at the very base of my spine that felt and sounded like something in my tail-bone was breaking loose.

I believe that the traditional Daoist terms for what was happening is “tendon changing” and “marrow washing”. In modern medical language, I theorize that what was happening was that by specific exercises I was reversing the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle.

My family has a disposition towards a stooped posture which Daoists have traditionally identified as “the scholar's hump”. In my case the title is well-deserved as it was made worse by years of sitting at a desk (this was before computers.) My brother actually has the condition worse that I ever did, and he probably gets it from his work repairing sewing machines. The loud “cracking” sound, therefore, was the loosening up of long-tight muscles and tendons in my chest.

With regard to my hips, I noticed that as my exercise progressed I was changing the way I worked. I used my back less and less to do things like pick up heavy objects and instead used my legs. Moreover, I found that when doing things like breaking concrete with a sledge-hammer I used my legs and the weight of the hammer instead of my upper body. I started paying more attention to the way people use their bodies and noticed that most people have lost a large amount of flexibility in their hips which they compensated for by using their backs. This means that all the accident prevention instruction that people receive at work (i.e. life with your legs, not your back) is pretty much useless unless they also start working on opening up their hips. The conclusion I came to was that from lack of use my hips had lost a great deal of mobility. The “clunking” was the ball and socket joint working beyond the limited area of movement I had previously used.

Finally, I have been told that the snapping sound in my tail-bone (or “coccyx”) was two segments that had been fused together snapping apart. My quick searches on the Internet would seem to indicate that this might not be totally correct. Contrary to old opinions, it appears that for most people the tail-bone doesn't actually fuse together. Nor does it seem to be a useless appendage. Instead it serves a very useful purpose in anchoring a wide variety of muscles in our abdomens and legs. It is also supposed to be very important to the process of sitting and squatting, which means that it too is important to opening up the hips. Whether or not some of the segments in my coccyx had fused, the process of doing taijiquan had loosened it up and the result was a lot more mobility.

Moments of Grace:

Several times in my life I have experienced what could only be called incidents of “grace” in my taijiquan. By this, I mean that spontaneously I have been able to do things that seemed totally remarkable and seem to validate the “wild history” that people talk about kung-fu masters. For example, once I was clowning around in my school with a practice sabre in my hands. I noticed a poster on the wall of the club for an organization that I don't like so I stabbed it with the tip of my sabre, tore it off the bulletin board, tossed it in the air and sliced it into two pieces in mid air as it floated down---all this with a totally blunt aluminum sabre. Another time I was demonstrating “live” push hands with another fellow for a visitor to the club. At one point I spontaneously grabbed onto the other fellow's arms and executed a back roll. He tumbled over on top of me and he ended up on his back with me sitting on his chest with both his arms pinned.

The important thing to understand was that these maneuvers were totally spontaneous---if my life depended on it I couldn't recreate them. It was if taijiquan was doing me rather than I was doing taijiquan. I don't like the word or idea of “master”, but I think that this is the sort of thing that lies at the root of the notion. I suspect that someone like Yang the Invincible was able to manifest this sort of state very often, which would explain the extra-ordinary feats attributed to him. Moreover, I have met people from other traditions who have said that they have had similar experiences.


Dropping the Chest and Finding the Bubbling Well Springs:

The latest milestone is finally being able to achieve something that I was told in the first year of practice---over 30 years ago. I have always been told that my weight should be on the entire sole of my foot instead of concentrated on the heel or ball. No matter how much I tried to figure out how to do this, it always seemed beyond my ability. A year or so ago I started saying a rosary while doing walking meditation most mornings. (Primarily, I was using reverse breathing techniques in order to cure constipation.) It did this, but I also noticed other significant mental and physical advantages, so I have stuck with the practice.

As almost a side benefit, I noticed that in doing so I made a significant change in my posture while doing the taijiquan set. I was in a totally vertical posture, but because of the concentrated experience in reverse breathing, I'd gotten into the habit of sinking my rib cage at the same time. This allowed me to drop my buttocks while being totally vertical, which in turn allowed me to put all my weight onto the entire sole of my foot. I had finally found out how to access the “bubbling wellsprings” in my feet! This has totally changed my practice and allows me a whole new level of control and balance in my form.


