Whether as a cyclist, a practitioner of Chinese medicine, or a Neo-confucian scholar, the reason we are interested in discovering li 理, the topic of the previous blog, is to establish a basis for effective action. What is special about li, and what makes it different from how we nowadays tend to conceive of facts, is that li denotes not merely the pattern in a thing or event, but that this pattern is, by definition, part of many other li, or patterns. The totality of all these li or patterns, which is, of course, another instance of li, is dao 道 - the cosmos conceived of as a vital process of unceasing generation (sheng sheng bu xi 生生不息). For that reason, “patterning” and not “pattern” may be a more appropriate translation of li. The gerund form is a noun, and thus refers to a thing (wu 物), but that thing understood as a process.
If we go back, for a moment, to the li of a mountain that we discovered cycling up it, then this patterning-as-process is difficult to see, at least initially. However, as we cycle up more and more mountains, we start to get a feeling that the mountains in the Alps or Rockies have a different li, than the mountains in the Picos de Europa or Appalachian Mountains. This is because the Alps and Rockies are historically younger than the Picos or Appalachian Mountains. As cyclists we become aware of these different li, even if we lack the ability to explain them, because we cycle in the here-and-now and not across geological time.
On the other hand, if we seek to discover the li of cycling up a mountain so as to become a better grimpeur (cycling jargon for a climber), we immediately become aware both of patterning as a process, and of climbing as a patterning constituted by and interacting with a multitude of other such patternings.
With regard to the former, cycling up a mountain takes time. It therefore is an effort that needs to be managed. Go too fast at the bottom, and you may never make it to the top. If you ever cycled with some friends who are perhaps less fit than you, you quickly discover that cycling too slow is tiring, too. It is most economical, and most fun, to go at the pace that suits you.
But that pace may differ from day to day, even up the same mountain. It depends on the wind, and the weather, on how much you sweat and how much you drink, on how you slept and on how many mountains you climbed before this one, on whom you are riding with, and on many many other things besides. Things that all have their own patternings. Which brings me to the topic of this blog: How can we ever hope to understand such complexity, and how might such knowledge serve as the basis of effective action?
Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472-1529) on effective action
Chinese thinkers (including physicians) have debated these questions at length and in detail. Needless to say, they did not arrive at a single answer they all agreed upon. In this blog, I will therefore only present one of these answers. It was proposed by the Ming dynasty philosopher, statesman, general, poet, and calligrapher Wang Yangming, one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Chinese philosophy. Generally labelled a Neo-confucian, Wang Yangming drew on a wide range of other sources including Buddhism and medicine, but also Daoism, the Book of Changes, and the military arts. Vice versa, Wang’s ideas profoundly influenced Chinese medical practice during the last five hundred years, and they remain relevant for us today.
Wang Yangming’s solution to the problem of how to act effectively goes under various names. The most important of these are good, pure or virtuously refined knowing (liangzhi 良知, also often translated as innate knowledge), and the unity of thought and action (zhi xing heyi 知行合一). Both are made possible by a state of embodiment Wang called “forming one body with the ten-thousand things” (wanwu yiti 萬物一體).
I will try to sum up what he meant by these terms with the help of a few bullet points.
Good knowing is a state of being that is reflected in situationally appropriate effective action. Such action is natural (ziran 自然), because it accords with the broader patterning of things. It is effortless (wuwei 物為), not because it does not require physical or mental effort, but because it comes effortlessly and spontaneously to the good knower.
Everyone is capable of good knowing. Some people are naturally gifted (the sages), but most of us need to cultivate good knowing through consistent effort (gongfu 功夫) over many years. Such effort not only involves practice in whatever field one choses to act in, but above all vigilance. Vigilance means staying attuned to one’s actions and one’s body in the course of practice. Such vigilance allows us to develop a awareness of all the patternings in which our actions are situated. In doing so, we connect and interpenetrate (tong 通) the ten-thousand things, forming one body with them.
Good knowing is not knowledge of things or facts. It is a somatic knowing that involves one’s entire body. One spontaneously does the right thing, be it a choice of words in a conversation, be it some physical action.
Good knowing is impossible without care or compassion (ren 仁). Such compassion is rooted in the sense of connectedness we achieve by being vigilant. It ensures that our actions are not selfish (si 私), but impartial (gong 公). We do what needs to be done, and adopt ourselves and our actions accordingly.
