Читать книгу The Root of Chinese Qigong - Jwing-Ming Yang - Страница 5

16

Foreword First Edition

When Nixon opened China to the West in the 1970’s, great interest was kindled in the possibilities of Americans learning many previously-hidden secrets of the “inscrutable” Orient. One of the realms of exploration most eagerly awaited, particularly by Western physicians, was the science of Oriental healing: exotic practices such as acupuncture, Shiatsu massage, Taijiquan, and the curious and puzzling notion of Qi, or vital energy. Popular magazines at the time featured arresting photographs of men and women lying calmly on operating tables, nearly disemboweled during major surgery, yet apparently requiring no more anesthesia than a few gleaming needles thrust into the skin of their foreheads.

Since these earliest dramatic harbingers, serious investigation of phenomena based on Chinese conceptualizations have both waxed and waned. Interest in Taijiquan, for example—a form of exercise, health maintenance, and combat—has risen steadily, especially in the western United States, stimulated in part by the fact that a large part of the Chinese citizenry practice this exercise daily to apparently good effect, and in part by the fact that Taijiquan masters, who regularly win mixed martial arts tournaments, seem to become better with age, rather than slower and weaker as do aging practitioners of other martial forms such as Gongfu.

In contrast, after a spate of studies and articles attempting to define the physiologic bases for the generally unchallenged efficacy of acupuncture, interest in this area has waned markedly. Most early investigators tended toward the beliefs either that some form of suggestibility was involved, like that of hypnosis, another time-honored and effective anesthetic; or else that some known neural mechanism was being employed, such as “gating,” where stimulation of some nerves with acupuncture needles functionally blocked impulses (presumably pain impulses) in others.

At the present time in the public mind a mixed feeling, an ambivalence, seems to hold sway, between forces of acceptance and of resistance toward these oriental concepts. To place the value of the present book in some perspective, therefore, it will be useful to understand these opposing forces.

The current forces tending toward acceptance of Chinese healing theory and practice draw from multiple origins. The first is the upsurge of interest in physical fitness. A few years ago the “high energy, high effort” fitness wave swept over the country; thousands of formerly sedentary individuals ran, jogged, danced, pumped and stretched in search of greater health and strength or, at least, an improved silhouette. Then, as many would-be athletes nursed injured or over-strained muscles, bones and joints, interest in “low-impact” exercise surfaced. Ironically, Qigong practices were already providing this valuable type of conditioning centuries ago. Thus, the Westerner familiar with low-impact aerobics can readily understand the value of Qigong forms.

A second force tending toward acceptance is the average person’s awareness of the link between mind and body; the concept of psychosomatic illness—mental conditions causing physical illnesses—is familiar from the popular press, from the revelations of celebrities and from everyone’s personal experience of tension headaches, stress ulcers, and the like. In a comparable fashion, some recent investigations by Herbert Benson, M.D. and others on the beneficial physical effects of mental calmness (as in the “relaxation response”) have given solid support to the power of mental states to heal or harm. Thus the emphasis in Qigong practice on mental conditioning as a prerequisite and companion to physical improvement is not so foreign a notion at all.

On the other side of the ledger, certain factors tend to elicit resistance to these Eastern teachings and disbelief in both their relevance to modern persons and their scientific validity. One such factor is the radical interweaving in Qigong of what purports to be an essentially physiologic theory with philosophy and even religion or cosmology. Westerners used to partaking of their philosophy and science at separate tables may be alienated by their frank combination in Qigong principles.

A second factor is the absence at the present time of a “hard-science” physiology for Qi, its vessels and its actions. Some provocative preliminary findings have emerged correlating alterations in electric impedance in the skin at those points thought to be significant as acupuncture meridians and points; yet, alas, careful and replicable research with impeccable methodology has largely been lacking in this area. Instead, dubiously convincing, largely anecdotal material dominates the written works on the subject.

Another factor causing resistance is the tendency of writers in this field, following very ancient traditions and philosophical themes, to use the names of familiar body organs to describe conditions of the body related to Qi for which no other terminology exists. The Western reader becomes lost in the question of whether such phrases as “weakness of the liver” are meant to be metaphoric (that is, meaning, more literally, “a certain condition of bodily energy, otherwise indescribable, which affects those body sites which historical tradition has identified with the liver”); or whether the reader should, indeed, look to the condition of the actual liver to find some form of pathology, for which no clear picture comes to mind, since the liver performs so many different functions that “weakness” conveys nothing meaningful.

Finally, many Westerners appear to be put off by the inherently poetic and metaphoric terminology common in Chinese nomenclature for, say, types of Qi and physical exercise techniques. To pick one example, a particular stance in Shaolin style Gongfu is called “Golden Rooster Stands on One Leg”; such flowery language can have a jarring effect on the Westerner who is accustomed to such mundane descriptions as “side deltoid stretch.”

For the Westerner who can bridge the gap between Western and Oriental conceptualizations, this book (and, indeed, the planned series) offers an exceptionally valuable resource in summarizing in a clear and straightforward way the historical development of this ancient field of learning. Through his exhaustive efforts to bring together ancient and more recent Chinese texts in this book, Dr. Yang has performed essential services in two ways. First, by tracing the history and evolution of these concepts, the reader can gain a sense of the development of ideas whose roots reach back over the centuries—ideas which are desperately in need of just such cross-cultural illumination as this book provides. Second, Dr. Yang is issuing a challenge to others to bring the focus of careful research to this area to provide a durable empirical basis for both theory and practice of these sciences and arts. For both of these important steps, clearly, the time has come.

Thomas G. Gutheil, M.D. Associate Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School