These milestones are my own personal ones. I could have mentioned others, but they were the ones that came to mind as I was writing this essay. I suspect that others could have written a different set because they have had different experiences. But I have heard other people who practice either taijiquan or other forms of kung-fu say similar things.

This Time De, Not Dao

People who are interested in such things usually spend a lot more time thinking about the term "Dao" than they do "De". But it is still very important, so much so that one of the oldest versions of the Laozi that has been found actually bears the title "De Dao Jing" instead of the more common one.

Like most important philosophical or spiritual words, "De" seems to have a lot of different associations and connotations. People like me who have not spent their entire lives learning ancient Chinese and all the nuances associated with specific characters have to get by with translations and what little scholarly reading we can find time for. To illustrate the sort of thinking that I do about such things, take a look at the following translation of chapter 38 of the Laozi. It is the first chapter of the "De" portion of the text and the one that most specifically deals with the concept. (The translator, Victor Mair, has used the word "integrity" to translate "de", so everywhere you see the first word, you know the original text has the second.)

The person of superior integrity does not insist upon his integrity;
For this reason, he has integrity.
The person of inferior integrity never loses sight of his integrity;
For this reason, he lacks integrity. (1)


The person of superior integrity takes no action,
nor has he a purpose in acting.
The person of superior humaneness takes action,
but has no purpose in acting.
The person of superior righteousness takes action,
and has a purpose for acting.
The person of superior etiquette takes action,
but others do not respond to him;
Whereupon he rolls up his sleeves and coerces them.(2)


Therefore,


When the Way is lost, afterwards comes integrity.
When integrity is lost, afterwards comes humaneness.
When humaneness is lost, afterwards comes righteousness.
When righteousness is lost, afterwards comes etiquette.(3)


Now,


Etiquette is the attenuation of trustworthiness, and the source of disorder.(4)

Foreknowledge is but the blossomy ornament of the Way,
and the source of ignorance.(5)


For this reason,


The great man resides in substance, not in attenuation.(6)


He resides in fruitful reality, not in blossomy ornament.(7)


Therefore,


He rejects the one and adopts the other.

(Chapt 38, Victor H. Mair trans.)

Before we get to discussing "de", I think it is important to point out a couple other things first.

Scholars tell us that like the Christian Bible, the Dao De Jing wasn't written by a single writer. Instead it is a collection of sayings from an oral tradition that were brought together and edited into the form we have today. With this in mind, it is very useful to look at a translation and try to parse out the different parts that were brought together. In a scholarly translation like Victor Mair's, clues are left in the text---in the way the stanzas are laid out---so the reader can work out them out.

With that in mind, I've labelled what I am assuming are different "voices" in this chapter from "1" to "7". I've also changed the colour to pink of what I am assuming are "transitional words" that editors have inserted to give the illusion that the chapter is a complete entity instead of a collection. Finally, I've changed the words to green that I think make up a conclusion that the editor inserted.

I've done this to remind myself that because this is a collection of oral sayings instead of the creation of one mind. This means that I shouldn't assume that each one of these stanzas is informed by the same way of looking at the world. Indeed, when I do make the effort, I think I can see a subtle difference.

Another thing I find useful to do is to try and step back from the decisions that the translator has made and substitute the original word so I can just see them in their context without the connotations that the English word brings. Let's do this for the first three stanzas.

The person of superior de does not insist upon his de;
For this reason, he has de.
The person of inferior de never loses sight of his de;
For this reason, he lacks de. (1)

This stanza is arguing that "de" is something that is involved in one's awareness of self. If one is self-conscious about their "de", they lack it. This could be referring to someone who is following a course of action more because of how he wants to be perceived by his neighbours than by whether or not he thinks the action is the "right thing to do". It could also be referring to someone's internal self-image and how that constrains their behaviour. (My Daoist teacher once said that one of the biggest problems people have in life is their self-image that says things like "Oh, I couldn't do that!") Finally, it could be referring to the idea that the act of thinking about some things makes it difficult to do them. (There is a teaching story I read once about a centipede who lost the ability to walk when someone asked him just exactly how he was able to control so many legs. Once the started thinking about it, he found he could no longer do it.)

