“The [Chinese] shepherd does not lead the animals in his charge by marching at their head like the good pastor in the Gospels, who guides his flock across the desert to a lush and fertile promised land. I see the shepherd in the Chinese text as a master who is content to follow along behind his sheep, making sure that no dissident motivation leads them astray and that the flock as a whole continues to move forward. Progress lies not in moving toward a visible ideal but ‘merely’ … in remaining open to change … The sole concern is efficacy: to move forward, but with an openness to the interior dimension.”(François Jullien – Vital Nourishment Departing from Happiness, Chapter 2)
Zhuangzi had warned that “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].” Instead, one’s focus should be on “feeding one’s life” (yang sheng). Jullien makes it clear that “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’. ‘My life’, comprehended globally, is my vital potential.” Since “the ancient Chinese had no conception of immortality … the only conceivable duration of existence was the embodied life of individual beings.” The traditional formula for the goal of self-cultivation in China is to “live out all our years to the end.” In the first chapter of the book, Jullien had explained that “feeding one’s life” meant “purifying one’s life,” and he used the example of the Old Woman who had retained “the complexion of infants” to show that purifying her life stopped her growing old. Since life itself was no longer a burden on her vitality, Jullien writes, she had “gained access to the ‘transparency of morning’, a metaphor which should not be interpreted in mystical terms.”
Feeding the body is not enough to maintain vitality
Jullien begins Chapter 2 by asking: “how, by emancipating, decanting, and refining my physical being, do I learn to ‘preserve’ its ability to grow and to develop my vitality to its full (‘daoic’) potential?” As a rule, he notes that “he ‘who has mastered the true nature of life’ is not concerned with anything removed from life.” It will, of course, begin with “material resources and goods … But we also know that ‘even if life does not leave our body … our vitality may very well diminish … Feeding the body is not enough to maintain vitality … What else is necessary but not separable from it (thus ruling out something spiritual, as opposed to the physical), if I am to ‘feed’ not only what I reductively call my body but also, and more essentially, or ‘quintessentially’ my life?”
The Subtle or Quintessential
While fully aware that the words “subtle” and “quintessential” belong to what could be regarded as belonging to an “obscurantist vocabulary that predates modern science,” rather than avoid the word as a vestige of an “archaic mentality,” Jullien resolves to dwell on it. For one thing, these are the words used by Zhuangzi. And in addition, these words help “banish from [Jullien’s] experience the great dualism of the physical and the spiritual. Without necessarily leaving the realm of the physical and concrete (and therefore without reference to the order of faith), [the subtle] is nevertheless already liberated from the encumbrances, limits, and opacities of the concrete.” As the “refined and decanted,” the subtle was seen by ancient Chinese as “more ‘alive’ because it was more fluid and less reified.”
Jullien notes that “there are various angles from which the subtle becomes accessible to experience. In aesthetics, for example, there is the exquisite flavor of the barely perceptible, whether in sound or image, in the transitional stage between silence and sonority in music or between emptiness and fullness in painting, when the sonic or pictorial realization is barely evident or on the verge of vanishing.” In a domain one may not have expected to be harbouring the subtle, such as military strategy, “the subtle refers to the flexibility and suppleness of a maneuver undertaken before forces are deployed on the ground, thereby rendering the opposition relatively inert. If I remain alert, I elude my enemy’s grasp and my extreme responsiveness constantly replenishes my potential. Conversely, my adversary is hampered by the rigidity of his plans and deployments. I maintain myself in the agile posture of the virtual, while the other remains mired in or confined by the actual and thus vulnerable.”
The term used by Zhuangzi is jing, which scholars usually translate as “essence” or “quintessence.” Jullien suggests that it “might also be rendered as ‘flower’, ‘choice’, ‘elite’, or ‘energy’… Originally it denoted the seed of selected or hulled rice, the fine fleur as one says of the germ of wheat in French, but it was also applied to human sperm, to the spirit of wine, and indeed to any form of matter that has been decanted, subtilized, and thus energized and endowed with the ability to communicate its effect.” So, it belongs to “the realm of the physical,” but it is “refined.” “For this reason it opposes the phase of the tangible, the opaque, the inert, the numb, and the crude.”
“Nutrition is not progress toward something, it is renewal”: the goal is “to remain open to change”
Disengagement from the affairs of the world as a process of emancipation is also found in the West. In China, it would not have been the goal of Confucians, but it was, and still is, that of Daoists who are commonly pictured in remote caves or on mountain tops only accessible through dirt paths, often involving hazardous climbs, in an effort to thoroughly disengage from the affairs of the city! Zhuangzi explains how, in Jullien’s words, “by committing myself ever more deeply to the process of emancipation, refinement, and decantation … I simultaneously free myself from the fixations, stumbling blocks, and encumbrances … I thereby restore the limpidity, subtlety, and alacrity of that flux and thus relate it ever more closely to the constant influx that links life to its source, both in myself and in the all-encompassing world process.” But, Jullien adds: “As the nutritional metabolism of my physical being already reveals at the most elementary level, and as the alternation of ‘concentration’ and ‘dispersion’ that marks the time of life and death exhibits on the cosmic scale, ‘feeding one’s life’, by entering into an ever-increasing subtilization (quintessentialization), will nonetheless always come down to this: ‘to remain open to change’. This is the first major point: nutrition is not progress toward something; it is renewal.”
