He was born in Ueno, a district of Tōkyō, in September 1911. It all began at the age of three or four when he was surprised to find that he had relieved someone’s toothache simply by placing his hands on them. He was a child, and his hands moved toward the target without him realising what he was doing. He accomplished his first feat at the age of twelve, when he cured his neighbours who were suffering from dysentery after the great earthquake that struck the Tōkyō area in 1923. From that age on, he began to receive people who asked him to heal them. At the time, he had no knowledge, not even basic knowledge, of anatomy or medicine. As a teenager, he began to realise the consequences of his actions. At first, like almost all healers, he believed that he had an exceptional power that only he possessed. He found his calling but did not stop there; he continued on. He taught himself all Eastern and Western therapeutic methods. At the age of fifteen, he opened a dojo in Iriya. At seventeen, he formulated Precepts of Full Life (Zensei Kun), which provide a better understanding of his thinking. In 1930, he wrote Reflections on Integral Life, a surprising text for a young man who was only nineteen at the time.
Category Archives: Noguchi
To Live Seitai
by Régis Soavi
Seitai: philosophy or therapy?
‘Seitai deals, above all, with the individual in his or her individuality, and not with an average person created out of statistics.
Life itself is invisible, but in manifesting itself in individuals, it creates an infinite variety of different combinations.’1Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, 2013, Yume Editions, Chap. VII, p. 73. (1st ed. in French, 1973, pub. Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), pp. 68-9.) (Tsuda Itsuo)
Seitai 整体, and its corollary Katsugen undō2Katsugen Undō 活元 運動: translated as Regenerating Movement by Tsuda Itsuo., are recognised in Japan since the sixties by the Ministry of Education (today Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) as a movement of education. They are not recognised as a therapy – which would rather be recognised by the Ministry of Health. The ambiguity between the two, however, is still being maintained by a great many of its disclosers.
Since the publication in the seventies of Tsuda Itsuo’s work, Seitai makes many dream among those interested in New Age, Orientalist techniques or else. At times one becomes a technician overnight, at times one adds ‘appealing ingredients’ as Tsuda sensei himself would write. It is time to put things into order, to try and clarify all this, and to that end we need only refer to Tsuda Itsuo’s teaching as well as the original texts from the creator of this teaching, this science of the human being, this philosophy.
Noguchi Haruchika 野口 晴哉 sensei
This Japanese man, founder of the Seitai Institute3Seitai Kyōkai 整体 協会., is the author of about thirty books, three of which have been translated into English. He is also the discoverer of the techniques that enable the triggering of the Regenerating Movement as an exercise of the “involuntary system”4More precisely, it is an exercise of the extrapyramidal motor system.. As a young boy, he discovers he has a capacity which he believes unique and “extra-ordinary”: that of “healing people”. He discovers this capacity during the big 1923 earthquake which devastates Tōkyō city, by relieving a female neighbour who suffers from dysentery, simply by putting his hand on her back. Rumour spreads very fast, and people hurry to his parents’ address in order to receive care. All he does is to lay his hands on the people, who go home relieved of their aches. He then starts a career as a healer – he is only twelve years old – and his reputation increases so much that, at the age of fifteen, he opens his first dōjō right in Tōkyō.
But Noguchi sensei wonders: what is the force acting when he lays his hands and why does he alone have this power? Instead of taking advantage of what he thinks to be a gift and collecting the related profits, he searches, asks himself questions, starts studying on his own.
For years, he will look for solutions to problems raised by his clients through the techniques coming from acupuncture of ancient traditional Chinese medicine which he studies with his uncle, from Japanese medicines (kanpō 漢方), various shiatsu, kuatsu, and even Western style anatomy, etc. His reputation is so wide that he is known and recognised internationally. For that matter, he will meet later many therapists including some who are already – or will become – well-known, like Oki Masahiro, creator of Oki-dō Yoga, or Kishi Akinobu sensei, creator of Sei-ki Shiatsu, or even, better known in France, Moshé Feldenkrais, with whom he will exchange many times. Yet, he has already understood that this force he feels in himself does not belong to him as an individual, but that it exists in all human beings – that is what he will call later the cohesive force of life.