The person of superior de takes no action,
nor has he a purpose in acting.
The person of superior humaneness takes action,
but has no purpose in acting.
The person of superior righteousness takes action,
and has a purpose for acting.
The person of superior etiquette takes action,
but others do not respond to him;
Whereupon he rolls up his sleeves and coerces them.(2)

This stanza seems to be making a different statement. The person in the first line is following the path of Wu Wei, or non-action. But please note that this statement is not some variant of the medical "first, do no harm". That is to say, that there are a great many cases where more harm is done through thoughtless action than would have resulted from letting things follow their natural course. Instead, this stanza seems to be saying that the superior man is acting without purpose at all. I suppose that this could be read---if it was seen in isolation from what follows---as saying that the sage is supposed to spontaneously sleepwalk through life.

I believe, however, that what the author really means is that the superior man of "de" has no motive when he acts. He just does what seems "right" or "natural" as it looks to him at that time. This could mean several different things. It could mean that he has no "ulterior motives", by which I mean that he is being forthright and honest in his dealings instead of following some selfish hidden agenda. It could also mean that he doesn't believe that "the ends justify the means", no matter how good the ends might be. It could also mean that he tends to act instinctively and "in the now", sort of the way people work when they practice "process art". The emphasis is still, however, that when a man with de acts in a "right" or "natural" way, he has a tendency towards doing nothing at all rather than getting busy. (And don't forget that even the process of not acting is still a conscious act.)

The next line of the stanza puts the word "humaneness" in the place where "de" was in the previous one. I suspect that the word that Mair has translated as "humaneness" is the Confucian term "ren". This word is about as important to the "Ru Jia" (Confucians) as "Dao" is to Daoists. If this is the case, then the author is trying separate Daoists from Confucians by saying that both are disinterested members of society---but one is engaged and the other is not.

The distinction is not just conceptual, however, for the author is clearly trying to suggest that "de" is superior to "ren". He does this by placing the former ahead of the latter in a series of declining value. The next step is righteousness, which is specifically mentioned as not being disinterested in nature. This could be the sort of "tough love" of Puritanism or mere hypocrisy based on ulterior motives. The final line about "etiquette" is, I suspect, a jab at the sort of person who's ethical framework is not much more than the conventional forms of social behaviour and who will not shrink from imposing his will by force if someone refuses to abide by the "norms". (Think of the boss who is all "noblesse oblige" as long as his underlings are properly deferential---but fires anyone who has the gall to talk back to him.)

The suggestion might be that once someone commits herself to acting---"ren" instead of "de"---she starts on the slipperly slope that ends in not much more than convention and force.

This slippery slope argument is also the basis of the next stanza.

When the Way is lost, afterwards comes de.
When de is lost, afterwards comes humaneness.
When humaneness is lost, afterwards comes righteousness.
When righteousness is lost, afterwards comes etiquette.(3)

But note that there is a new element involved here. The Dao (or "Way") is being placed ahead of "de". In fact, a progressive decline is suggested Dao>"de">"ren">righteousness>etiquette. So instead of "de" being the attribute of a life lived in tune with the Dao, it is a degenerated form of existence that comes when one has lost the Dao yet is still above the lowly Confucians, who are in turn above the more plebian sort of humanity. This seems to be at odds with much of the rest of the book, which would rest on the idea that a person's ability to manifest "de" is a result of living in harmony with the Dao. Indeed, the title of book is usually translated as something along the lines of the "The Way and its Power Classic" (i.e. Dao De Jing.)


Now let's look at a list of possible translations for "de" that I found at the Wikipedia.

