Zhao Jianyong
Advances in modern science and technology have given people ever richer material conditions, yet harmony of body and mind has not kept pace. Anxiety, depression, insomnia, split personality, and similar problems are growing worse, and restoring harmony between body and mind has become an urgent task. The wisdom of traditional Taoism (as philosophy and religion) holds a living spring that can free people from the predicaments of body and mind.
1. The Way of Nurturing Life from Body to Mind
Does the body determine the mind, or the mind the body? How are body and mind connected? Such questions about the mind-body relationship have been a major puzzle for Western philosophy, religion, and natural science since ancient times, and they have yet to be satisfactorily resolved.
Today phenomenology, medicine, and the life sciences have made great strides in this field. More and more evidence shows that the relationship between body and mind is extremely subtle, and that it is even hard to draw a strict line between them. The holistic way of thinking in Chinese culture kept the Chinese from setting body and mind against each other. This is typified by Taoist health cultivation, which prizes spiritual practice without neglecting physical training; the two complement each other and neither is slighted. Taoist health cultivation therefore has points in common with the frontiers of modern science: it takes the body as the material basis of the psyche and emphasizes positive interaction between body and mind.
Human life moves back and forth between body and mind, inner and outer. Yet apart from Taoism, the various philosophies and religions of the past have often favored the mind and neglected, slighted, or even disparaged the significance of the body. Liang Shuming realized only as he approached forty that Taoism has its own true value in human life, and called it a “study of the body”: “What Taoism emphasizes in its learning is the human body; it aims for this body's spiritual responsiveness and reaches the realm of using it freely.” Taoism does indeed value the body especially, and is good at tackling problems of body and mind by starting from the body.
The body is the material carrier of the mind: the body is the root, the mind the summit. The basic principle of materialist dialectics also holds that matter is primary and that spirit arises from matter yet acts back upon it. When the basic foundations (such as teachers, companions, resources, and place) have not been fully put in order, one should not overemphasize the power of spirit over matter, so as to avoid upside-down, deluded thinking.
Taoist health cultivation has always held firmly to the primacy of the material body; it begins with the body but does not end with it. The chapter “Putting Oneself First” in Mr. Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals (Lüshi Chunqiu) says: “The root of all affairs is first to govern the body,” and “The former sage kings of old perfected their bodies and the world was perfected; they governed their bodies and the world was governed.”
Cultivating body and mind is the most fundamental task in the world and the precondition for setting all things in order. According to Tang Yongtong's research, in Mr. Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals, governing the body, nurturing the body, nurturing life, and nurturing one's nature all include caring for one's physical self. These questions are not merely medical questions of how to care for the body; they also involve the relationships between body and spirit, physiology and psychology, form and spirit (matter and mind), as well as the methods of governing the state and bringing peace to the world.
The view of governing the body in Mr. Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals blends the Taoist theories that body and state share the same structure and of being a sage within and a king without with the Confucian ideal of cultivating oneself, regulating the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to the world. It unites Confucian and Taoist thought and has an extremely rich cultural content. One's work is an extension of one's body, and success or failure in one's work is often directly tied to the rise and decline of the body.
The Mawangdui medical text “Ten Questions” (Shiwen) records that Yu the Great repeatedly failed in taming the floods, was plagued by illness, and his household fell into chaos. Master Gui admonished him that “the principle of all governance must begin with oneself”—that is, the order of governing a state must begin with regulating one's own body. So Yu the Great tended his spirit and qi and trained his sinews and bones, until all his vessels were full and his spirits vigorous, and both his family and his state were restored to peace. Hence if one cannot lay the cornerstone of a harmonious body, one's mental state will be thrown off balance. Those who overestimate themselves and try to leap beyond this natural law often go around in a big circle only to end up back where they started. There are, however, people of extraordinary endowment who can break through the constraints of matter and achieve spiritual transcendence—but they are rare in this world after all.
A healthy mind dwells in a healthy body: this is traditional Taoist wisdom from ancient times. The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic (Huangdi Neijing) points out that mental activity is produced by the body and is distributed among the five zang organs: “The heart stores the spirit, the lungs store the po, the liver stores the hun, the spleen stores intention, and the kidneys store will” (Suwen, “Discourse on the Manifestation of the Five Qi”). It also holds that the organs are the physiological basis of emotional activity: “Humans have five zang organs that transform the five qi … giving rise to joy, anger, pensiveness, worry, and fear” (Suwen, “Great Discourse on the Primordial Regulations of Heaven”). The body's physiological structure and functional state largely determine a person's mental state, and even the course of one's life. People who are disabled in body yet firm in will are able to work miracles through tenacity precisely because the core functions of the organs to which the will belongs are sound.