Seitai: a global view
In the fifties, Noguchi sensei changes his orientation completely. Through his practical experience and personal studies, he comes to the conclusion that no healing method can save the human being. He drops therapeutics, conceives the idea of Seitai as well as Katsugen Undō. Back then, he already declares: ‘Health is a natural thing which requires no artificial intervention. Therapeutics reinforces links of dependence. Diseases are not things to be cured, but opportunities to be used in order to activate the organism and restore its equilibrium’ – as many themes he will take up again later in his books5Noguchi Haruchika, Colds and their benefits, Zensei Publishing Company, 1986. (Compiled and translated from edited transcripts of lectures delivered in the 1960s.).. So he decides to stop healing people and spread Katsugen Undō, as well as Yuki6Yuki 愉氣: action of concentrating the attention which activates the individual’s life force., which is not the prerogative of a minority but a human and instinctive act.
The findings of Noguchi Haruchika sensei lead to see Seitai as a philosophy – and thus not as a therapy – and he himself would define it as such in his books7Noguchi Haruchika, Order, Spontaneity and the Body, Zensei Publishing Company, 1984. (1st ed. in Japanese, 1976.). This does not mean that what he was doing and teaching did not have consequences on health, quite the opposite since his field of competence was in the service of persons and consisted in enabling individuals to live fully. Despite this, a certain number of people, in his time as much as today, were disturbed by such a drastic opinion and this brought about a confusion between fields for those who would see and understand only according to their own opinion. As a result, they favoured the support to people at the cost of the awakening of the being.
The technicity of this very great master was unanimously recognised in Japan, he even had been president of the Manual Therapists Association during the prewar period. But his work, that he would consider an accompaniment, a guide, a Seitai orientation, would go much further than healing people who came to see him; it was rather a matter of enabling each person to retrieve their inner life force – and in this he was incredibly efficient.
He explains that very often it is the Kokoro8Kokoro 心: heart and mind, ability of the man for reasoning, understanding and willing, not opposite to his bodily side, but as what animates it. that is affected, disturbed, and that driving this Kokoro in the right direction is enough for the person to retrieve the health that had been lost. Making Ki flow in the right direction was his favourite technique; this may seem rather easy, but reality is quite different. One does not become a Seitai guide overnight, it is not about trying to stimulate an area or another using conjuring tricks but about understanding, feeling where the problem comes from in order to allow Ki to flow in the right direction and make life work. Noguchi sensei had an extraordinary intuition and the quality of his sensations, the sharpness of his observation made him a really remarkable person – and even one whom some of his contemporaries would consider formidable in some respects because of his extreme perspicacity.
A dream
Health has become a technological dream. From the 19th century concept, summarized so well by Jules Romain in his play Knock, according to which every healthy person is considered as a person unaware that they are sick, we have shifted into the 20th century concept which claimed it would eradicate diseases thanks to pharmaceutical chemistry and rays. As for the 21st century, it proposes to solve all problems with genetics or transhumanism.
The analysis claims to become more and more thorough, we have shifted from dissection to sequencing. By cutting up the human being into increasingly smaller pieces, down to cells and now genes and even smaller, we are losing sight of the whole, we are moving away from the notion of the individual (from the Latin individuum: what is indivisible) and, as a curious consequence, we are compelled to treat the human being in general and no longer in particular. The human being appears like a collection of parts. Each part of the body has its own specialist, including the psyche of course, and all these specialists take care of their clients’ symptoms. For ideological or even religious reasons, when the expected result is lacking with classical medicine, we turn to what are called alternative medicines. These can be ancestral methods of great value as well as small fiddles. We can find around us lots of recipes promulgated on the internet, and forwarded by our friends and acquaintances, each thinking they have the solution to all our problems of health, energy, or simply to an ordinary disorder.
The symptom
We persist in removing the symptom, because it is the symptom that disturbs us. Of course, we cannot deny its importance, it is the sign, often the indicator, of a problem that had not yet been perceived. But it is also and above all the expression of the work done by our organism to solve this difficulty. Often, body problems are misunderstood and we want to solve them as fast as possible without really seeking the root cause. We need only make the symptom disappear to satisfy everyone, to think we are cured, even though most of the time we have simply put the problem aside and, even sometimes, prevented the body from reacting.
