Double Whammy! Yin Yang Theory and the Chinese Heart

OK, I'll admit right off the bat that this post involves some pretty heavy recycling of school assignments.  But then, what I write for school and what I write outside of it (or would given the time) are tending to converge.  I take this as a good sign.  

Without further ado then, here are a couple of short pieces on foundational aspects of Chinese medicine.  Oh, and I should say that the second piece owes a great deal to Dr. Heiner Fruehauf, whose life's work has centered around excavating and reviving the classical Chinese medical cosmology in all its glory.  

On Yin and Yang

Yin and Yang represent opposites--cold and hot, dark and bright, moist and dry, female and male, water and fire--and yet they are not opposing forces per se.  As with the sexes, they only make sense in terms of each other.  The Book of Genesis notwithstanding, would we be talking about ‘male’ if they weren’t a contrasting category, ‘female?’  Without cold we know no hot; light exists only in contrast to darkness.  These pairs are poles, defining a world between them.

 The characters for yin and yang contain the radical for ‘hill,’ so that Yin is the shady and Yang the sunny side of the same hill.  And clearly, the idea of a one-sided hill is absurd.  Yin and Yang define each other, need each other, and--more than this--they create each other, as the night births the day and the day the night, onwards in the eternal cycle of expansion and contraction.  The seasons and their five phases are a precise elaboration of this process, and everything in nature reflects reflects Yin and Yang through its organoleptic qualities.  New shoots in springtime are charged with yang emerging from the watery, yin stillness of winter.  Taproots gather and store yin, preparing for a future growth cycle (yang).  Bright colors, pungent taste, spikes--these outward, unsubtle qualities smack of the force of yang; softness, sweetness or blandness, downy leaves are all manifestations of yin.  As the Dao De Jing Chapter 39 tells us, “the humble is the root of the noble/the low is the foundation of the high.”  And lest the high should become proud, it must recall that it will lower itself again in time.  The tallest stone guard tower eventually becomes sand for children to shape into castles of their own, for the tide to fold into its embrace, for oysters to coat with pearly layers.  Pearls to royal necklaces, to be interred and dissolved back into the soil.    

On the Nature of Traditional Medicine: The Example of the Heart

We may argue over whether it is more of an art or a science, but medicine is certainly not a subject that stands in isolation.  Rather, a given culture’s medicine is a reflection of that culture’s ontology--their (often implicit) assumptions about the nature of reality--and their epistemology--their ideas about what constitutes knowledge and how that knowledge can be gleaned.  While modern biomedicine may claim for itself the status of “objective,” it is subject to all the limitations of its parent sciences of biology, chemistry, physics, etc., most notably their reductionist and materialist biases.  Actually, as modern medicine is an applied as opposed to a pure science, it tends to lag behind the scientific cutting edge by a generation or more, so that even events as distant as the quantum mechanical and relativistic revolution in physics in the early 20th Century have still not been thoroughly absorbed into the medical fold.  Rather, most of modern medicine operates on Newtonian assumptions about the nature of matter and its “laws.”  

The various strands of Chinese medicine no more stand alone than do their modern, biomedical counterparts.  In the worldview of ancient China, medicine was on a continuum with philosophy, part of an intellectual-spiritual complex that also includes astrology, feng shui, and the harmonizing, meaning-fixing practices that we tend to separate out from the rest of life and label “religion.”  This is to say that, as in most traditional cultures, there was in classical China no firm division between religion and philosophy, art and science, or science and religion.  All these disciplines, if it even makes sense to speak of them as distinct entities, shared a common cosmological understanding and used a symbolic language based in a system of associations or resonances linking microcosm and macrocosm.  In this system, the world bounded by the human skin is as a reflection of the world outside of it.  Humanity is not so much a part of nature as she is a distillation or crystallization of the universe, as in Blake’s “world in a grain of sand.”  Thus our organs each correspond to a network of constellations (the celestial level) and features of China’s geography (the terrestrial level) as well as to specific animals, sounds, and a whole host of other elements of reality as the ancients experienced it.  Every aspect of the medicine is informed by this rich network of correspondences and by the metaphorical language it gives rise to; nothing is merely what we measure it to be but rather an information-dense chunk of the universe whose nature can be inferred from its qualities and characteristics.  

