“Come back and see me when your symptoms calm down.”
Was this guy joking? He was supposed to be a Healthcare Provider… you know, someone who… provides healthcare. “Maybe go away for a week, to the desert,” he added, throwing salt in the wound.
That concluded my first visit to the acupuncturist’s office. Walking out the door, I felt dissatisfied, frustrated, annoyed—all the classic signs of “Liver invading Spleen,” in Chinese medicine terms. If this doctor wasn’t going to address my complaints, what was I there for?
Having run out of options, I decided to make a trip to the desert after all. I spent a week airing out and even managed to relax a bit. When I returned to the clinic, I felt less urgency about my health.
The way we approach our health is itself a symptom of health—and quite an important one. Our thoughts, feelings, and actions form patterns. Chronic patterns lead to chronic diseases.
In the months that followed, my visits to the Doc took on an ebbing and flowing quality. His demeanor was always the same: pleasant, light, and professional. He was curious like a child, often asking me surprising questions like, “How close are the trees growing to your house?” When I told him a certain detail of my life—a new place I had traveled, or a pillow I was trying—he would suddenly light up. If I was chewing gum the week my symptoms improved, he wanted to know what brand.
Healing happened in jolts and stumbles. Symptoms appeared and then vanished again. Sometimes, after a period of stagnation, my condition changed all at once, like a precarious rock that falls suddenly into a river.
Some days, Doc would just shrug and say “I don’t know what’s going on. What do you think?” We tried one herbal formula, and then another, until something clicked. Understanding came about at the pace of digestion.
Not-Knowing
Doc rarely indulged my anxieties, or my intense desire to understand why things were happening. He embodied the words of the Dao De Jing: “Empty the mind and fill the belly.” In other words, “Stop Googling your symptoms and eat some soup!”
To know not-knowing is best.
Not to know that you know is a disease.
The sage is not sick
Because he is sick of being sick.
Thus, he has no disease.
- DDJ, Ch. 71
It isn’t just that knowledge interferes with treatment. Knowing is itself a kind of disease. To know something is to separate it from the whole of experience. A fish doesn’t know water until it’s taken out of it. We’re not aware of the orchestra’s third-chair oboist until she comes in on the wrong measure. It’s just the same with the body. Human beings are made of interlocking cycles—digestion, respiration, regeneration, etc. When a cycle gets off rhythm, we call it disease. A symptom is a function of life that has broken off and risen to the surface of the body.
I like the way Claude Larre describes the role of the doctor in Chinese medicine:
We do not pay attention to each individual item, but rather to what is at the center of it all… When we begin to separate things out, then what was in the middle becomes apparent… We must use emptiness and the void to understand what is explicit, and use what is explicit to come back to the void, and to nourish the knot where everything is given within our being.1
Larre is using metaphysical language here, but he is describing an experience. The substance of life is always transforming: between solid and liquid, visible and invisible, actual and potential, inside and outside of the body. Rather than a sack full of meat, the body is more like a porous space in which these transformations take place. If it has a core, it is a “whirling emptiness” that can only be appreciated through meditative awareness—an attitude of keen interest with no expectations, as Doc himself modeled.
Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form… that’s great, Doc. But how do you use the void to cure your hemorrhoids?
The View
If comparing Chinese and Western medicine were a matter of comparing dried centipedes to Vicodin, there would be no contest. Vicodin is incredible. But it’s not a question of methods, instruments, or ingredients. It comes down to View.2
Liu Ming always began his medical lectures with the question, “What is a human being?” This approach may seem incongruous with the world of lab coats and prescription pads, but our cultural views of life and embodiment create our definitions of health—and thus the methods we use to achieve it. Without a guiding View, Vicodin mostly leads to more Vicodin.
To understand Doc’s unconventional methods, we must zoom out from the Western view of the body. Growing up in our (secular) Christian society, we learn that death is a tragedy, and healing is heroism—a battle to save our degenerate meat sacks.
Medicine as Ritual
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot. - Charlie Chaplin
The Daoists observed that most problems are caused by interfering with the natural way of things. Their prescription was to cultivate wuwei, or non-interference. Rituals functioned by emptying the body of desires, certainties, and agendas3—allowing the order of Heaven to spontaneously return.
Daoist ritual is full of jokes about emptiness. All that chaotic music and circle walking amounts to telling nature to keep being as it already is—for Heaven’s sake!
Daoist ritual does not take us anywhere. We are not “on our way” to Heaven, or wholeness, or Boca Raton. Ritual merely reestablishes our place in the cosmos. When we take the biggest view of life, all phenomena appear to arise and resolve on their own, back into the ocean of unknowing.
Emerging from (Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist) ritual culture, Chinese medicine is first and foremost an expression of life—a co(s)mic celebration of the body unfurling in time.