If the body is not healthy, the mind can hardly be at peace—this has been confirmed again and again in daily life and in science. Without a good body, however cheerful one may be, one will lose heart; however hard one tries, it all comes to nothing in the end. Some think that for brain workers it does not matter whether the limbs are well developed. In fact, even work like teaching, which seems to require no physical effort, needs a healthy body in order to bring a calm frame of mind. Every psychological problem has a material or energetic basis. For example, why do people sometimes have flashes of evil thoughts? Because behind them is a kind of negative energy, or so-called evil qi; if the evil qi is cleared out, the evil thoughts naturally disappear.
The problems of body and mind that people face today come largely from the fierce competition and anxiety about survival brought by social transformation. Western medicine already finds such psychosomatic illnesses hard to deal with, and modern psychology is likewise hard-pressed by many psychological problems. In fact, many mental illnesses are caused not only by subjective factors; many are triggered by physiological problems. Depression, for example, is often a disorder of mood brought on by disorder in the body. Therefore, beyond the old path of treating the mind for mental illness and the body for physical illness, approaching mental illness through the body, approaching physical illness through the mind, or treating body and mind together often achieves twice the result with half the effort.
Traditional health cultivation of the “study of the mind” starts from the highest unifying principle, first establishing a metaphysics of mind and nature to raise a person's state of being, and then regulating the body through the power of the mind. Taoism, while absorbing the study of the mind, emphasizes a bottom-up path of the study of the body, achieving sublimation from the body to the mind. These two paths suit two kinds of people in the world: those whose “circumstances change with the mind” and those whose “mind changes with circumstances.” The former are extremely rare; the latter are the vast majority. The latter's path of the study of the body is quite consistent with modern modes of thought. On the difference between modern and traditional thinking, the American philosopher Dennett uses a metaphor in which the latter is the “skyhook” type and the former the “crane” type.
The study of the mind and the study of the body correspond exactly to these two modes of thought. Like the two poles of yin and yang in the diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (Taiji), they are opposed yet unified, each the root of the other, and both ultimately aim to raise the harmony of body and mind. Though their results are the same, their processes differ: skyhook thinking often requires too many assumptions, so its path is often not smooth; crane thinking starts from the body's essential needs and advances step by step from low to high (for example, the successive transformation of essence, qi, and spirit), without needing many assumptions, so its techniques are more reliable and its road more open. Taoist health cultivation is a healthy way of life that lives in harmony with nature and society on the basis of harmony between body and mind. Its ideas are advanced, and at the same time it is modern and practicable, so it shows new vitality today.
2. The Bridge Between Body and Mind
Health cultivation is a body of learning, developed on the basis of Taoist methods of self-cultivation, that enables people to live longer. Classics such as the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi, the Liezi, Mr. Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic laid the theoretical foundation of traditional health cultivation. Although Confucianism stresses self-cultivation, it often does not focus on the level of the body, whereas Taoism brings out the body's central significance in life.
In the Taoist view, the “great learning” of cultivating oneself, regulating the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to the world must be rooted in the cultivation of body and mind, and the philosophical inquiry into the boundary between heaven and humanity must also start from the body. The Taoist study of the body, which brings together the whole tradition of health cultivation, is precisely such a learning of cultivating the self, nurturing one's nature, and settling one's life. It is a complete system formed by integrating everything around the principle of naturalness. This has in fact become the basic content and hallmark of Taoist medicine and even of Chinese medicine.
In Western medicine, activities similar to health cultivation are called preventive health care. Their aim is to avoid or delay the onset of disease. Taoist health cultivation is not satisfied with prevention; it seeks to further improve the quality of life. The “fitness” so popular in the West should really be called “body building.” It goes around in circles at the outer level of the limbs and neglects the inner cultivation of essence, qi, and spirit. If one cannot relax while exercising, the sinews and bones are easily injured, and the harm done actually outweighs the benefit. Taoism pays more attention to inner cultivation of body and mind, while Western culture places more weight on shaping the outer physique.
Through long practice of health cultivation, Taoism came to recognize that body and mind (that is, form and spirit) are an organic whole, and developed a systemic view in which essence (form), qi, and spirit are the Three Treasures in one body, a trinity.