The body has its reasons that reason does not know
There is no perfect nor immutable body, the body moves continuously from the outside as well as from the inside, life itself wants it so. But we really must take into account that this movement or rather these movements come also as a result of our corporal tendencies, themselves resulting from our birth, genes, as well as from the way we use our body through work, sports, martial arts, thus in general through every activity, whatever. For instance, a recurring phenomenon in martial arts and more generally in sports is to feel pain in one or both knees. The most common answer to it would be to treat pain where it occurs, anaesthetize it, prevent swelling, etc. Actually, in such a case as in so many others, one is just forgetting or even denying that this is a natural response of the body to a much broader issue, a posture problem or a misuse of the body.
Noguchi Haruchika left us a most precious tool which enables better understanding of human beings according to the polarization of energy (Ki) in the different regions of the body. This tool, the Taiheki9Taiheki 体癖: corporal habits. concept, makes possible for us to perceive the individual through their unconscious movement according to their corporal habits and what results from them. Noguchi sensei used an animal-type comparison system designed in his early researches as a careful observation of human movement, which he reduced for purpose of teaching to six groups comprising as a whole twelve main tendencies. Each of the five first groups is in relation to a lumbar vertebra and a corporal system (urinary, pelvic, pulmonary, etc.) while the last one rather describes a general state of the body.These tendencies, resulting from ki coagulation and stagnation, are caused by the stiffening or flabbiness of the body when it can no longer regenerate, recover from the fatigues imposed on it.
Let us take an example so as to make things concrete: many persons tend to lean more on one leg rather than on the other. This tendency may result, among other things, either from what is known in Seitai as lateralism, or from torsion, which like other corporal deformations are absolutely involuntary, just being the result, the response of the body trying to maintain its equilibrium.
In the case of a torsion, the support leg is used to prepare to spring, to attack or to defend oneself – in any case to win. If lateralism is involved, we are rather dealing with a condition resulting from digestive or sentimental tendencies with a deformation occurring at the second lumbar level, a condition inclining to concert, to diplomacy. In both examples, the same leg will be used as a supporting point, thus constantly bearing most of the weight and so getting tired and tending to wear out more and become rigid. This dissymmetry affects the whole body and, obviously in the first place, particularly the spinal column. Through swelling resulting from a liquid supply, or through pain, even often through both reactions, the body tries to relieve the knee that bears the heaviest tribute, preventing us from using it until healing is completed, that is, the whole body equilibrium is restored. If this development is impeded through bringing down the swelling and removing the pain, the body, which has become insensitive, will go on leaning on the same side and the situation will get worse. The body will try by all means to retrieve its equilibrium, first by renewing the knee problems as soon as sensitivity has been recovered there, then gradually the hips will start compensating the lack of flexibility and finally it will be the back, that is the spinal column, with all the resulting consequences one may imagine.
Is back pain not considered the most common problem in our civilization, maybe even as “the evil of the century”? Is bearing pain silently to be taken as the solution to it? This is not the point of view of Seitai but, on the other hand, preserving balance from the beginning, from birth, consists in accepting little disturbances and guiding in daily life the body in the right direction, day after day. If one has ignored the manifestations of one’s own body, it becomes necessary to go through a corporal relearning, a slow but deep equilibrium restoration. If, on the other hand, one does not accept one’s own body’s work, one will then have to accept progressive desensitization, progressive stiffening and its consequences: some sort of Robotization or weakening and inability to react.
To live Seitai
According to Noguchi sensei, beginning to take care of children at birth was already late. The months of pregnancy, the delivery, the first cares given to the baby were fully part of his concern about the child’s future life as well. In his books, Tsuda Itsuo sensei provides us with many indications about pregnancy, delivery, breastfeeding, nutrition, weaning, first steps, etc., particularly in volume four entitled One. Seitai does not set rules to be followed in every occurrence, it is not about figuring out the right solution to the problems of early childhood, childhood, or adolescence, as in childcare or pedagogy books. Seitai deals with the manifestations of life with no preconception, it here again makes it possible to guide parents while, at the same time, enabling them to develop their intuition thanks to a dialogue in silence with the baby and later with the small child. For those who have not had the chance – or sometimes the possibility – to let their body work according to their own needs, are there still possibilities to retrieve a healthy state? This is where the practice of Katsugen Undō comes in.