Medicine as Comedy
“Come back and see me when your symptoms calm down.” Now that’s a good Jewish doctor joke. Like all good jokes, it turns convention on its head. Instead of the doctor giving health to the patient, he asks for it back. This sudden reversal gives us a brief experience of the emptiness at the center of things. For a moment, we are in free-fall… and then, laughter: the sound of life gushing up from the void.
To our imagination, the void can seem dark and scary, or stressful and chaotic. Chinese medicine is like a well-timed joke: it cuts the tension, instantly making the situation appropriate. Echoing the Daoist priest, the doctor says, “See? Not-knowing is totally normal, healthy even. That murky void inside your body? It’s actually quite intelligent. Look at all that life springing from it! Can you stay open and let it do its thing?”
By the time you actually roll onto the treatment table, one needle in the right place should heal your whole body—or even better, rectify your fate for seven generations!
Redefining Illness
What do we make of the story of the Chinese doctor who ordered his cancer patient to sit on the roof and look at the stars?
Will there ever be clinical data on the efficacy of lying beside a creek?
Illness can be a scary thing. When we respond to our symptoms by becoming rigid, agitated, or deflated, we are adding sickness to sickness. In Daoist terms, we are producing “hardened fate.”
When things seem heavy, return to the center.
Doc understood that when a patient comes in full of neuroses and Google search results, his first job is to reestablish emptiness by any means necessary.
Diseases may show up in our bones and tissues, but they originate in emptiness. That is to say, the most unyielding conditions all begin as subtle fixations—qi patterns that swirl under the surface until the conditions are perfect, when they pop up like strange mushrooms.
We are born carrying our own deaths. Relax. Our destinies are negotiable, or so the Daoists say.
By cultivating softness, we can notice patterns before they harden. If we hit a wall, we don’t have to smash our heads against it. We can simply turn around… or return to stillness, letting the knots untangle themselves. This is called wuwei.
Redefining Health
To be full, empty out.
What is worn out will be repaired.
Those who have little have much to be gained;
Having much, you will only be perplexed.
Hold to the One, and be like a shepherd to all things.
DDJ, Ch. 22
Health is not a mystical or transcendent state. It is not bestowed upon us by doctors or medicines. It does not require knowledge, discipline, or inner strength.
Health is the simple capacity to enjoy our circumstances. Hungry or full, young or old, alone or in company, prosperous or hard up: we humans are born to feel at home at each moment in the cycle.
When we stay with our circumstances, we get access to all sorts of improvisational resources. Health shows itself as a kind of dynamism: a relationship to ourselves, an aliveness to the world. Our fate opens up, and we no longer experience our circumstances as constraining.
Backwards or forwards. Pain or pleasure. Dried centipedes or Vicodin. All roads become expressions of our authenticity. This is a definition of health beyond prescriptions.
NOTE: The methods of medicine are myriad, the effects endless. Even within Chinese medicine, there are hundreds of different schools and traditions.
Medicines arise in response to the needs of people. If your patient is hemorrhaging blood, you’re not going to stand there meditating on the void.4
Doc had built up a set of practical healing skills from his years working in Chinese hospitals. I remember one time when I came in with a hamstring injury. I seem to recall lying on the table, my whole body spasming under the influence of a single needle, and Doc’s devilish voice howling from above, “Where’s your placebo effect now?!”
The Punchline
Who can make non-being their head, life their spine, and death their buttocks? Who can understand that birth and death, existence and non-existence, are all one body? Such people make true friends. — Master Zhuang
In my time with Doc, I learned to see my problems in a softer light. I went to the desert and found it abloom with prickly pear. I met my fate on the road, and we traded wisecracks.
Like an unmotivational speaker, I am here to say: as much as we love to love our ailments, we must ultimately grow sick of our sicknesses.
Life bejewels our bodies with ulcers and abscesses. Death passes unseen, like a silent fart. All the while, the sages play in the Great Transformation, “tumbling and twirling through a blur of endings and beginnings.”
I’ll leave you with a joke I heard the other day:
A man goes to the doctor’s office. The doctor says, “I’m sorry, you’ve got six months to live.” The man says, “How am I supposed to come up with the money for treatment?!” So the doctor says, “Alright, I’ll give you twelve months.”
§
May you all live out your allotted years, and may your death be like a well-timed punchline—leaving everyone around you feeling a little bit lighter.
From The Secret Treatise of the Spiritual Orchid (2003).
“Body” refers not just to the physical body. To the Daoists, community was a kind of shared body, as was family, country, and cosmos.
For more on this, I highly recommend Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (2002).
Doc often lamented that Western practitioners don’t learn the skills to treat serious ailments like broken bones, strokes, and heart attacks. Instead, Chinese medicine is taught as a gentle, spiritual modality. Is this due to a cultural misunderstanding of qi? Is a great historical joke unfolding?
Eli, what an excellent post!!! I thoroughly enjoyed reading your insights and humor here. Thank you!