                                         (Another metaphor for the heart ? >>)

To take an example, the Chinese conception of the heart includes all of 

these layers of context and resonant associations.   To begin with, a Chinese classical text states that “the heart is the human heart.”  We are dealing, then, with the organ that separates us from the beasts, that provides a home for our shen (spirit, consciousness).  The heart, as a zang or solid organ, is indeed an organ of storage, and as such is represented by a vessel.  However, he heart stores the immaterial spirit and not any physical substance; indeed, filling our hearts with material things gives rise to a pathological condition in which there is no room left for what matters.  So the heart is represented by an upside down vessel (as depicted in its I Ching hexagram).  This design for our innermost, essential organ allows it to shun what is material and fill up with immaterial shen as with a gas.  It is this shen that shines forth from its seat in the heart, radiating out in the face, with the light of consciousness.  This is the heart as life’s lamp.  The association of heart and face makes sense to us; we instinctively judge the state of someone’s spirit (or simply mood) based on what we see in their face.

As a complex composite formed over millennia, Chinese medicine includes layers of influences from different traditions, notably Daoism and Confucianism.  Daoism provides the esoteric and shamanistic parts; Confucianism lends it a pragmatically social dimension.  In the medicine, Confucianism is perhaps most visible in the theory of the 12 ministers.  Each organ is conceptualized as having a role in the government (the phrase "body politic" seems especially apt).  The heart, as will come as no surprise, is the emperor.  But unlike worldly emperors who seek power and prestige, the heart is the perfect spiritual leader, the one responsible for receiving the Mandate of Heaven.  The emperor, in classical China, is just such a one who the divine and human realms.  S/he need not actually do very much in the world, besides providing this all-important orientation and setting the example.  So with the heart.  If the heart is strong, the person's mission will be clear, and the other organs will naturally settle into their own, more worldly roles.  In case of a weak heart--and though we are talking about the Chinese heart, this also includes the physical organ--the other ministers may try and usurp its function.  The stomach, which mirrors the heart in certain respects, often attempts this, with the result that the affected person will follow his appetite around blindly and seek only to fill the vessel with the savors of material life.  

The heart’s elemental association is with fire.  In Chinese cosmology, the five phases or elements are not conceived of as substances per se, but rather as stages of a continuously-unfolding process.  They relate directly to the seasons of the year.  Briefly, water relates to winter, the time of inwardness and storage.  Wood, the energy of new growth springing forth, follows water and bursts forth out of its stillness with the advent of springtime.  Wood, new yang rising, matures into fire, the stage of flourishing and maturity.  Fire’s time is midsummer, when the world is alive with color and heat and the yang has reached its full manifestation.  At just this moment (summer solstice), as yang climaxes, there begins the return of the yin; the days start to get imperceptibly shorter.  Now is the time of the earth phase, when (in the climate of Northern China, at least, as in New England) nature seems to hang still for a moment and the golden perfection of late summer reigns.  In addition to this late summer time of stillness and peace, Earth also represents the center, if each other element is associated with a cardinal direction, and the transitional time between the seasons.  Finally, the year’s expansion collects and condenses back inward in the autumn.  This is the time of the metal phase, the harvest, the time of reaping what is valuable and letting the rest go.  Metal’s purity and sharpness is well represented by the crisp, clear, brilliant days of fall.  Metal, new yin, matures into water, yin at its fullest, and we are back in the realm of winter.  

But here, with the heart, we are in the fire phase.  Even more key here than the flourishing of yang is the idea of the return of yin: at the peak of outward expression the seeds of an inward turning germinate.  The heart, in all its sacred firyness, is just as much about forsaking the upward climb and looking in, down, towards the source.  In terms of the day it is high noon, the point when the long descent to nightfall begins though much light and warmth remain.  

The animal associated with the heart is the horse: noble, beautiful, powerful and graceful; yet proud, needing to be controlled, dangerous.  The message implicit here is that we must master the horses of our hearts, to direct them and not be run around by our desires and ego.  At its best, the horse is a symbol of sacrifice, as in mythical horses who ride themselves to death for their masters.  In Chinese myth, the perfect picture of the heart is the horse so devoted that she gallops until she sweats blood: the very fluid of the heart oozing from her pores.  

The symbolism of this organ, one of twelve in the Chinese system, spreads deep and wide.  There are meaningful associations with the geography of ancient China, with I Ching hexagrams and stellar constellation, as well as a great deal of medical theory.  But it is in the nature of this kind of holographic system that every part contains the whole, so that the simple image of an empty earthen vessel shining like a lamp, of a blood-sweating horse, or of the moment of summer solstice convey the meaning of the organ.