SERIES: Books to better understand China
It is a book only in French but extremely brilliant and documented. Javary is a specialist in China, but not only at the level of theoretical knowledge. He has been traveling around China often since 1975 ! So this book is also loaded with first-hand experiences and meaningful anecdotes.
In a first reading, LHCH will explain to you the reframing operated on the the badly translated notion of “5 elements” in Chinese philosophy and medicine. No need to read the book in French therefore, just please read our sump up.
PART 1. THE FIVE ACTIONS OF THE YIN AND THE YANG
The French Sinologist makes a link between sedentary life in the countryside thanks to agriculture in ancestral China and the famous Classic of the movement. The peasants motionless on their land have since the dawn of ages witnessed the passage of the seasons, a vital passage for their work. The real would then have become synonymous with change. But without the fear that the West had in our antiquity. We would always have looked for “fixed, determined, eternal essences” to give “meaning” to the chaos of this incessant becoming.
The Chinese have made change their greatest wisdom. We see it in their old painting where the very subtle transitions of time, of fog, for example, are the subject of predilection.
But how will the Chinese then imagine this change in wisdom, politics, war or medicine?
The principle is simple: only the change does not change! This is the only stable principle. From there, there will be “strategies” to follow and manage this change in the most intelligent way and to carry out “effective” actions or reactions to it.
This would be according to Javary, the main theme of the Book of Change. Here, we do not go back to the legendary origin, nor the inscriptions on the bones or the shells of turtles from the Shang dynasty which would later have given the famous 64 typical situations expressed in 64 hexagrams.
These 64 hexagrams are each made up of 6 dashed lines, Yin or continuous lines, Yang. We limit ourselves here to coming back to these two forms Yin and Yang
You know Yin and Yang. Sure. But there are a lot of misconceptions, bad interpretations on the part of Westerners.
Let’s take a quick look at Yin and Yang before understanding the “5 elements” that the author calls the “5 Actions” more because they are precisely the workings of Yin and Yang.
Not of the 5 determined and fixed elements Wood, Metal, Water, etc! We will see it.
REAL YIN AND YANG MINDSET
We cannot give precise dates for the birth of the Extraordinary Book. Nor of clearly defined authors.
We speak of the Zhou dynasty for the version where the complementary opposites Yin and Yang appear. So somewhere between 1046 and 256 BC. JC. Just after, we know that the Han officially made this book the Book of Yin and Yang
We come back to the peasants. They perceived in the year a cyclical movement of the seasons: “a light and a heat which rise gradually to give place afterwards to the cold and the darkness”. For afterwards with the spring-, obviously, the Return of this light, of that warm clarity…
We could speak of a Yin and Yang breath, alternating in their movements, without one ever completely disappearing.
It seems like one grows up at the expense of the other and when it has reached its peak, it transforms into the other! Javary talks about the Great Turnaround. And a binary dialectic.
It is said that it was the great sage Confucius who wrote the Great Commentary on Yi Jing, the most important commentary in this book.
The basic principle is stated: a Yin, a Yang, together are called Dao (functioning of the world).
It is useless to look for a fixed meaning in Yin and Yang; the first is a tendency towards withdrawal, shadow; the second as a tendency to deploy energy, light.
But again: Yin is the transition from light to darkness and Yang is the transition from darkness to light.
Westerners would say Cold and Hot! No ! Ultimately, the cooling action (or what darkens becomes passive) and the warming action (or what lights up becomes active)
Javary says “restore her strength” and “deploy her strength”. So everything except ready-made, limited and fixed things. The worst would be to say “Yin = woman” “Yang = man”!
For French sinology, beware of the simplistic cold / hot, odd / even, female / male oppositions.
The least bad would be: Yin flexibility and Yang firmness because these are two strategies of life and of living in general. In fact, with each action of one of them you have to finish some criteria in advance to rank them.
In short, if the Dao is the infinite movement of Yin and Yang. The wisdom will be to find at each moment of our life a harmony between these two “opposites”.
Now let’s move on to the badly called “5 elements”. It’s the same western idea to overthrow!
THE 5 ACTIONS
But the alternation of Yin and Yang is not enough to explain, for example, what is essential for a sedentary people who practice agriculture and who see the seasons change before them each year.
Traditional medicine also needs modes of action that go beyond the simple functioning of Yin and Yang. It was his initiative, according to Javary , that 5 different ways of functioning will enrich the dialectic until then simply binary.
The Chinese, and particularly, Zou Yan, called them “Yin Yang Wu Xing”, the 5 actions of Yin and Yang. But as the Chinese characters represent what are for us, since ancient Greece, “elements” of Nature, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, the European books of the 19th century stopped at these inert natural materials. , forgetting the movement of each of these “elements”!
We talked about the season, but there are only 4! Yes, the 5 is the number which makes the 4 others succeed one another, here the immobile Earth which sees the 4 seasons “pass”.
The empty pivot of which Lao Zi speaks in the Dao De Jing which makes everything work “without wear”?
Javary argues his position by emphasizing the Chinese verb Xing. It means “to walk” for a man but also for a “computer which works or not”, which works!
In short, we find ourselves within 5 energy movements in the life cycle (seasons, human body, etc.).
So let’s take Wood, Mu, it’s a phase. The action of “pushing” down, Yin; up, Yang. In spring, in summer, the trees grow skyward; in autumn, in winter, the sap of the tree grows towards the earth, “descends”.
But Wood if its function, its Action is to “push”, it was logical that it essentially symbolizes Spring!
And the Metal? Symbol of autumn, 2nd shoulder season? Javary analyzes the character of Jin (metal, gold) in which there is the key to the Earth. However, the Chinese already knew that heavy metals are concentrated in the center of the Earth, at depth. The “functioning of Metal”, its Action is therefore to “concentrate”.
For the two main, potentially higher, seasons, the two Actions are more obvious. Winter is therefore Water “to descend”; Summer is Fire therefore “rising”.
But the 5th Action then? Earth ? Like Lao Zi’s Void, it allows the 4 seasons to “rotate” because it remains motionless, “in the center”.
Finally, between these 5 Actions there are relations of Generation (for example, Earth generates Metal) and also of Control (Water controls Fire).
The idea of this article was first and foremost to convey that Chinese thought is unfortunately still understood to be made up of “correspondences” which seem arbitrary. Westerners blithely say “Autumn corresponds to Metal and Lung” but without understanding the deep and pragmatic meaning of these relationships between beings and things.
