Weekend Literary Supplement: "Digging Your Own Well", Part Ten

Yet another key concept from Daoism is introduced!

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Transformations and Kungfu

Chinese folk culture believes that creatures can transform themselves from one thing to another. The famous Chinese novel Journey to the West is filled with these beings. Indeed, the very first part of the most popular version of this book, A Taoist Interpretation of Journey to the West, begins with this poem: 

Before Chaos was divided, Heaven and Earth were one;
All was a shapeless blur, and no men had appeared.
Once Pan Gu destroyed the Enormous Vagueness
The separation of clear and impure began.

Living things have always tended towards humanity;
From their creation all beings improve.
If you want to know about Creation and Time,
Read difficulties resolved on the Journey to the West.

Journey to the West, W. J. F. Jenner translator,
Foreign Languages Press, 1993, (ISBN: 978-7-119-01663-4)

In this book the lead character, Monkey, is born of a stone. One of the “villains” is a goldfish from the goddess Guan Yin's pond that becomes a mighty dragon. Laozi's ox becomes another monster. Monkey's right-hand-whatever is Pigsy, who was a heavenly general that was reincarnated as a man-pig hi-bred monster that was converted into a protector through the intervention of the Bodhisattva Guanyin.

Even less fanciful books take the idea of transformation for granted. In The Three Kingdoms when Cao Cao decides to build a new palace he needs a large beam for it. The only tree large enough is an immense and ancient pear tree. When woodsmen set to chop it down, it bleeds from their axe cuts and screams in agony! Even a very realistic novel like The Dream of the Red Chamber starts with the premise that a stone transforms itself into sentience and sets out to be incarnated as a human being to see what that type of life is like.

These are literary devices, of course, but they are very different from the sort of thing one finds in European literature. I cannot think of any example in English, French, German, Russian, etc, literature where animals or plants work themselves into some semblance of humanity. The most one can think of are things like witches' “familiar spirits”---which are totally different because they are actually demons masquerading as animals, not animals becoming humans.

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What is at work here is a key Daoist concept: kung fu. Everyone has heard of this term through Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies. But while martial arts are examples of kung fu, just about any activity can be a kung fu. That's because kung fu just means “excellence through diligent training”. Kung fu can be done through just about any activity---you can achieve kung fu in art, the skilled trades, or even something as lowly as being a janitor. The important issue isn't what you are doing, but rather what attitude you bring to it.

Someone who practices kung fu isn't focused on results but rather the process. And “process” is meant in a different way from how most people would understand the term. For someone practicing kung fu, there is a constant self-evaluation going on. This includes things like awareness of the posture, muscle tension, how one breathes and so on. It also involves thinking about the mental state. Are you distracted? Thinking about the fight you had with your spouse last night? It also involves thinking about the “big picture”. Why exactly am I doing this task anyway? People who don't understand the ideal of kung fu will admit that people who pursue it can often achieve amazing results. But that isn't the point. Kung fu is a spiritual discipline aimed at squeezing every last iota of self-awareness from the experience of being alive. In the process of doing so, one gains a deeper insight into the subtle processes that govern how our minds and body work, how the universe we inhabit operates, and, how we interact with it.

The process of doing one kung fu---for example the martial arts---will inevitably bleed into the rest of your life. If you spend a lot of time really thinking deeply about how your body and mind operates while training in a studio, you will inevitably carry the same attitude into the rest of your life. What this means is that kung fu inevitably becomes the practice of holding onto the One: the process of reminding yourself to look for the subtle individual daos, and, the single over-arching Dao, that govern our experiences as human beings. Carry this discipline throughout your life and eventually you will become something of a “realized man”. That is the ideal of Daoism, the person who has---through careful observation of both self and the world around her---realized the basic principles that govern everything and in the process transformed themselves into something quite remarkable.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!