1. Rise, go up, climb, ascend. [升; 登.]
2. Morals, morality, virtue, personal conduct, moral integrity, honor. [道德, 品行, 节操.]
3. Denoting a wise/enlightened person with moral character. [指有道德的贤明之人.]
4. Kindness, favor, grace, graciousness. [恩惠, 恩德.]
5. Grateful, gratefulness, thankful, indebted. [感恩, 感激.]
6. Benevolent rule, good government, good instruction. [德政, 善教.]
7. Objective regulations/rules. [客观规律.]
8. Quality, nature, basic character, characteristics, attribute. [性质; 属性.]
9. Intention, purpose, heart, mind. For example: "Be of one heart and mind". [心意. 如:一心一德.]
10. In Five Phases theory, a reference to seasonally productive energy/air. [五行说指四李的旺气.]
11. First growth, initial stage, beginning of something. [始生; 事物的开始.]
12. A phoenix-head pattern/decoration. [凤凰头上的花纹.]
13. Blessings, good fortune, happiness, resulting from benevolent actions. [福, 善庆的事.]
14. Used for zhí "straight, just". [通 "直 (zhí)".]
15. Used for zhí "to plant, grow, establish". Plant a tree. [通 "植 (zhí)". 立木.]
16. Used for "get, obtain, result in". [通 "得".]
17. A national name. An abbreviation for the Republic of Germany during World War II. [国名. 第二次世界大战结束前的德意志联邦的简称.]
18. A star name. [星名.]
19. A river name. Another name for the Yellow River. [水名. 黄河之别名.]
20. A surname. [姓.]

I think we can ignore meanings seventeen to twenty. (I doubt that the "old ones" were thinking about Nazi Germany.) But as you can see if you think about meanings one to sixteen, a translator has a lot to choose from when he thinking about a English word that will have all the relevant resonances. Indeed, Mair says in his introduction to his translation that it took him two months of very intense thought before he settled on the word "integrity".

If you look at the possible translations, it strikes me that they break down into three different complexes: goodness (3-6), wisdom (3, 6, 7, 14), and power (1, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16.) From my own limited understanding, it seems to me that the problem that Mair and other translators face is that there is no word in English that encapsulates at the same time the three concepts of goodness, wisdom and power. And the reason why no English word does so is because the common wisdom of our society is that these are totally unrelated---if not mutually exclusive---concepts.

Indeed, for our civilization "de" is a rather revolutionary idea. Most people conceive of goodness in terms of weakness. Think of all the images in popular culture of the weak priest or minister, or soft woman, who is "goodness" incarnate. Their only real strength is their ability to sacrifice themselves for their ideal. And there are only two ways that good "triumphs". The first is through its ability to convert some sort of hard, strong man to support it (think of the classic Western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" where the good man survives because a strong man murders the villain.) The second is through some sort of heroic sacrifice that results in divine intervention (think of the clergyman who sacrifices himself to the Martians in a futile attempt at peace-making in the 1950's movie "War of the Worlds" which leads to their death from disease---a "divine" intervention if there ever was one.)

In the same way, wisdom is usually considered to be separate from goodness and strength. Again, if you look at popular depictions of wise people, they are usually described as old and feeble types who need young, strong types to be able to achieve their ends. (Even powerful Gandalf from "Lord of the Rings" needed the support of the youthful hobbits in order to achieve his ends.)

The idea that a type of real power can be associated with both goodness and wisdom is really a rare idea in Western civilization. Usually our archetypal figures of power have some sort of character flaw that renders them foolish in one way or another. (Think of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, for example, they never seem to get over their silly infatuation with Guinevere---even though the result is a ruinous war and the destruction of the kingdom.)

The oriental, Daoist-inspired, archetypes are different from the Western ones. The wise, good man or woman is also very potent. The Shaolin-monk or priest from Wudang-shan may be old and wise, with good in his heart---but he is also able to fight and, when necessary, make the tough decisions. The nun (such as Ng Mui) may have a heart of gold, but God help any man who thinks he can take advantage of her because she can fight too! And, of course, there are many different types of power. Martial arts are but one example, the powerful tactics and strategies that the Daoist advisor Zhuge Liang used in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms are another example. But they do use the same principles as expressed in the Laozi and manifested as "de".

