KI POWER CULTIVATION, PART 3

 The Budo Secrets of Internal Energy from the Master Samurai Kaibara Ekiken
Part Three
Nourish Your Mind and Your Ki

If you missed them:

Part Two

Part One

Your fundamental health is, in its origin, the ki that gives birth to all the Ten Thousand Things in Heaven and Earth.  If you do not have this ki, you will not be born.  After you are born, you are aided by such external elements as food and drink, clothing, and shelter.  Thus, your fundamental health is provided for and your life stays on a steady course.*

At the outset of this 3rd part in my series on the teachings of the “master of ki” Kaibara Ekiken, I wanted to begin with this quote—with its reference to the “Ten Thousand Things in Heaven and Earth”—so that you will understand the “place” of ki in Asian thought, which will better help us to understand not just this particular essay but all essays in budo with regard to ki development and cultivation.  Ki is not something that you cultivate in addition to your “regular” energy.  Rather, ki is the very essence of not just energy but of life itself.

As we have learned from the first two essays in this series, Ekiken was a neo-Confucian scholar, not a Taoist or Buddhist.  And yet he uses the term “the Ten Thousand Things,” a term used throughout both Buddhist and Taoist literature in East Asia.  This shows you the importance of the term in Asian thought regardless of the “religion” of the budoka.  The “Ten Thousand Things” is used by Taoists, Buddhists, Confucians, Shintoists, Christians, and practitioners of local “folk” religions throughout China, Japan, and Korea.  It connotes “all things under Heaven and Earth,” which means that the term is representative of the “infinite material diversity” of our objective reality.

In the Tao Te Ching, the Ten Thousand Things finds probably its earliest written descriptions.  It is used, in fact, throughout Lao Tsu’s work.  Here are a couple of excerpts to give you a taste of how it’s used there:

“The Way that can be spoken of is not the True Way.

The name that can be named is not the true name.

From the nameless, Heaven and Earth arose.

The named is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things.”

“Before the birth of the universe, it was formless and Perfect.

It is serene and empty,

Infinite and eternally present.

It Alone gives birth to the Ten Thousand Things.”

In the 13th century (about 1,400 years after the Tao Te Ching was written, give or take a couple hundred years), Eihei Dogen—the founder of the “Soto” school of Zen in Japan—wrote this in his Genjokoan: “To study the Way is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the Ten Thousand Things.  When enlightened by the Ten Thousand Things, body and mind—as well as the bodies and minds of others—drops away.”  This is not the essay to dig deep into these words of the great Zen master, but I present it here—and the words from the Tao Te Ching—so that you will understand that Ekiken was well aware of the term’s usage.  For Ekiken, all of these variegated thoughts on the Ten Thousand Things are true, and he wants his students to understand that their life energy is the very life energy of the universe itself.

If you use external elements such as food and drink—which are to nourish your fundamental health—lightly, and do not eat or drink to excess, they will nourish your fundamental health, maintain your natural lifespan, and even lengthen your life.  But if you use these elements to excess, your health will deteriorate and you will become sick.  If you become seriously ill and exhaust your fundamental health, you will die.  In the same way, if you give grasses and trees in your garden too much water and fertilizer, they will lose their vitality and wither away.

Thus, you should seek pleasure in your mind alone, and use external nourishment like food and drink lightly.

Ekiken was adamant in the Yojokun that all men and women—with very, very few exceptions—can live to be around 100 years of age.  It is clear for Ekiken that our life is given to us by “Heaven and Earth.”  As a theist, I believe that God gives each of us—with very few exceptions, the same as Ekiken believed—a body that is healthy from birth, and that God has given us all that we need in life if we will but pay attention to what has been given.  If we take care of our body from birth, then there is no reason we can’t live to be, if not 100, very old indeed.  And this should be seen as our duty: to care for our body that is really not ours—not ultimately, at least.

Our bodies are not “built” to consume an excessive amount of calories, either in food or liquid form.  Understanding that our body is a gift given to us by the One who made us, we don’t take this gift lightly.  Food must be seen as fuel for our bodies, and little more.  Yes, it’s okay to occasionally indulge in an excess of food or drink, especially for a truly festive event such as a wedding, or on a holiday such as Easter or Christmas.  But, without exception, during the rest of the year we should do our best to “eat to live” instead of “live to eat.”

