“Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in grave danger [of exhaustion]. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger [of exhaustion] for certain.” (Zhuangzi – “On the Principle of Vital Nourishment” Chapter 3)
This is advice the West has not followed. From early on, with Plato’s theory of Ideas, according to which the “being” of the things we see would be found in abstract forms in the supra-sensory realm of metaphysics, classical Greek philosophers launched the West on a quest for knowledge. In China, although the School of Names initiated a similar approach, the emphasis remained on “feeding one’s life” rather than on the pursuit of knowledge. Yet, Francois Jullien remarks, the terminology of “feeding,” not only one’s body, but also one’s soul, was present in the Christian faith and, in fact, in Plato himself, who said that “the divine is what helps to feed the winged apparatus of the soul.” As we will see, however, what the Chinese understand as “feeding one’s life” is quite different from what Plato saw as “feeding one’s soul.” But, to begin, Jullien examines how, in Christianity, the literal meaning of feeding the body was expanded to include the metaphorical meaning of feeding the soul. He can then better assess how original the Daoist notion of “feeding one’s life” truly is.
Split between body and soul/mind in the West
In Vital Nourishment – Departing from Happiness, Jullien writes: “Nowadays everyone knows, or at least intuits, that this division marks an important fork in the road, the place where the fate of the so-called ‘Western’ mind was historically decided.” This, however, did not stop Plato, and Christians after him, from extending the concept of nourishment from its literal sense of feeding the body to a figurative sense of nourishing the soul. Jullien writes: “Just as I feed my body, said Plato, I feed my soul: the relationship is analogic.” Jullien quotes a few Christian phrases where the metaphor of feeding is used: the true ‘hunger’ is for the word of God; its mysteries are ‘food’; and the Lord has gathered for us the ‘bread’ of the Scripture. Christ gave us the bread of life. ‘Carnal’ nourishment is rejected in favor of ‘heavenly’ nourishment. And so on. Thus patristic discourse, comfortably adapting itself to this distinction between the material and the celestial, two worlds it was unembarrassed to treat always in parallel, speaks of the ‘milk’ that feeds novices in the faith, the ‘vegetables’ used to treat those still sick with doubt, and the more solid and substantial nourishment reserved for the elect in the form of ‘the flesh of the Lamb’. Manna already symbolized this future nourishment, because, as Origen tells us, in order to have manna one must not ‘remain seated’ but must ‘go out of the camp’, that is, the body in which the soul is imprisoned.”
Jullien, then, concludes: “Thus the meaning of ‘feed’ was bifurcated as the great codification opposing body and soul, or material and spiritual, required. It straddled the great divide between the visible and the invisible, the latter conceived as the intelligible’, but ‘is it quite as self-evident as it seems? Does it not threaten to obscure the full experience of feeding?” Doesn’t such a metaphorical use of the word “feed” leaves out its concrete experiential meaning?
Vital nourishment in China
Jullien writes: “In Chinese, however, we learn the common, everyday expression yang sheng, ‘to feed one’s life’, and it unsettles the supposedly unshakable division described above … For the meaning of “to feed one’s life” cannot be narrowly concrete and material, but neither does it veer off into the spiritual, for the life in question here is not ‘eternal life’. Though no longer reductively terrestrial, the meaning also resists tilting toward the celestial. ‘My life’, comprehended globally, is my vital potential.”
When the first naturalist thinkers in ancient China came to the fore, in reaction against the subordination of human conduct to any transcendent order whatsoever, they defined “human nature as life, nothing more. To feed one’s life is the same as to feed one’s nature. My entire vocation and sole responsibility lie in the care I take to maintain and develop the life potential invested in me, or – as another common expression puts it, … in the care I take to nourish its essence or, rather, its ‘quintessence’, its ‘flower’, its “energy,’ by preserving its ‘cutting edge’. The word “essence,” which Western philosophy has loaded with a heavy metaphysical weight, can be confusing when speaking of East Asia. Jullien therefore hastens to replace it with the word “quintessence,” whose connotations are certainly debatable, but which can be redefined in the particular context of Daoism.
Jullien further explains: “Not only must we replenish our strength even as we expend it but we must also perfect our abilities by cleansing our physical existence of impurities, we must hone our edge while also maintaining ‘our form’… Another common expression, which might be translated literally as ‘feeding calm’, can hardly be understood literally … More loosely interpreted … the expression means to ‘nurture’ and restore our strength by availing ourselves of peace and quiet … to recreate ourselves of peace and quiet by withdrawing from the world’s everyday cares and concerns. It is neither physical nor psychological – or … it is both at once. The indissoluble unity is invaluable: it will, provisionally, guide our inquiry.” Another familiar Chinese phrase, sue sheng does not mean “‘to study what life is’ (as it would be if defined from the point of knowledge) or how to live (as it would be if defined from the point of view of morality), but to learn to deploy, preserve, and develop the capacity for life with which we are all endowed.”
Aristotle explicitly “excluded life” in the Nicomachean Ethics
Jullien, who is an hellenist as well as a sinologist, explains: “In his nomenclature of the living, Aristotle distinguishes and names three types of souls: the nutritive, the sensitive, and the thinking,” the nutritive soul being primary as the basis of the other two. “Yet at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, he explicitly excludes life that feeds and grows but is also subject to corruption from his consideration of human life: ‘Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth’.” A disciple of Plato, Aristotle was led to focus exclusively on thought and knowledge, the nous and the logos, that is, the functions specific to humans. Since nutrition was not specific to humans, it was left out. And this, Jullien comments, was “fraught with consequences.”
