Jiggling the Jing
Last night, I once again had the great pleasure of talking to my wise friend Leo Lok, for the purpose of recording another episode of my “Pebble in the Cosmic Pond” podcast. In preparation, I had sent him a quick email suggesting that we explore “cultivation of the non-brainy, non-intellectual part of medicine.”
As usual, this exploration took us in all sorts of unexpected directions, besides the usual suspects that I will let you enjoy in the actual podcast. But before that is released, I wanted to share one precious little gem that Leo dropped, casually, as he likes to do, from his vast storehouse of expertise in the ancient philosophical and medical classics. I so appreciate Leo’s fluency in this literature and, as a native Chinese, his lived, experienced, embodied familiarity with the cultural foundations of Chinese medicine, whether we discuss dietetics, religion and ethics, or aesthetics. At the same time, his experience of living and clinically practicing in the US and of engaging closely, patiently, and compassionately with the contemporary Chinese medicine world in the West has allowed him to step back from his native culture and critically assess how his understanding and practice of Chinese medicine differs from that of his non-Chinese medical colleagues and patients. Our conversations powerfully demonstrate to me how no one person can claim ultimate expertise in traditional (intentionally spelled with a small “t” to distinguish it from TCM) Chinese medicine and how much we can all benefit from collaborative open-ended conversations where both partners approach a topic with mutual respect and curiosity for the other person’s view.
To return to today’s nice jingle of “Jiggling the Jing,” Leo’s gem of the week, at least the most precious one that I picked up last night, emerged in response to my question for our episode: How do we cultivate inner stillness, powerful healing presence, mastery of medicine (perhaps even with a capital “M”) beyond technique, or whatever you want to call it? We were playing with concepts like “concentrating the yì (intent) and unifying the shén (spirit/s), to stop the jīng essence and Qì from separating, …so as to gather in the (patient’s?) jīng (essence)” 專意一神，精氣不分…以收其精 (Lingshu 9). In this context, Leo mentioned the phrase 搖精 yáo jīng, which I have, somewhat fancifully, translated in the title of this short article as “jiggling jīng,” but which you could also render as “rattling the essence.”
If you already know the meaning of the two characters 搖 and 精, you can skip the next two paragraphs and scroll right down to the Zhuāngzi quote….
For the rest of us, some background: This expression immediately caught my attention partly because I have a bit of a hard time with the important medical concept of 精 jīng anyway. In addition, the combination with 搖 yáo (to wiggle, shake, agitate) offered a different and new perspective, at least to me. Have you ever thought of your essence, your jīng, whether earlier-Heaven or later-Heaven, in danger of being “shaken”? Have you encountered or treated a patient with rattled essence? I can see the Qì or the shén (spirit) getting shaken up by fear, a loud bang, or as in my case last November, a tree landing on top of my house after getting blown over in a wind storm. But the essence? How does our understanding of jīng “essence,” used here for lack of a better word, change if we take into consideration the possibility of it getting stirred up as a pathology?
In the medical classics, the character 搖 yáo occurs in both pathological and physiological contexts, like the ability to wiggle one’s toes and move one’s body in healthy flexibility, versus uncontrollable shaking of the body or just the head. In addition, we see descriptions from nature like the wind shaking trees and causing the leaves to fall.
Regarding 精 jīng “essence,” many of you, the clinical readers of by blog, probably feel like you have a much better understanding than me, given the fact that as clinical practitioners you deal with jīng in diagnosis and treatment on a daily basis and just probably don’t think about its deeper meaning all that much. But this is where to me the beauty and importance of learning classical Chinese, and reading classical literature more widely, beyond just the basic medical classics in translation, really starts to shine. Reading the classics in Chinese encourages us to look at individual characters and phrases more deeply, by slowing down the conversation and questioning what we do and how we look at the body and its health and illness, which all too often is still shaped by our dominant biomedical paradigm and material science-based worldview. How can we try to approximate, as authentically as possible, the embodied sense of traditional Chinese medicine as a lived experience, as a way of feeling and sensing our relationship with our bodies, our hearts, our human community, and our surroundings? How can we experience the world the way the ancients did, when language is such an inadequate medium for expressing sensation? If you have never eaten green mango or stinky tofu or a thimbleberry from Whidbey Island, how could you possibly know what it tastes like?
Well, in the case of classical Chinese, the traditional and still most effective way of gaining a feeling for a character, of “making friends with it,” as I like to encourage my students to do, is to look at the way in which it was used in different literary contexts up to the time of the text that you are working with. In the case of 精 jīng essence, the medical meaning as one of the three basic bodily substances along with Qì and Shén, is obvious to most of us. To add to this picture, here are some other dimensions of the character: Originally meaning polished or premium quality rice, it came to refer to anything that was refined, crystallized, essentialized, pure, the finest and most concentrated or most precious aspect of something. Obviously it also means sperm or semen or the germ of things. But it can also mean something like a person’s vitality or energy, or even “spirit,” both in the sense of a person being “high-spirited” and the spectral entities you might encounter on a lonely walk in the woods. It can refer to the radiance of stars, or the sincerity of the human heart, or even a person’s emotions in a sense like 情. And now I want to draw your attention to this beautiful beautiful quote that Leo sent me this morning to follow up on our podcast conversation, from the Outer Chapters of our favorite text Zhuāngzi:
No looking! No listening! Hug your shén tightly, to thereby create stillness.
And your outer form will spontaneously square up.
You need stillness! You need purity and clarity!
Do not exhaust your outer form, and do not rattle your jīng!
Only thus can you lengthen your life.
無視無聽，抱神以靜，形將自正。
必靜必清，無勞汝形，無搖汝精，乃可以長生。
Before I leave you to contemplate this beautiful passage on your own for a nice long summer weekend in the shade, it is perhaps helpful to explain the context: The Yellow Emperor goes to see a famous recluse in the mountains and asks him for advice on the “jīng of the ultimate Dào” 至道之精, because he wants to “grasp the jīng of Heaven and Earth, to thereby assist the five grains and feed the people” 取天地之精，以佐五穀，以養民人. The hermit waves him off, explaining that, given the imbalanced state of the world under the Yellow Emperor’s rule, he is clearly not ready to hear about the ultimate Dào. After withdrawing for three months to live as a lowly recluse in a hut, the Yellow Emperor returns with a much more humble question: How do I govern myself/my body in order to make it last a long time 治身奈何而可以長久? That is the context in which the passage above appears in the Zhuāngzi.
Now I realize that my translation, while attempting to strike a balance between still being literal and yet replicating the poetic flow of the original, can never do justice to the original in either of these goals. Ultimately, as always for a passage like this, there is no single way to translate it adequately and fully. Each character and each compound, much less each line or the whole passage, require both intellectual explanations, the slicing and dicing of the rational analytical mind in the left brain, as well as the meditative contemplation and creative intuition of the right brain. Before I rattle your jīng any further, I better stop here and encourage you to go for a walk or take a nap. For me personally, this is one of the benefits of reading Chinese classical literature, that at some point, the limitations of the analytical brain become apparent, and I am reminded of the need for stillness, for space, for non-doing and non-thinking and non-trying, for wondering and wandering, for aimless roaming in the spirit of the Zhuangzi.
But maybe, if this post has inspired you to feel likewise, you can consider whether you want to join the incoming cohort for my Classical Chinese Triple Crown program, which starts once every two years with the Foundations course this September 14. If that is the case, I encourage you to fill out the application survey and tell me a little bit about yourself, so I can see how I can help you gain a more direct access to this beautiful literature.
