Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.
Hello Friends,
I hope this message finds you all well and enjoying this glorious time of year. This week I would like to share a piece of writing about the centrality of naturalistic metaphors in Chinese medicine. Although I wrote this piece many years ago, its themes are very prevalent in a larger writing project I am currently engaged in (more on this in the future).
And a quick reminder: I will also be starting to teach an online meditation class weekly that you can sign up for here.
Naturalistic metaphors shape the understanding of the Chinese medicine practitioner, whose role is more akin to that of a gardener than a mechanic. When we are young, we are like a young sapling: delicate and flexible, easily bent but not easily broken. In our early years, the trajectory of our growth can still be easily influenced by being bent one way or another. We are easily formed in childhood like a tree whose bark has not yet hardened.
This is why working with pediatric patients can be especially rewarding for clinicians; for one can make a profound impact on their direction of growth very rapidly, setting the pattern for future growth and development for years to come. Resetting an unhealthy pattern that has developed for children can save them years of challenge in the future.
Utilizing organic metaphors, practitioners of Chinese medicine can often predict the way patterns of growth are likely to develop both in the short term and long-term. The more deeply one understands the body and understands its patterns of disharmony, the better one can predict the potential directions of future growth, where a given growth-pattern may lead a person. In this sense, humans really can be viewed just like plants: if the tree continues to grow this way, will it become crooked, putting more pressure on the roots which must hold it up? If it continues to grow like this, will it become dehydrated, and will this lead to being more susceptible to insect infestation because it will develop small holes in its body? This is the kind of thinking that a clinician engages in every day. Once the pattern of growth is identified, the implications for continued growth can be understood.
In the Western, and specifically Christian, tradition, there has been a tendency to imagine birth and creation as singular, discrete events, without precursor, and death or potentially apocalypse as ultimate ends. As such, a singular individual life, marked off by the temporal boundaries of an absolute beginning and end is considered the proper unit of life and thus is the main concern of modern Western medicine. The machine metaphor continues in this line of thinking; machines have decisive beginnings and ends; they are built, and eventually break down.
The traditional Chinese conception, in contrast, based on the metaphor of plant life, understands individuals as momentary expressions of lineage. During their individual lives, individuals are the living manifestation of their ancestral line, as well as of continuums of consciousness that extend beyond the boundaries of a singular lifetime (in Buddhist and most Daoist traditions).
This is clear when the concept of de 德, often translated as ‘virtue’, is considered. It is understood that the development of de benefits not only oneself, but one's descendants, and indeed one’s ancestral lineage as a whole, as a quality that is passed down through the ages, which can be either lost or maintained through organic processes of positive cultivation or moral degeneration. So too, de is understood to influence future incarnations. De is often understood with analogy to plant reproduction; in which some plants are more strong, healthy, or beautiful than others—all people cultivate de, and it can always be cultivated to a greater extent within an individual's lifetime, though some are born with exceptional or unusual capacity to express de.
In every way, the organic metaphor of plant life is more aligned with the notion of personal cultivation of qualities of character and capacities of perception than the mechanical metaphor. Whereas the machine simply performs its pre-set function regardless of the way its environment affects it, a plant is in a flexible and dynamic relationship with its surroundings and can grow and develop in a myriad of different ways depending on how it is conditioned and cultivated. When humans are likened to plant life their growth, development, and cultivation is more apparent.
As we have noted, the emphasis on cultivation, which is still central to Daoist and Buddhist traditions today, was also present in earlier forms of Western philosophy and spiritual tradition, as is attested to by the essential role that Aristotelian virtue ethics played in Western religious conceptions for much of the last two thousand years. Not inconsequentially, prior to the complete domination of mechanistic philosophy, many of the great philosophers of the Western tradition also employed metaphors based on plant life to guide their explorations of human existence. Similar to the broad conceptual category of wan wu in ancient Chinese thought, the Greek used by Plato and his contemporaries lacked specialized words for ‘plants’ and ‘animals’’ and they were not considered categorically different entities. Rather, their differences were highlighted with a matter of emphasis.
Plato discussed ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ plants to describe his realm of abstract ideas, which he took to be separate from the immediately sensible earthly realm. Aristotle too, as mentioned, employed plant metaphors, discussing certain capacities of our ensouled being as the vegetal soul. As we also saw, he was also responsible for the enduring metaphor of ‘matter’ which issues from his use of the ordinary word hyle, which in colloquial greek meant ‘wood’, whether growing in a forest or as timber, as a general metaphor for the stuff with which things are made. Curiously, although we have forgotten its origins in modern discussions of matter that imagine it in a wholly mechanical way, it is the materiality of wood, and thus plant life, which lies at the root of our conception of materiality as such. In many ways reminiscent of various Daoist ideas, Plotinus described the great ‘soul of all’ of which each individual soul is but a part, with reference to a ‘great plant’ emphasizing the unity underlying multiplicity, as all are branches emerging from the same spiritual root.
Of course, the overall character of philosophy changed after the Enlightenment, focusing less on inner cultivation and more on external doctrine in tandem with the wide-spread adoption of the machine metaphor. The use of the plant-metaphor, which is more appropriate for understanding organic processes of bodily growth and development and how they too can be cultivated, fell out of fashion as the emphasis of philosophy moved away from focusing on cultivation of the whole person toward a purely intellectual pursuit. As the focus shifted from cultivating one’s character toward goodness to simply having the correct intellectual understandings and belief-structures, Western culture moved further and further from notions at all similar to the Chinese concept of de.
Aidan Keeva, DACM, L. Ac.,
Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine
Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.