One of my goals in teaching tai chi and qigong is to de-mystify the arts. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ve by now noted the emphasis on making tai chi and qigong understandable and accessible. The Masters of the arts are quite matter-of-fact about them; and where their language appears to veer off into the mystical, it often makes more sense when we understand that they’re speaking within the context of Chinese culture. None of tai chi’s earliest Grandmasters ever left China, and they knew about as much of the world outside their own culture as the average American knows about the world around them today – in other words, a hodge-podge mix of fact, fairy-tale and outright codswallop.
In discussing the topic of “Chinese Internal Alchemy,” I run the very real risk of undermining every single effort I’ve undertaken in pulling back the obscuring veils of Orientalist mysticism. Just using the word “alchemy” in a sentence in the 21st century conjures up images of Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and Legions of misguided occultists or manipulative charlatans. You’re liable to think I’ve got a Ouija board and a hooded cloak stuffed in the trunk where I keep the striking pads and “loaner” shoes at class. I’m acknowledging this hazard not only for my own benefit (to help me keep focused) but also as a way of begging your indulgence. Trust me - we won’t be dealing in potions or incantations, and any lingering ghosts we can’t just ignore will be unceremoniously banished.
Much of the work, therefore, of discussing Chinese Internal Alchemy involves something philosophically similar to mucking out a stable. There’s a lot of manure to pitch before you get to anything useful. Again, I beg your indulgence.
I’ve written before about the fact that while a great deal of the “muck” in the stable of Chinese martial arts (and Chinese culture generally) is the result of Western Orientalism and cultural ignorance, the Chinese themselves have deposited their fair share as well. Chinese Internal Alchemy is interwoven with Chinese cosmology, philosophy, history, folk religion, traditions whose true meaning are lost to time – just like us. Everyone, everywhere, believes a certain amount of unexamined nonsense, each according to their own cultures.
Starting off at a baseline we
should all be able to agree on, Wikipedia has this to say about Chinese
Internal Alchemy:
“Chinese alchemy is an ancient
Chinese scientific and technological approach to alchemy, a part of the larger
tradition of Taoist body-spirit cultivation developed from the traditional
Chinese understanding of medicine and the body.”
This is an inoffensive definition,
if somewhat unsatisfying and incomplete.
To say it another way, it’s the foundation of traditional Chinese medical practices like acupuncture, massage, pharmacy,
diet, exercise (qigong is considered an intrinsic element) and so on.
Without going into details which are beyond my grasp, it can perhaps best be understood in the following manner: Western medicine tends, as a rule, to consider a healthy person as one who is free of disease or injury. Traditional Chinese medicine tends, as a rule, to consider a healthy person as one who lives well, which includes not only the absence of disease or injury but also includes wholesome and beneficial practices and habits.
The previous paragraph is a nearly unfair oversimplification. Western medicine also contemplates “healthy lifestyle” practices as being essentially necessary; while for its part, Chinese medicine has a fair bit of what can only be described as quackery. For example, while I can accept that acupuncture works, without fully understanding why it works, I also think the use of bear bile, tiger bones and rhinoceros horn as treatment for ailments is ridiculous and beastly. More sympathetically, Western medicine excels at treating acute conditions, where Chinese medicine tends to return good results on long-term and chronic problems. There are other fundamental differences between Western “biomedicine” and Traditional Chinese Medicine, but these need not be gone into, except to direct the interested reader to “The Web That Has No Weaver,” which is as good a primer as any ever written.
When people talk about qigong and tai chi being “healing,” I’m not always sure what they mean. When I think of “healing” in the context of qigong, tai chi and Chinese medicine more generally, I think of it as undoing the decades of self-abuse, neglect, bad habits that started out as expediency, wear-and-tear from work or family life; learning to pay attention to what our bodies tell us, and re-learning how to move and live the way we were designed/evolved to live. In this sense, Chinese Internal Alchemy has much to teach us.
There is much about Chinese Internal Alchemy that I don’t know and much more that I don’t completely understand. The one concept I think I have a reasonable grasp on – one which we as tai chi players can actually put to use in our daily lives – is that of the “Sanbao” or “Three Treasures.” It is this, the Sanbao, which will take up the remainder of this blog post.
The names for the “Sanbao” or “Three Treasures” are jing, qi and shen, translating (roughly) into Essence, Energy and Spirit or Mind. We’ll look at each of them in turn; and in doing so, we’ll use two allegories to help communicate the concepts: a candle and a car.
Jing
Look up the word jing and
very often you will find that the Chinese translate it as…well…um…. This is a
(mostly) family-friendly blog, so let’s just say that certain Chinese think of jing
as: “Half of what goes into making a baby; specifically, Dad’s contribution.”
I find this definition altogether unsatisfactory. First, I believe it's likely a corruption or "garbled transmission" based on dialect, region and ignorance. Second, and following from this, there’s a lot of unscientific hogwash wrapped up in the definition, none of which needs to be discussed further. But most importantly, it’s chauvinistic in a way that goes beyond mere social conventions. With few exceptions, most of which are “legendary,” martial arts in China were primarily male-oriented undertakings up until the very late Qing dynasty. In the context of the Sanbao, the existence of excellent female martial artists is either acknowledged without comment or the subject is talked around – at least that’s my understanding. We will not discuss this woefully inadequate definition any further.