On a first reading, all of this may seem over-complicated, idealist, and a bit esoteric. However, once we relate Wang Yangming’s ideas to some concrete action, like trying to win a sprint in the Tour de France, the world’s premier cycle race, we quickly discover their real world relevance. Wang Yangming himself never cycled, of course. But understanding how to act effectively in the constantly changing and ultimately unpredictable conditions of a cycle race is just the kind of problem he might have been interested in.
Winning a sprint in the Tour de France
To make my point, let us look a the victory by the Belgium sprinter Jasper Philipsen in the sprint that concluded the eleventh stage of the 2023 Tour de France (which you can relive in the video above).
Winning sprints in road cycling is a specialist job. It demands the ability to produce and sustain an extremely high power output through your legs for thirty or so seconds after you have already raced hard for four hours or more. Only someone with a certain kind of physiology is able to do that. Winning a bunch sprint demands more than strong legs, and a big heart and lungs, however. Aprinter has to know when to launch his sprint. Too early, and they will run out of steam before the finish line. Too late, and all the power in the world will not be enough to catch the rider ahead.
Next, there is the vital importance of aerodynamics, or draft. Cycling behind another rider, sitting on their wheels as it is known in cycle parlance, allows a cyclist to save around thirty percent of their energy. Finding the right wheel to sit on thus has tremendous advantages. It is the reason professional sprinters usually have a lead-out-man, another rider from their team, who is almost as strong as they are, and who guides them to the point where they can launch their final effort. Unfortunately, sometimes the lead-out-man goes missing, and the sprinter has to fight for the right position themselves.
This is what happened during the final somewhat chaotic minutes of stage eleven in 2023. Cycling at speeds of over sixty kilometres an hour, sprinters were forced to jostle for space on the road, while also trying to strategically exploit each other’s position. Dylan Groenewegen, one of Jasper Philipsen’s main competitors, had found the wheel of the Norwegian rider Alexander Kristoff, another famous sprinter, and seemed in with a good chance to win the race. Unfortunately, Kristoff did not go quite as fast as Groenewegen himself was able to do at this point. This meant Groenewegen either had to slow down and lose momentum, or launch his own sprint, albeit a few seconds earlier than he ideally would have wanted to do. Just like that, the advantage of having found a wheel to sit on had turned into a disadvantage.
When Groenewegen launched his sprint, Philipsen, who had been slightly further back, made the split-level decision to slow down again momentarily, use the wheel of Groenewegen for a few seconds, and then move out of Groenewegen’s slipstream to comfortably win the race. These few seconds behind Groenewegen made all the difference, but getting there and doing what Philipsen did - seeing the opportunity, slowing down briefly before accelerating again, all done while being at the limits of his physical powers - had been, as all the TV commentators agreed, a marvel to watch.
Sprints like this do not last more than half a minute. But TV pundits can spend fifteen minutes or more analysing what happened over the course of the last kilometre, as you can see in the attached video clip. If we move from TV punditry to a more science-based analysis of the sprint, something all professional cycle teams will do in order to increase their odds next time round, we require the expertise of numerous specialists: sports physiologists and nutritionists, who focus on how muscle power is produced and sustained; aerodynamic engineers, who know about the best position to take on the bike; social psychologists, who might be able to provide insights into the group dynamics of a bunch sprint, where different riders are accorded different amounts of respect from their peers depending on past and current performance; experts in cognitive neuroscience, who may be able to shed light on the interplay of physiological, emotional and cognitive processes that define a great sprinter.
Yet, as our TV pundits keep reminding their audience, “there is a lot of science out there, but of course we still don’t know how to put it all together.” Putting it all together, even now, is therefore a matter or good knowing, of connecting with the ten thousand things. Philipsen’s win was built on a cultivation effort over many years, which from Wang Yangming’s position, had harmonised body and mind/heart to the extent that, when the time came, Philipsen was able to resonate perfectly with things (his bike, the road, the wind), events (this moment in time), and other people (his competitors, the spectators) in a manner that was situationally appropriate, effortless, and precisely for this reason spectacularly effective.