The chapter “Originating in the Tao” in the Huainanzi says: “The body is the dwelling of life; qi is the filling of life; spirit is the controller of life.” The body is the foundation of life's activities, the spirit is the master of life's vitality, and qi, as the life energy filling the whole body, is the conductor that binds body and spirit together. In health cultivation this appears as methods of training the body and nurturing the mind that give equal weight to both and cultivate nature and life together.
The basic core of Taoist health cultivation—“refining essence into qi, refining qi into spirit, refining spirit to return to emptiness”—is to regulate the breath (qi) and the spirit on the basis of adjusting and aligning the body, rising level by level. First, by adjusting one's posture one promotes the flow of qi and blood, opening the meridians and balancing qi and blood, thus laying the foundation; this in turn affects mood and thought, bringing body and mind into harmony and reaching a state of indestructibility and oneness with the Tao. Tang Yijie pointed out: “Through circulating qi and daoyin (guiding and pulling exercises), Taoism removes inner and outer disturbances to body and mind; this developed into an inner circulation of qi, and so came the study of inner alchemy (neidan).”
The “sitting in forgetfulness” and “fasting of the heart” in the Zhuangzi mean this: “Only by not clinging to one's own physical form and will, and by negating everything that binds body and mind within and without, can one, like qi, ‘be empty and respond to things,’ reaching a transcendent state of harmony of body and mind, within and without, in which both things and self are forgotten.” Taoism has always opposed the alienation of “people being enslaved by things,” calling for “treating things as things and not being made a thing by things.” Through inner cultivation and outer training that make heaven and humanity one, one returns to one's original, innocent nature and attains absolute free and easy wandering (freedom) of body and mind.
The Taoist emphasis on inner transcendence requires, on the basis of physiological harmony, attention to psychological harmony as well, and to harmony between these two harmonies. This is the dual cultivation of nature and life, in which neither the training of spirit nor that of the body may be slighted: nurturing the heart and nature within, training the body without, so that body and spirit are both wondrous and transform together with the Tao. This way is deep and broad and not limited to the physical body.
The dual cultivation of nature and life requires equal weight on spiritual life and bodily life. One must pursue not only a strong physique but also a sound psychological makeup; only when both develop vigorously can one have a truly happy life.
Pointers on Nature and Life (Xingming Guizhi) sums it up: Thus spirit does not leave qi, and qi does not leave spirit; when the spirit and qi of my body unite, then the nature and life of my body appear. Nature does not leave life, and life does not leave nature; when the nature and life of my body unite, then the nature before nature began and the life before life began appear in my body. The nature before nature began and the life before life began are my true nature and life. My true nature and life are the true nature and life of heaven and earth, and also the true nature and life of the void. Therefore sages and worthies uphold precepts, concentration, and wisdom to empty their hearts, and refine essence, qi, and spirit to preserve their bodies. When the body is preserved, the foundation of life is forever secure; when the heart is empty, the substance of nature is always bright. When nature is always bright, there is no coming and no going; when life is forever secure, what death is there, what birth? Moreover, what departs at death is merely the physical frame. But my true nature and life, which pass through day and night, match heaven and earth, and span past and present—when has it ever been extinguished in the least?
Cultivation of the heart-nature and spiritual awareness is the work of nature; cultivation of the body and the qi channels is the work of life. Those weak in mental or physical strength should first dispel illness and strengthen the body, beginning with the work of life and supplementing it with the work of nature. Those of the highest capacity can go straight to the work of nature and succeed. Those with problems in their thinking should likewise first cultivate the work of nature, raising the level of what they pursue; combined with medicinal foods and qi training, transforming their heart-nature and accumulating merit and virtue, they will surely obtain good results. The work of nature and the work of life vary from person to person and may each be emphasized at different stages, but the key is to transform the psychological through the physiological and at the same time the physiological through the psychological, so that each promotes the other and both advance together.
In short, the basic approach of Taoist health cultivation is to choose according to one's own conditions. Whether one starts by adjusting the body or the mind, the ultimate aim is to achieve, by sound methods, the harmonious unity of body and mind, and thereby harmonious unity of one's life with nature and society. This can help modern people improve their constitution and wisdom, so that they can face a complex, desire-filled life with greater ease and freedom. Practice has shown that body-and-mind health cultivation in which the Tao follows what is so of itself is safe and highly effective. It deserves to be spread throughout society and can go out to the world as a form of cultural soft power and a cultural industry. In an age of worsening crises of body and mind, it will undoubtedly do much good in relieving people's troubles of body and mind and maintaining social harmony and order.
(Zhao Jianyong is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences.)