So this far too long post ultimately has a conclusion. That is, that the ideal of "de" is different from Western ones.

But more importantly, this post is an attempt to show how scholarly thought is also a type of Daoist meditation technique. I wanted to work through this for at least one post because it is a traditional form of Daoist internal yoga, but one that Westerners know almost nothing about and probably wouldn't recognize if they fell over it.

A Mustard Seed of Happiness----

Most people nowadays suffer from the delusion that it is possible to find happiness in the externalities of life. It isn't surprising that this is the case, because our culture pretty much rams this idea down our throats from an early age. Not only is it enshrined in the US Constitution and constantly dinned into our ears through advertising, but I find that people increasingly police each other in order to ensure that each of us has a "positive attitude".

I was reminded of this the other day at work when a co-worker made a comment about my countenance. I had been reading a newspaper article about a researcher who was saying that a very high percentage of men leave their wives when they suffer significant health problems. I don't know if this is truly a problem or just some more hype created by the media. But I'm not sure that I ever want to be the sort of person who isn't visibly disturbed by reading this sort of thing.

Several days before I'd been listening to two of my co-workers talking about some issues that one of them had been facing. The one fellow had been off work for a couple months because he had had two major arteries in his heart almost totally block by plaque. He didn't have a heart attack, but it was almost a miracle he didn't. Thanks to the Canadian health care system, though, he had both blockages fixed and he is back at work now. But in the interim, it was discovered that his wife has breast cancer. So not only was this guy stuck at home and forced to do nothing in order to recuperate from the insertion of two stents, but now he had to watch his wife undergo surgery, help with her post-operation recovery, and, wait to see what the tests will say about the lump that was removed.

What was really interesting about this was the response of two of his co-workers. One said "I bet you're glad you got the plasma screen tv!" The other said "rent movies, lots of comedies". In effect, the solution of life's problems is to keep yourself distracted.

I'm not about to say that there is no sense in trying to cheer oneself up with entertainment. I myself have been a little "down" lately and last night I made my own attempts at distraction with a Patrick O'Brian novel and a glass of red wine. But I do think that our society is really misguided in its attempt to convince people that some sort of physical "happiness" can be the baseline without the odd tragic fluke intruding once in a while. When I look around me I see so much evidence of real tragedy that I cannot think that the odd person I know who really does seem to be immune from bad things is simply the result of my own ignorance of their true condition rather than some objective reality.

I've been contrasting our society's response to human tragedy with one that comes from the literature of Buddhism.

The Buddha was once taken to see a woman who had lost her mind in grief from the death of a small child. She would not even allow anyone to bury it, and she continued to carry the body around. The Buddha told her the following "I will make a magical elixir that will bring your child back to life. But in order to make it, I need you to give me an essential ingredient. Bring to me one mustard seed from a home where no one has ever died." The woman ran off and went from home to home looking for this seed. But everywhere she went she got the same reply "You cannot get it here, many people have died in this house." Eventually, this exposure to the reality of death wore away her grief and brought her back to her senses. She reconciled herself and allowed the child to be buried.

As I see it, the people of our civilization are like that woman running from house to house seeking a mustard seed that could return her child to life. But unlike her, most of us never really twig into the fact that there is no home where things are all sweet and rosy. I suspect that a big part of this comes from the fact that unlike the home-owners in the story, no one tells us "no, this too is a house with sorrow". And I think this gets back to what was happening at work. The co-worker who was trying to jolly me out of my pensive mood, and the others that were suggesting that the other fellow distract himself with movies, were suggesting that the way to deal with sorrow is through denial.

This isn't to say that the problem of suffering is answered simply by refusing to be in denial. In Buddhism the acknowledgement that death is universal is simply part of the first of the Four Noble Truths. And understanding those truths is not enlightenment itself, that only comes from following the Eightfold Path. But having said that, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step. And this step will never be taken until people admit that life is, on the whole, more of a veil of tears than a cornucopia of joy.