It is a most simple practice beginning with an indispensable condition: not to think. Tsuda sensei used to refer to this condition as ‘clearing the head’. In The Science of the Particular, he explains what he means by using this expression:
‘Clear the head! We understand the need for it today, when the head has become a trash bin in which fermentation continues twenty-four hours a day to produce worry about the present and fear of the future.
What do we mean by “clearing the head”? Of course not a comatose state in which consciousness is lost. It is a state in which the consciousness ceases to be disrupted by a stream of ideas. Instead of excessive cerebralisation, life begins to stir in parts of the body that were previously dormant.’10Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, 2015, Yume Editions, p. 159. (1st ed. in French, 1976, pub. Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), p. 143.)
The notion of individual in Seitai
For Noguchi H. sensei, there is no human being divided into parts but always a single body.
In the light of the most recent discoveries, one becomes aware, for instance through the fascias theory, of the interaction between the various parts of the body, even when sometimes extremely far from one another. Some of these theories made possible to rehabilitate ancestral techniques from distant countries, which had not so far been understood in their depth and had very often got little respect from Western medical science. Other discoveries, mentioned particularly by M.-A. Selosse in his book Never Alone11Marc-André Selosse, Jamais seul [Never Alone], pub. Actes Sud (Arles, France), June 2017., have emphasized the symbiotic dimension of the individual, the interaction that takes place between bacteria and the body: the human being is no longer considered separate, modern biology gets obvious insight on his nature as a symbiont. Once more – once again should I say –, one is compelled to consider the whole of the individual.
However, in spite of experiencing a time when technologico-scientific discoveries have considerably increased knowledge about human beings, there is little change from the Seitai perspective, they remain the same as sixty or seventy years ago; the causes disturbing them, disturbing their Kokoro are different but human beings themselves have remained the same. Unfortunately, it can be seen that many bodies and minds are more fragile today, when ideologies about health have designed individuals deeply dependent on all kinds of specialists, thus generating a certain type of alienation which might be difficult to understand or analyze by anyone lacking an overview of society. The abyss to the bottom of which we are heading calls for a recovery of everyone at the individual level and this is perhaps where the Seitai orientation may enlighten us: by providing the individual with a unique tool in order to recover their autonomy, to re-appropriate their own life and live it fully. That is why the practice of Katsugen Undō and Yuki are the two activities proposed by the Itsuo Tsuda School – for they are the Alpha and Omega of the practice of Seitai.
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Article by Régis Soavi published in Yashima #7 in July 2020.
Notes
- 1Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, 2013, Yume Editions, Chap. VII, p. 73. (1st ed. in French, 1973, pub. Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), pp. 68-9.)
- 2Katsugen Undō 活元 運動: translated as Regenerating Movement by Tsuda Itsuo.
- 3Seitai Kyōkai 整体 協会.
- 4More precisely, it is an exercise of the extrapyramidal motor system.
- 5Noguchi Haruchika, Colds and their benefits, Zensei Publishing Company, 1986. (Compiled and translated from edited transcripts of lectures delivered in the 1960s.).
- 6Yuki 愉氣: action of concentrating the attention which activates the individual’s life force.
- 7Noguchi Haruchika, Order, Spontaneity and the Body, Zensei Publishing Company, 1984. (1st ed. in Japanese, 1976.)
- 8Kokoro 心: heart and mind, ability of the man for reasoning, understanding and willing, not opposite to his bodily side, but as what animates it.
- 9Taiheki 体癖: corporal habits.
- 10Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, 2015, Yume Editions, p. 159. (1st ed. in French, 1976, pub. Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), p. 143.)
- 11Marc-André Selosse, Jamais seul [Never Alone], pub. Actes Sud (Arles, France), June 2017.