Ancient Chinese thought turned away from the activity of knowing and concentrated on man’s ability to use and preserve vital energy
Jullien continues: “Ancient Chinese thought went in exactly the opposite direction: it deliberately turned away from the activity of knowing, which is endless and thus hemorragic in terms of energy and vitality, in order to concentrate on man’s ability to use and preserve the vital potential vested in him.” Zhuangzi, a contemporary of Aristotle, writes in Chapter 3 “On the Principle of Vital Nourishment”: “Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in grave danger [of exhaustion]. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger [of exhaustion] for certain.”
Now, how does one preserve one’s vital potential? Jullien had to turn to Chinese medicine to get an answer to this question. He explains: “If one no longer follows the endless and aimless path of knowledge, one must return to the source of our physical being, to a very different organ, namely the principal artery (du), which traverses the back from the base of the spine to the base of the neck and conveys the subtle breath of life that allows this vessel to regulate our energy. The influx of energy passes through the empty interior of this artery, from its base to its summit, without deviating from its designated path. This is the ‘line’ of life, the rule and norm of conduct to which we must cleave. This shift in focus is fundamentally important: it stops the dissipation of thought in knowledge and removes us to the vital median axis where organic regulation is maintained moment by moment. Only in this way, Zhuangzi concludes, can we “preserve our person,” “complete our vitality,” and ‘live out all our years to the end’.”
Ancient China had no conception of immortality
Although ancient Chinese Daoist sages are often referred to as “immortals,” Jullien tells us that “the ancient Chinese had no conception of immortality.” He explains: “Since their world, unlike that of Plato’s Phaedo, had no otherworld to which escape was possible, the only conceivable duration of existence was the embodied life of individual beings. Life as such did not persist in the souls that ascended to mingle with the winds of yang, nor in those that returned to the earth to merge with the energies of yin. Henri Maspero – though still unduly influenced, in my view, by European terminology – summed this up by saying that for Daoists, the ‘eternal life’ of ‘salvation’ meant “long life,”understood as a form of material immortality of the body itself. The ground suddenly opens beneath our feet: can a body hope for such longevity when the process of achieving it must be seamlessly integrated with the phenomenal world?”
While Christians hope for a resurrection in an afterlife, and Buddhists, in the original Indian tradition, for nirvana in this life and paranirvana, that is, complete liberation from the cycle of birth and death, after many kalpas of practice, Daoists, more realistically, aspire to a long life. The traditional formula is “to live all our years until the end.” It is therefore in this context that the Daoist practitioner is called to feed his/her life. It is not only a question of preserving or replenishing their reserves of vital energy, but also a practice of purification to halt the aging process.
Shou – to know how “to keep” by purifying
Zhuangzi talks about the Old Woman whose skin is “as bright as snow” and retain “the delicacy and freshness of virgins,” or “the complexion of infants.” “After a thousand years, [such people] tire of this world and ride the clouds back to the empyrean, following a way dao, which is precisely what wisdom claims to teach and which Zhuangzi characterizes by the verb shou: to know how ‘to keep’ by purifying … Questioned as to her dao, the Old Woman describes how she unburdens herself of every vestige of a cumbersome, energy-sapping ‘exterior’ so as to focus exclusively on her inner or vital capacity. This capacity after gradually purifying itself, at last communicates directly (‘transparently’) with the pure (full) regime of natural ‘processivity’, with the ‘taoic’ (‘unique’), which consequently remains continually present. This is the key point. Although the youthful glow in question may require loftiness and transcendence in order to attain it, it is not to be interpreted figuratively, for it pertains to the non-aging of the physical being. By methodically abandoning all my external and particular investments and concentrations that consume and dissipate vitality (including those pertinent to my own life), I become one with its common source. At that stage, the youthful Old Woman tells us, I will be completely unencumbered and therefore know how to remain in contact with vitality’s perpetual renewal, so that I will stop growing old.” The Old Woman stops growing old because “even ‘life’ itself is ‘external’ and therefore no longer a burden on [her] vitality. In metaphorical terms, she has “gained access to the ‘transparency of morning’.”
Jullien can therefore assert that this has nothing to do with a “mystical” experience, as this term is understood in the Christian apophatic tradition, where it is described as a “union with God,” which would amount to a conflation of one’s consciousness with the One, to the detriment of the discriminating faculty of apprehending the ten thousand things. The image of the “transparency of morning” evokes a clear solar awareness of things, retained even after having embodied the One. In this sense, it is closer to Buddhist awakening, where discriminating awareness is not stifled by the embodiment of unity with reality. In Zhuangzi’s view: “‘Past and present abolish each other’, and even in the midst of this ‘tumult’ nothing stands in the way of ‘placidity’. Once attained, this placidity preserves longevity and ‘feeds’ life. Elsewhere in this corpus, Zhuangzi writes that if the troubles of the outside world are shut out so that they are neither seen nor heard, the last screens disappear, leaving us face-to-face with ‘clear tranquillity’, and ‘we no longer exhaust our physical being’, no longer ‘rattle’ or shake our ‘quintessence’ … At that point we hold on to ‘all the vitality of our physical being” and enjoy ‘long life’.”
Source:
Francois Jullien – Vital Nourishment, Departing from Happiness (2007)