Friday, June 26, 2015

Of Cornflakes And Emperors

Touch has a memory
~ Keats

Any good dictionary contains a multitude of little stories.  Take the word serendipity.  First coined in 1754 in a letter written by Horace Walpole after coming across a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip (the Urdu name for Sri Lanka) in which the heroes make a series of lucky discoveries. 

Other words emerge out of each other, branching off to give fresh meaning.  Deriving from old German the word whole gave rise to health which in turn has obvious affinities with heal, all important words.  Sometimes it feels essential that such words are in existence.  Having no negative connotations to speak of, they suggest respite, taking place away from life's treadmill, when time becomes incredibly precious. 


Healing has an end, a purpose and that is to become whole once again.  Human touch plays a vital role in this process of healing.  It reminds us like nothing else that we are rooted here and now on this Earth, in no other possible place or time. Such deep connectivity is one of the reasons massage has been used as a healing method for millennia. 

The Chinese first documented their findings in the Huang-di Nei'Jing (see our previous blog) which contains thirty different chapters on massage.  It has long been favoured by people at all levels of society.  Julius Caesar was said to have received daily sessions of "pinching" to treat his neuralgia and epilepsy.  Perhaps more bizarrely, in 1929 the inventor of the cornflake Dr John Harvey Kellogg published a book about massage and today people still cite him as one of the pioneers in that field.  Freud was supposed to have used massage to help patients suffering from hysteria and his friend and colleague Carl Jung once said that "often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain".

These are just a few random examples but they hint at how massage and the power of touch have been so valued down the centuries by givers and receivers alike.   You then only have to consider how central social grooming is for species of primates for example to see how close physical contact reinforces vital bonds.  It has the capacity to show you that something or someone else cares and you're not on your own.  And it is left to Keats to encapsulate the whole mystery in just four words.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

The Velocity Of Ideas

Sometimes connections may be obscure and tentative but have undeniable echoes all the same. They can also seem to unwittingly travel along parallel lines.   

Take the island of Kos in the Dodecanese, lying just four kilometres off the Turkish coast.  Once home to a thriving Jewish community, it also has a 230 year old mosque that's still in use today.  None of which is unusual for a part of the world that not only nudges the eastern fringes of Europe but once lay along ancient Hellenic trade routes, with links to the Orient and beyond.

Kos also has an ace up it's sleeve, to put it very mildly.  Just along from the mosque stands a tree which according to legend marks the spot where Hippocrates first taught the art of medicine a mere 2,500 years ago.  This culturally rich island could therefore claim to be the birthplace of Western medicine.  Quite an assertion and one that is widely accepted.

Hippocrates' pupils documented his numerous teachings in what is now known as the Hippocratic Corpus.  It shows that, among other things, he was the first person to assert that diseases had natural causes and were not due to any supernatural forces. They resulted from our environment, diet etc. not from the disfavour of gods, an incredibly 'modern' perspective.


What is also fascinating and something that invites endless conjecture is that at roughly the same time and 10,000 kilometres to the east, Chinese physicians were busy documenting their own findings. One of the major texts that resulted from this activity was called Huang-di Nei'Jing or The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon.

Similar in some ways to the Corpus, it describes a series of conversations between the mythical Emperor and some of his ministers.  It is presented in two parts: the Suwen which forms the comprehensive basis of traditional Chinese medicine, and the Lingshu which specifically focuses on acupuncture.

One other undeniable similarity that it shares with the Corpus is the fact that it too rejects the influence of spirits and the use of magic in medical practice which had hitherto been de rigueur.

There are surely reasons for such changes in direction.  No-one knows categorically why medical practitioners at that time and in different parts of the globe were starting to turn their backs on superstition as a source of diagnosis.  It may be coincidental that these new-found beliefs were concurrently being taken in the same field, but people travelled for trade on a vast scale and ideas will have moved around with them.

As always, the headspring of such profoundly innovative new ways of thinking will ultimately remain a mystery.  It can't however be discounted that once the idea took flight it sent shockwaves across the world.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

T'ai Chi : The Snake And The Bird

Truth and fiction are odd companions.  One can masquerade as the other, adding spice and playing with perceptions, invigorating the apocryphal.  Origins obscured by the passage of time can be prone to the artistry of myth-makers and Eastern traditions have more than their fair share of legends, valid or not.

Camus said that "fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth" and what beautiful 'lies' or stories they can turn out to be.  The story behind t'ai chi ch'uan is simple but profound.  Like anything of such significance the facts are endlessly disputed but it's poetic imagery is everlasting.

Roughly eight hundred years ago in China there is supposed to have lived a Shaolin monk named Zhang Sanfeng, seven feet tall with the posture of a pine tree, spear-shaped whiskers and capable of covering up to 350 miles in a day. Some say he was a wizard, a transcendent immortal being.

As a young man he yearned to live a more solitary and spiritual life so he left his monastery in the Wudang Mountains and took up residence in a small isolated hut-like dwelling. He submitted himself to inner contemplation, exploring the mystical union with nature as befitted a devotee of Taoist philosophy.

One day whilst sitting at his window he heard a raucous noise in his garden and saw a snake and a bird in the midst of a terrible struggle.  He  observed how each one behaved, the snake remaining still, avoiding the bird's grappling claws while choosing it's moments to strike and the bird dancing about defending itself adeptly with it's wings.

He was profoundly affected by what he had seen and that night in a dream was visited by the Jade Emperor himself who revealed to him the secrets of the Tao. On waking the following morning Zhang leaped out of bed newly inspired.  Prompted by what he had learned the day before he chose to dedicate the rest of his life to the formulation of a new 'internal' martial art form.  The two main Truths that he expounded could arguably have derived from witnessing the two animals respond to their confrontation, forming a basic rationale : "yielding overcomes aggression" and "softness overcomes hardness".

It is obviously unknown how much of this story is authentic or whether such a man as Zhang Sanfeng existed. But the principles that emerged over subsequent centuries contain an enduring power and mean as much to the modern practitioner of t'ai chi as they did to any mythical creator and that is truly invaluable.