Noguchi on Chuang-Tzu #5
Concerning Chuang-Tzu’s chapter ‘The spirit of cultivating life’ (V) by Noguchi Haruchika. You can read the beginning here.
For as long as human beings live, they will at some point die. This statement has been tested for thousands of years, and so it is not a misapprehension. People generally do not accept the irrefutable fact that men die, and as they draw closer to death and feel death in their hearts, they worry and act impatiently, since they don’t want to die. But human beings are creatures that die. Bach composed the Goldberg variations for the sake of someone’s sound sleep, and this piece says again and again that men are mortal. Read more
Noguchi on Chuang-Tzu #4
Concerning Chuang-Tzu’s chapter ‘The spirit of cultivating life’ (IV) by Noguchi Haruchika. You can read the beginning here.
When Kung Wen Hsien saw the Commander of the Army, he said in surprise, ‘I wondered who it was, and it‘s you. That one foot is it the work of man or of Heaven?’ The Commander replied, ‘It was Heaven’s, and not man’s work. Essentially, a man’s form is determined. From this, I know that being one-footed, too, is the work of heaven, and not of man.’
The Commander’s words are followed with: ‘A pheasant that lives in a marsh walks ten paces for one beakful of food and a hundred paces for one sip of water, but it doesn’t want to be kept in a cage. Though a bird may be filled with vitality there, it cannot enjoy its life.’
Chuang-tzu broke the various cages that environ people’s lives: the attachment that comes from being ruled by the things around you, the sense of values that goes against life, partial philosophies that hinder the development of life. He demands that we should step out from these prisons and conveys the Buddhist priest’s spirit of renouncing the world by casting off all attachments. Again, Yun-men wondered why a priest should robe himself at the sound of the bell, when the world, so full of splendours, is very wide; and there was the European thinker who threw away all his books and possessions.
‘Common people breathe from their throats. Those who are slaves to the world choke out their words as though they were vomiting… Human life is it in its essence as murky as this? Is it I alone who see it as murky? And is there someone who does not see it as murky?’
Is it not because people don’t comprehend the pleasure a pheasant has from walking ten paces for a beakful of food and a hundred paces for a drink of water ? Is it because the children of men do not enjoy the fate of having no place to rest their heads ?
Because past knowledge is attached even to a single action like raising a hand or kicking out with a foot, human activity lacks buoyancy. Because with every breath drawn in and breathed out people vomit for joy or anger, or love or hate, human life lacks transparency.
When, as soon as someone spreads his wings, he injures them, it is because he is in a cage. To spread your wings is life’s demand. So long as they remain shrunken, without spreading their wings, human beings do not become strong. Breathe expansively and get out of the cage that hinders you from doing so. Throw off the weight of duty and act buoyantly. This is what cultivating life is. Chuang-tzu never stopped hoping that human beings would live actively without being hindered by anything.
‘Life arises from death and death from life. What comes into existence passes out of it, what passes out of existence comes into it.’ As for Chuang-tzu’s thoughts on the problem of what happens after death, he believed neither in the immortality of the soul, not in eternal life. ‘At one time, I may become a rooster… or a bullet.., or an insect.’ In the one real world, there is nothing but the continuation of ceaseless change as various forms of life disperse and come together.
The last sentence of the chapter entitled ‘The Spirit of Cultivating Life’ goes: ‘Although there is an end to the fingers putting fuel on the fire, the fire endures and we don’t know the end of it’. These words should be understood in the light of what has just been said. Chuang-tzu points to the continuity and flow of life, conceived of as fire, not for a moment entertaining the idea of any opposition between mind and body.
It is an especially interesting point that this chapter ends by broaching the question of death.
[to be continued…]
Noguchi on Chuang-Tzu #3
Concerning Chuang-Tzu’s chapter ‘The spirit of cultivating life’ (III) by Noguchi Haruchika. You can read the beginning here.
Living is a more important matter than thinking. Being alive is not a means, but an end. So life should be carried on naturally only with the aim of maintaining life: a breathing in, a breathing out, a raising of the hand, a movement of the leg – all these should be for the cultivation of life.