One of the problems in our modern society is that we take pleasure, too much pleasure, in food and drink.  Gluttony is no longer seen as a sin, but, rather, it's seen as a “freedom” we have to do with our bodies as we wish, because it is “our right.”  But this is a selfish, narcissistic view, and, in the end, it does cause us harm.  (This is not the essay for it, but it actually does cause us a great deal of harm in the short term, as well.  We just don’t have “eyes to see.”)   Eating and drinking to excess, in the long run, will almost always lead to poor health, disease, cancer, and, in the end, of course, a premature death.  But, as Ekiken points out in the last sentence above, our pleasure must be in our “mind” and NOT in food and/or drink.  If we take pleasure in cultivating our mind, in learning how to control it, and even to take delight in it alone, we will not rush off after the sensory pleasures of excessive food and drink.

When taking care of your health, it is best to first nourish your mind and ki.  The essentials of this are as follows:

• Suppress anger and desire.

• Diminish grief and yearning.

• Neither trouble your mind nor damage your ki.

• Do not take excessive pleasure in sleep.  If you sleep for long periods of time, your ki will stagnate and not circulate well.

• Do not go to bed before digesting what you have eaten or drunk.  To do so stifles your breathing and is injurious to your health.  Please guard against this.

• With alcoholic beverages, it is acceptable to become lightly drunk, but you should stop halfway.  Avoid complete drunkenness.

• With food, stop halfway to satiety, as it is not good to be completely full.

• Establish limits with both food and drink and do not go beyond moderation.

• Be circumspect with sexual desire from the time you are young.  You must not be wasteful of your essential energy.  If you use too much of this essential energy, your subordinate ki will be weakened, you will eradicate the very root of your fundamental health, and your life will surely be shortened.

If you cannot be circumspect with your food, drink, and sexual desire, you might end up using restorative medicines every day and supplementing your diet, but such efforts are likely to be of no use.

Now we get down to the practical application of “nourishing your mind and ki.”  By the way, for the modern reader, I believe this is one of the appeals, and one of the strengths, of Ekiken’s writings.  He can wax poetic, mystical even, when he wants to, but he always returns to the practical applications of the subjects that he discusses.  Philosophy, for Ekiken as a Confucian, had to be applicable for the common man.  Philosophy that was not therapeutic, but was only academic or “intellectual,” would have been seen by Ekiken as not just foolish, but evil, for it did nothing to help either the common good or one’s self personally.

Keep in mind that Ekiken was a “popular” writer, even during his day.  And since his writings were read by the “common person” in addition to the aristocrat, he always returned to the practical and the applicable.

Ekiken begins this list with the mind, and then moves on to the body.  This tends to be a recurring theme throughout the work.  The body is of little use if it’s not subordinate to the mind.  And the mind is of little use if it’s not trained so that it can be controlled.  For control of the mind, Ekiken begins with anger, desire, grief, and yearning.  He saw these four as particularly evil.  But the question you probably have is how do you control your mind?  For instance, you may realize that your desire for donuts every morning is not conducive toward the development of your body and the cultivation of ki, but you struggle with how to stop eating them.

I think for the majority of individuals, they struggle with these four emotions because they focus on the “big” things, when the focus needs to be on the “small.”  Let me explain in a bit more detail.  And let’s use anger for our example.  When someone struggles with anger, the person may have a hateful outburst, even yelling or (possibly even) physically harming a person that this individual loves.  And then the person feels awful that they were mean, or cruel, or even violent.  And so the focus always comes down to controlling these large, BIG outbursts of anger.  But this approach will NEVER work.  Your mind, in this way, is similar to your body when it becomes ill.  As Ekiken points out repeatedly, if you wait until you’re sick to improve your health, you will be constantly fighting an uphill battle, one that you’re unlikely to win, because the key is to prevent the illness from occuring in the first place.  And so it is with anger (and the other four emotions listed).  If you wait until your anger (your “illness”) blows up, you are not going to be able to cure this illness.  Instead, you must focus on prevention, and this comes down to focusing on little things throughout your day.  In this way, you can notice subtle ways that anger rises up in your mind, and then in your body.  Not just anger, but the emotions of desire, grief, and yearning must be “fought” this way, as well.

When the mind is settled, calm, and peaceful, then your ki will not be damaged, and it will be easily cultivated, and you will have no problem increasing the vitality of your ki.

*All italicized entries are from the Yojokun, by Kaibara Ekiken, translated into English by William Scott Wilson