Sweeping in front of the master’s gate as a discreet but effective role in the preservation and renewal of life
Jullien asks: “Once this ‘nourishment’ is no longer limited to the feeding of the ‘body’, must it fly off into the realm of the speculative? How can we express that which constitutes experience without immediately splitting it in two?” as would happen in the West? The ancient Chinese predilection for the concrete led their sages to teach through stories. In one of these, a prince asks a visitor: “I’ve heard that your master taught [how to nourish] life. What did you learn from this? The guest offers an enigmatic answer: ‘I swept at the master’s gate with a broom. What do you think I learned?’ The guest was not avoiding the question. What he meant is that “the act of sweeping in front of the master’s gate indicates in a most basic way that the visitor plays a discreet but effective role in the preservation and renewal of life.” Sweeping is a significant activity performed by monks in East Asian temples. They move “in a way that is neither nonchalant nor overexcited, neither hurried nor fatigued, cleaving to the form of things without pressing on them or breaking away from them.” Jullien believes that “what we have here is an answer in the form of an action, or, rather, a movement … the movement of sweeping, which is repeated for each step.”
The Chinese shepherd is content to follow along behind his sheep
Another metaphor used in Chinese texts compares “feeding life to feeding sheep”: “if you notice some of the sheep straggling behind, you whip them.” Jullien explains: “Scattered across the countryside, they lag behind and slow the others’ advance … The attitude one should take toward one’s nourishment is the same as that adopted by the shepherd who allows his flock to proceed at its own pace, following its noses, while he keeps an eye out for stragglers. This shepherd does not lead the animals in his charge by marching at their head like the good pastor in the Gospels, who guides his flock across the desert to a lush and fertile promised land. I see the shepherd in the Chinese text as a master who is content to follow along behind his sheep, making sure that no dissident motivation leads them astray and that the flock as a whole continues to move forward. Progress lies not in moving toward a visible ideal but ‘merely’ … in remaining open to change … The sole concern is efficacy: to move forward, but with an openness to the interior dimension.”
The art of renewal lies in the alternation between tendencies
Jullien writes: “The prince’s visitor eventually explains his meaning with two more stories. Shan Bao lived among the cliffs and drank only water. He did not seek profit and was therefore not concerned with other men. He was thereby able to preserve his vital potential and reach the age of seventy without losing his childlike complexion. Unfortunately, he crossed the path of a hungry tiger, who, given the solitude in which Shan lived, easily devoured him. Then there was Zhuang Yi: he assiduously visited every single noble mansion and at the age of forty he was already weak inside and caught a fever, from which he died. ‘One fed his inside, but the tiger ate his outside, while the other fed his outside, but illness attacked him from within. Neither man applied the whip to what lagged behind’. The path of true nourishment falls between the two. Make no mistake, however: the precise middle way is not equidistant from withdrawal, on the one hand, and social life, on the other, for such a middle path would also lead inevitably to immobility and impede life’s renewal. The art of renewal instead lies in the alternation between tendencies.” More precisely, Jullien concludes: “We should not isolate ourselves in a certain position, lest we cut ourselves off from the opposite direction and become deaf to calls to free ourselves from the position we happen to be in (so as to continue to advance); the alternative to this is necessity. Stuck in an extreme, life ceases to ‘feed’ itself because it loses its virtuality, bogs down, becomes stalemated, and no longer initiates anything new.”
“If you do good, do not seek renown. If you do evil, avoid punishment.”
This passage at the beginning of Zhuangzi’s chapter on feeding life has shocked Western moral sensibilities. Jullien interprets it as follows: “Ultimately it matters little whether the action is ‘good’ or ‘evil’: the important thing is not to become so attached to a position as to remain trapped by it. Even the good becomes a trap for vitality, not only when it becomes routine but also when we become prisoners of the label.” And he sees in the process of respiration an embodiment of the way “renewal lies in the alternation between tendencies,” concluding the chapter with the following: “And what is respiration but a continual incitation not to dwell in either of two opposite positions – inhalation or exhalation? Respiration instead allows each to call upon the other in order to renew itself through it, thus establishing the great rhythm of the world’s evolution, never absent from the Chinese mind: the alternation of day and night and the succession of the seasons. Thus respiration is not only the symbol, the image or figure, but also the vector of vital nourishment.”
Source:
François Jullien – Vital Nourishment, Departing from Happiness (2007)