Therefore, simply dwelling in health is a very precious thing. Zensei, which is to say, “A fulfilled life”, is nothing but the road men follow, and it is the road, of nature. Fulfilling the life that is given in peace of spirit is not for the sake of spiritual content, but is what should already have been undertaken before all else. We have to live in a vital way human life, which is health. Living always cheerfully and happily – this has always been what is of true value to human beings.
Human beings live because they are born, and because they are living, they eat and they sleep. They are born as a result of a natural demand, and they live as a result of the same demand. To live is natural. And so to die is also natural. Human beings’ accomplishing the life that is given them comes before all else. But this does not mean being attached to life at all. Chuang-tzu disliked any craving for particular things. For him, the arising of any attachment is at once a departure from the way. So he speaks about cultivating life and maintaining the body in order that the present moment that is given, precisely because it is the present moment, may be used fully, and certainly not because the thing given is life.
Chuang-tzu saw as a single whole the contraries of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, and of the useful and the useless, and for him life and death were also a single whole, what comes into existence passing out of it and what passes out of existence coming into it. ‘Life arises from death and death arises from life’ he wrote.
When Tsu-yu contracted a crippling illness, Tsu-szu visited him and asked, ‘Do you think your fate is unpleasant?’ Tsu-yu’s answer was astounding: ‘Why should I find it unpleasant? If changes are brought about and my left arm turns into a rooster, I’ll use it to herald the dawn. If my right shoulder is transformed into a bullet, I’ll use it to bring down a pigeon for roasting. If my buttocks become carriage-wheels and my spirit a horse, I’ll ride along on them. Then I would need no other vehicle but myself – that would be wonderful!’
Time does not cease even for an instant, and if it is destiny for a human being to be born, then it is natural that living form should be lost. If you are content with time’s flow and in accord with the order of things, then there is not especially any joy or sorrow. This is what the ancients called “deliverance from bondage”. You put a noose round your neck and you can’t get it off; this is because it is tied by the mind that thinks in terms of right and wrong and good and bad. Nothing can overcome heaven. Nothing comes of hating heaven.
Chuang-tzu’s point about cultivating life is clear in the words that come in the passage where Kung Wen Hsien speaks to the Commander of the Army: ‘The work of man is still the work of nature.’ This is the road he walks. Within his attitude – that whatever happens, it is proper, and that when something happens, you go forward and affirm reality – there is not a trace of the resignation that lies in submitting tu destiny. His affirmation of reality is nothing but the affirmation of reality. The dignity of the man is conveyed only by Lin Chi’s words: ‘Wherever you are, be master.’
From Chuang-tzu’s point of view, the security of the bird-cage is no better than being obliviously asleep. He feels the vitality of life only so long as existence is unconstrained.
[to be continued…]
Picture: Chuang Tzu. Lu Chih (1496–1576)
Noguchi on Chuang-Tzu #2
Concerning Chuang-Tzu’s chapter ‘The spirit of cultivating life’ (II) by Noguchi Haruchika. You can read the beginning here.
‘In doing what is considered good, avoid fame; in doing what is considered wrong, avoid penalties; make it a principle to keep a middle course, and you will preserve your body, fulfil your life, support your parents and live out your natural span of days.’
Read and accepted as they are, these words are the principles of health. I feel in them, close to me, the force of the man’s spirit.
When the king of So heard of Chuang-tzu’s cleverness, he sent, with a great show of courtesy, officials to Chuang-tzu, asking him to become prime minister; but Chuang-tzu laughed and remarked that ten thousand pieces of gold was a large amount and a prime minister’s position was very superior. But he asked the officials whether they had ever seen a sacrificial bull decked for a festival. Such a bull, he said, is fattened with various nourishing foods for the occasion, decked with beautiful cloth, and driven into the chamber of the gods. However much the bull wants to be merely a bull at this time, it cannot. He told the officials to leave without making a fuss and not to sully his life, and he said that he simply wanted to enjoy himself in his own squalid situation. Words like these are extremely characteristic of Chuang-tzu, and they still raise a smile after two thousand years.