Other sources – the ones I pay attention to – consider jing or “Essence” as the unique quality of a thing in itself. In other words, it's the “chairness” of a chair, the “fishness” of a fish, the "houseness" of a house the “youness” of you, and so on.
Going to our allegorical comparisons, the “candleness” of a candle is the wax and wick, the match, lighter or other source of ignition, and its capacity to give off light and heat. The “carness” of a car consists of the various raw materials the car is made of, as well as those materials in their finished-and-assembled form (this includes the quality of the materials and the construction); its design, the fluids and chemicals which propel and lubricate it, its capacity to move people and things here-and-there efficiently and safely, and so on. The “youness” of you is your physical body, the food, drink and medicine that keeps you around, your education, formal and informal, your experience, your inclinations, aptitudes, skills, talents and limitations, your personality, beliefs and consciousness – everything that makes you a unique human being.
Maintaining jing in a candle is simple – don’t let it melt before you need it, keep the wick long enough to light, and keep the matches dry. Maintaining the jing of a car involves routine maintenance and repair, using the correct fluids and the right sized battery, not wrapping it around light poles or dashing it against concrete barricades, not leaving it neglected to rust and rot in our driveways and so on. Maintaining your own jing contemplates everything from proper diet, rest and exercise, good hygiene, healthy relationships, going to the quacks when you need to, and mental/emotional/spiritual “fitness.”
Qi
If jing is the “thingness”
of things and the “youness” of you – which includes their essential functions –
then qi is the that by which these essential functions are carried
out. The qi of a candle is the
chemical energy in the wick and wax, activated by the input of heat from the
match or lighter. The amount of qi
in the candle is determined by how much wax is in it and how long the wick is. The qi of the car is the output of the
engine, translated into the speed it can go, the alacrity with which it can
stop, its roadkeeping, its responsiveness and its feedback to the driver. The amount of qi in the car
is determined by the normal life-span of its component parts, the ordinary
wear-and-tear of operating it, the attendance to or neglect of maintenance and
repair, and whether we drive like “grandma on her way to church” or “Dale
Earnhardt on Turn 4 at Daytona.” Our qi
is our ability to move and function, to perceive and interpret, to think, feel, interact and communicate, etc. The amount of our qi is determined by our genetics, the wholesomeness of our food and drink, our
lifestyle (extremes in any direction are harmful), the quality of our
relationships, the degree to which we are mentally/emotionally/spiritually “resilient”
or “brittle” and so on.
Everything and everyone has a more-or-less fixed amount of qi; and when that amount is used up, the thing or the person ceases to exist physically. When the candle’s qi is exhausted, we say it’s burnt out. When the car’s qi is exhausted, we say it’s wrecked or trashed. When we run out of qi, we die. This is the natural state of all things – creation, existence, cessation – but by “cultivating” qi, we can extend the useful life of the candle, the car and ourselves.
We “cultivate” the qi of
the candle by putting it out when we don’t need it and only lighting one end. We cultivate the qi of our car by good
maintenance and safe, moderate driving.
We cultivate our own qi by:
o subsisting on something better than a steady diet of Little-Debbies, Big Macs
and Red Bull on the one hand, or pseudo-scientific fad-diets on the other;
o finding a happy middle-ground
between shiftless sloth on the one hand and “fast-lane” burnout on the other;
o having healthy relationships at
work, home and elsewhere (neither being a people-pleasing doormat on the one
hand nor a standoffish misanthrope on the other);
o neither being a hypochondriac on
the one hand nor a pigheaded sufferer on the other;
o finding some happy middle-ground
between the extremes of indolence/hyperactivity, melancholy/ecstasy, and
nihilism/zealotry
In other words, the “balance” we’re all striving toward in our tai chi and
qigong.
Shen
Speaking broadly, shen can be thought of as an “ultimate purpose”
– why does a thing or a person exist? The
shen of a candle isn’t merely to consume itself – its ultimate purpose is to
provide light and/or heat. The shen
of a car isn’t just to go fast and stop quickly – its ultimate purpose is to
get us and our stuff from where we are now to where we want to be.
What is the shen of a human life? That’s where philosophy comes in, and it’s also where I exercise self-discipline and throw most of it out. Allan Watts gave perhaps the most universal and succinct definition of shen (perhaps not even knowing he did it) by saying that the purpose of life is to live it. We are offered the opportunity of richness of experience, to live a full, meaningful, purposeful life, however we may define it. By acknowledging jing and maintaining qi, we are better enabled to exercise our own shen as we see fit.
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And this is what brings us back to tai chi and qigong. The shen in tai chi and qigong is intimately bound up in jing (essence) and qi (energy). By self-audit, we understand jing. By exploring and working with jing, we discover and understand qi. By tempering and training and mastering our qi, we exercise shen – not only within the confines of the class, but within the context of tai chi (the martial art) and qigong (self-mastery, health and vitality), and ultimately better fit ourselves for fulfilling our own “ultimate purpose.”