Returning to Chinese medicine
All the experts that aid our analysis of Jorgensen’s win were, from a certain point of view, experts on qi. Wind, for instance, is qi, and aerodynamics nothing but a modern way of studying qi. Many of these experts, furthermore, work in fields related to medicine: nutritionists, sports physiologists, psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists. Small wonder, then, that for Wang Yangming, too, medicine was an important tool in thinking about effective action. Or, vice versa, that physicians should have found Wang Yangming’s teachings highly attractive.
Some of them took the idea of forming one body with the ten-thousand things literally. Here, for instance, is how the famous seventeenth century physician Yu Chang 喻昌 (1585-1664) described how he practiced medicine:
I have no special strengths with respect to the dao of medicine other than that from youth to old age I paid close attention to what my ears and eyes told me about a disease. I never failed to quieten my qi and reduce the activity of my mind/heart. Attuning our breathing, I first aligned my own body to that of the patient. Becoming its shadow, groaning with its grief, faint and indistinct to begin with, I gradually transformed my mind/heart into the mind/heart of the patient. If I surmised a patient would live, I seriously desired they would, and did not hesitate to contribute the brain and marrow in my skull and bones to that outcome. If the disease was characterised by complexity, I treated a little more carefully, relying early on introspection. If the illness was not cured and my body became exhausted, this is what [the famous poet Tao] Yuanming meant when he said “such feelings are sincere.” For this reason, it is not possible to do this extensively. But I hope to reach authenticity for the duration of a single thought more often than once in that solitary and sad turning on the wheel of life and death.
Yu Chang clearly describes the effort of cultivation Wang Yangming demands, as well as the somatic dimensions of good knowing.
Ji Huang 嵇璜, a government official who contributed a foreword to Ye Tianshi’s 葉天士 (1664-1746) famous case records, described Ye’s efforts at diagnosing difficult cases in terms reminiscent of Yu Chang’s earlier attempts at transcending the physical boundaries between himself and his patients. In such cases, Ji Huang notes, Ye Tianshi would make daily house calls, adjust his own habits of sleeping, eating and drinking to that of his patients, and seek to arrive at an in-depth understanding of their emotions and feelings. The renewed attention that Ye Tianshi placed on the importance of tong 通 (facilitating free flow) in clinical practice, was most certainly also an effect of Wang Yangming’s teachings. Without free flow we cannot connect with the ten-thousand things, we cannot care, and we feel pain.
As for ourselves, Wang Yangming’s conception of good knowing still holds important lesson for learning and practicing Chinese medicine, even if we do not want to go to the lengths Yu Chang or Ye Tianshi did. What Wang Yangming suggests is that becoming a good practitioner, someone able to make the right calls in complex situations characterised by uncertainty, is facilitated by a number of different practices. These include at least the following:
An awareness that effective practice does not consist in the routine application of theoretical knowledge or technical skills. It is flexible and situationally appropriate action that makes use of such knowledge and skills, and in so doing realises their limits or develops them further.
Consistent and ongoing effort, or vigilance, in order to stay attuned to the exigencies of every moment (the interfacing of various patternings that constitute the here-and-now).
An attitude of care that stems from experiencing a physical connection with the ten-thousand things as the foundation of all practice.
Knowing as a whole-body phenomenon. The true expert knows with the help of their entire body, and all of their senses, so that the right course of action comes to them effortlessly and spontaneously.
I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not any of this is helpful to developing their own practice. It is essential knowledge, however, if we want to understand better why Chinese medicine developed in the way it did, and where its true potential lies.
Notes
Bruya, Brian. “Emotion, Desire, and Numismatic Experience in Descartes, Zhu Xi, and Wang Yangming.” Ming Qing Yanjiu (2001): 45–75 is a lucid and brief introduction to the Neo-confucian philosophies of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. I borrow the term "patterning" from him.
Frisina, Warren G. “Forming One Body With All Things: Organicism and the Pursuit of an Embodied Theory of Mind.” Dao (2022) is an interesting attempt to link Wang Yangming's thinking to contemporary theories of mind.
Chan, Wing-tsit. Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings By Wang Yang-Ming. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963 is a translation of Wang Yangming's most important writings
You can also find free downloads of papers on Yu Chang and Ye Tianshi in the "Academic Scholarship" section of my site.
Comentarios