In the end right and wrong and praise and blame are one, Chuang-tzu said.The distinguishing of things involves definition. Definition involves disruption. With things, there is neither definition nor disruption, only one-ness. Only the true sage knows that everything is one. In this way, Chuang-tzu stamped on the world of oppositions and shattered it. That is why he said unworriedly, ‘In doing what is considered good, avoid fame; in doing what is considered wrong, avoid penalties.’
When someone sleeps on the damp ground, strength drains from him and he develops rheumatism. Put an eel on a treetop, and it trembles with fear; do the same to a monkey, and this doesn’t happen. ‘Within these three, is there any one that doesn’t know the place that is proper for its life?’
The human being eats pork, the deer likes grass, the centipede finds worms delicious, the crow delights in rats. ‘Within these four, is there any one that doesn’t know what it likes to eat?’
The male monkey takes the female monkey in its arms, the stag copulates with the doe, the eel plays with fish. Mao Chiang and Li Chi were reputed to be the most beautiful women under the heavens, but at the sight of them, fish dived into the depths, birds flew up into the sky, and deer ran away. Which of these does not know the proper object of its affections?
Standing beyond good and evil and merging with the nature of all things: this is the secret of Chuang-tzu’s cultivation of life.
Chasing after a healthy life and running to avoid an unhealthy one only makes you hot and bothered. Being proud of your talents and wanting to become first in the world in something is to have forgotten the most important principle of cultivating life.
A great tree is toppled by the wind; the high status of a minister attracts the envy of the masses, but for the person who has cast off every fetter and enjoys a life of freedom, a minister, though he has a high status and receives a high salary, is no more than a broken sandal.
‘A pheasant that lives in a marsh walks ten paces for one beakful of food and a hundred paces for one sip of water, but it doesn’t want to be kept in a cage.’
Chuang-tzu teaches that there is no need to be over-pernickety about a “healthy” or an “unhealthy” life and to make yourself hot and bothered. He teaches that one breathes quietly and follows disinterestedly and calmly the body’s demands, and that this is the essence of preserving life and living fully.
How can we live up to this? Do we adopt the attitude of someone who sees a fire on the other side of the river and folds his arms? Or is there something more to be done, something positive?
Prince Wen Hui’s cook said, ‘I handle things with the spirit, and not with the eye. When the senses cease functioning, the spirit leads.’ This is to close yourself off from appearances and at once to forget them; essentially it is the same as the Zen priest Lin Chi’s saying, ‘Mind does not differ from mind.’
Thus, in all this there is nothing but the unfolding of a pure act, and this, fundamentally, is what is asserted in the master swordsman’s adage: ‘Forget your skills and forget your opponent; let him cut skin-deep, while you carve his flesh; only if you abandon yourself to the flood may you reach the shallows.’
Can we not say that within the way the art of killing leads to the road of being in true earnest, the road of cultivating life is concealed? Conquering attachment to things, the adherence to rule and the fear of death, and making the spirit free allows you to use the sword freely in the swordsman’s world without damaging anything, and in the ordinary. world it allows you to enter on the road of cultivating life and to foster the essence of life. I suspect that Wen Hui learned from his cook’s words that it is by following the nature of things that one cultivates life; the important thing was his recognising that the cook’s knife moved without the intervention of the self and without the knife’s being damaged. One Zen priest was asked, ‘You come and go, come and go. What do you mean by it?’ ‘I wear out shoe-leather to no purpose,’ he replied.
[to be continued…]
Noguchi on Chuang-Tzu #1
Concerning Chuang-Tzu’s chapter ‘The Spirit of Cultivating Life’ (part I) by Noguchi Haruchika.
Chuang-tzu’s chapter ‘The Spirit of Cultivating Life’ is an exposition of the way to cultivate the spirit of life, that is to say, one’s whole being. Nevertheless, if – still reading the first two Chinese characters in the usual way – one takes the title as meaning something like “The Rules for Maintaining Health”, the result is very interesting. Hitherto, where rules for maintaining health or rules of hygiene are concerned, the only things that have been preached are “Treat life as precious” and “Be careful”; and one hasn’t been able to feel, even a little, the vital activity of life in such preachings. It may be because of a lack of any Chuang-tzu-like element in them.
I shall look at “The Spirit of Cultivating Life” not as a means to spiritual development, but as one of the sciences of health, and I hope to be able to discern what is concealed within it: the true lineaments of life, which is exuberant and positive.
Chuang-tzu begins his chapter with the words: ‘Our lives are limited, knowledge is unlimited. It is perilous for what is limited to follow what is unlimited. It is still more perilous to apply knowledge.’
Rather than using knowledge to bore seven holes in the Formless (as in the parable he concludes his seventh chapter with), Chuang-tzu wanted to remain within undifferentiated nothingness, and he taught that human beings should remain within this.
Our lives are limited, there is no limit to shoulds and shouldn’ts, and if, possessing limits, one tries to abide by limitless shoulds and shouldn’ts, one is left only with the anxiety that one is unable to abide by them. Nevertheless, people still chase after shoulds and shouldn’ts. And their anxiety grows.
The way of hygiene is pursued with the sole result that shoulds and shouldn’ts are multiplied; the shoulds and shouldn’ts that people must heed multiply more and more; and then the anxiety to heed these rules coupled with the ‘ fear that they are not able to do so makes people ever more timid and weak-spirited, and the other side of the coin is that this anxiety and fear increase the powers of disease-causing agents and of unhealth.
Separated from the fundamental matter of enhancing life, hygiene strives only to avoid unhealth, to keep away from harmful things, to escape from things that are feared; and so it becomes difficult for people to live in a vital way. Eating all one can, sleeping as much as one wants, sparing oneself trouble as much as possible, resting as much as possible, taking lots of medicine, avoiding heat and disliking cold, wearing more clothes than is necessary, and living in a safe way by these meansshould we call this health? Should we call these methods, for which human beings have used every bit of knowledge they have, hygiene?
What force is there in an enumeration of forms? It only vitiates the human spirit. Does it not only make life wither?
Living in a healthy and vital way means not being daunted by cold, heat, wind or humidity, working without being fatigued, sleeping without dreaming, finding whatever you eat delicious, and always enjoying life; it does not mean not falling ill. Not falling ill should not be a purpose, but a result. Healthy people are not daunted by illness, and they pass through an illness when they have one in a splendid manner, becoming all the more energetic and full of fife; and you don’t need to read about Nietzsche’s experience in order to understand this. When shoulds and musts control human activity, then human beings have already forged fetters for themselves. Knowledge is a weapon for human beings, and a power for accomplishing their intentions. But when knowledge is piled up and the freedom of human beings is restricted, people become unable to live in a lively way because of shoulds and shouldn’ts, rather as a deer’s antlers become a hindrance to it. And then there’s nothing better than to become free by cutting that knowledge off and throwing it away.
When you want to eat, eat; when you want to sleep, sleep; when you want to work, work. It is not a matter of having to eat, it is not a matter of having to sleep, it is not a matter of working because you should. Much less is it a matter of eating, sleeping or working because of what the clock says. It is not a matter of living tomorrow’s life in accordance with yesterday’s knowledge. Tomorrow is for opening up the new on the basis of tomorrow’s experience. Past knowledge, customary fettersseparate yourself from such things and live in a vital way. The vital activity of life that is always renewed belongs to the person who lives always in an unfettered way.
[to be continued…]
Kokoro
A text by Haruchika Noguchi, founder of Seitai.
‘The kokoro that resides deep within man, has invaluable faculties; its possibilities are so endless and inexhaustible that even if we put together all the ki and we make it concentrated we will never end being incapable or helpless. Everything begins to change, not just the body, when the ki focuses and concentrates in the kokoro. Those who practice it told me after the changes experienced.
Many associate the word kokoro to willpower, but it in fact it does not have its own virtue; on the other hand, instead of pretending to achieve something by willpower force if we simply visualize that we are going to get there, our wish comes true. Anyone knowing how to use his kokoro will see the realization of his wishes.
Since the dawn of time up to now, human being has invented countless things. Here is a table. It has not been around forever, it was created by the use of visualization. Visualization always precedes what will then exist; the word comes just after. If we proceed in this order, step by step, without deviation and with firmness, our wish will be fulfilled. Only then the various worlds in which humanity evolves will widen further. Mankind is like that.Read more