The last section of The Way of Heaven, (天道, tian dao), the 13^th chapter of the Zhuangzi, relates an exchange between duke Huan and Bian the wheelwright – I have used the translations from Schipper’s The Taoist Body and the Chinese Text Project.

Duke Huan sat in his hall, reading out loud. Downstairs [in the courtyard] stood Bian the wheelwright, making a wheel.  Putting down his work, Bian went up the steps and asked the duke: “May I ask your Grace what are you reading?”

“The words of the sages,” answered the duke.

“Living sages?”

“No, these have died.”

“So, what you are reading is just the dregs and sediments of men of former times.”

“What! A wheelwright ventures to judge what his prince is reading?  Explain yourself or I will have your life!”

Bian the wheelwright said: “Your servant looks at this from the point of view of his craft.   In making a wheel, if I go at it too carefully, it won’t be round; if I go too fast, it won’t be the right size.  Neither too carefully, nor too fast; my hand knows how to do it in harmony with my mind, but my mouth cannot put into words how this is done.  There is an enormous distance between the word and the doing.  I cannot even instruct my own son in my art, nor is he able to learn it from me.  That is why at seventy, I am still making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, these men of former times, and what it was not possible for them to put into words, are dead and gone: so then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!”

The insights of Bian the wheelwright are profound, yet very familiar.  One insight is that there is so much about doing that is unverbalizable, cannot be put into words (口不能言, kou bu neng yan).  Another insight is about the enormous distance between the description of doing and doing itself.  And these insights are familiar to us all from our daily lives, from describing how we, say, drive a car from one place to another, to how we prepare a meal.  Verbal accounts of our activities amount to a superficial sliver of what we do.

For the past few years I have been learning Mandarin Chinese.  Many, many things have struck me, one of them being that my mistakes in Chinese are usually a mirror image of the mistakes my Chinese friends make in English.   Another striking thing has been the detailed attention the language pays to family relations.  In Greek or in English, we have single words for brother (αδερφός in Greek), sister (αδερφή), as well as sibling (αδέρφι in Greek, using the neutral gender).  Not so in Chinese.  There are distinct words for older brother (哥哥, gege), younger brother (弟弟, didi), older sister (姐姐, jiejie), and younger sister (妹妹, meimei).  You cannot directly ask someone whether they have brothers, sisters, siblings, you have to be specific.  There are of course terms for brothers (兄弟, xiongdi – 兄, xiong, being another term for older brother, and 兄弟 being the title of a beautiful novel by Yu Hua), sisters (姐妹, jiemei) and siblings (兄弟姐妹, xiongdijiemei), but are not typically used to find out what siblings one might have.  For that, one asks generally about family, 你家有几口人 (ni jia you ji kou ren = how many people does your family have?) or 你家有谁 (ni jia you shei = who are your family?).

The language extends this fine discrimination further, to uncles, cousins, grandparents, placing special emphasis on the male side of the family, consistent with patrilineality, and a strong preference of boys over girls – a preference that shows up in the highly skewed male-female ratio in areas of China.

This preference shows up in an interesting way in the terms for grandparents.  English, as well as Greek, have single words for grandfather (παππούς in Greek) and grandmother (γιαγιά in Greek).  Chinese on the other hand distinguishes between paternal grandfather (爷爷, yeye), paternal grandmother (奶奶, nainai), maternal grandfather (外公, waigong), and maternal grandmother (外婆, waipo).  What is particularly interesting – and the Chinese themselves joke about this – is that the first character in the maternal terms, 外 (wai), carries the meaning of ‘foreign’, ‘outside’, as in 外国 (waiguo = foreign), 外国人 (waiguoren = foreigner), 老外 (laowai = foreigner), 外面 (waimian = outside), 外空 (waikong = outer space).

Preference notwithstanding, Chinese nouns do not have genders, and even the pronouns for ‘he’ (他) and ‘she’ (她) are pronounced exactly the same, ta.  Which sheds some light on the common mixing of ‘he’ and ‘she’ by my Chinese friends in English.

And all this reminds me of the beautiful opening by Michel Foucault of the preface of “The Order of Things”:  “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

We have all learned through instruction, when being taught our first words by our parents, how to say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’, how to sit ourselves in a chair or on our haunches, how to hold a fork or a pair of chopsticks to eat, how to brush our teeth, wash ourselves, and so on.  Later, as we grow older, we may be instructed how to ride a bicycle or how to drive a car.

All this learning involves the all-too-familiar trial and error process, we are shown how to do it, try it out, get corrected as necessary, try it out again, practice, and slowly get the hang of it.  We end up learning how to perceive and do things.

But we are also familiar with another type of instruction, sitting in a room with our peers, listening to a teacher, watching their writing on a board, or their show and tell.  On the face of it, it looks passive, the teacher instructs, the pupils listen and watch.  But, especially when we were younger, the teacher would ask us to repeat, recite, sometimes in unison, sometimes one-by-one, would conduct regular drills with multiplication tables, ask us to go to the board and write words out, or do it at our desks, frequently give us exercises in class.  We would take homework at home, to practice with the material we covered in class.  We would write short compositions, write out answers to questions, write essays on topics.  And when studying alone, we would frequently repeat out loudly to memorize what we wanted to learn.  Even when we would try to repeat in silence, our lips usually would move.  And we would check, a friend or our parents would check, and the teacher would check as well, whether our trials demonstrated that we had learned or not.

We sometimes tend to focus and remember the passive aspect of that classroom instruction, of just sitting in class, and we forget the extensive trial and error activities that went on behind the scenes.

During my years in Baltimore, I worked with several Chinese and Japanese colleagues, and we frequently went to eat together at Chinese restaurants – the greater Baltimore area has several excellent ones.  We always shared dishes, whether whole entrées, or dim-sum, small plates with 3-4 pieces of delicacies – dumplings of all sorts and shapes, steamed or fried, sweet and savory cakes, stuffed buns, rice wrapped in lotus leaves, and so much more.  To properly eat Chinese food one has to use chopsticks, which I had never really used before.  With communally shared food, to manage to feed oneself requires efficient use of eating utensils, and my friends found this a great motivation for me to learn how to use chopsticks.

When I began my tries at holding a pair of chopsticks, my fingers did not know what to feel for, what was relevant for the hold and what not.  When trying to imitate how my friends were holding their chopsticks, my eyes did not know what to look for, to see the important part of the hold and ignore the unimportant.  I tried to copy the way my friends held their chopsticks, my eyes looking at their fingers, then at mine, adjusting, registering what my fingers felt, then try to use.  Reach to grab a dumpling with the chopstick tips, use the tips to tear a piece of cake, try to bring the piece over to my mouth, registering what my eyes saw, what fingers felt.  Sometimes I held the chopsticks too close to their tips, sometimes they were not stable enough and the morsel of food would fall off, sometimes too stable and could not open to grab.  Amidst my friends’ mirth and guidance, there was a clear criterion for whether I had learned how to use chopsticks: could I feed myself?  could I grab a piece of food and bring it from the plate to my mouth?  For the first few outings I did go a bit hungry, but eventually I began to get a feel for holding the chopsticks, one always held stable, the other mobile, controlled by the thumb and index finger.  My fingers learned to recognize the chopsticks, adjust them, coordinate with my eyes.  And with practice I got better and better, and now can comfortably hold and use different kind and size chopsticks, long, short, thick, thin, very thin, wooden or plastic or even metal ones.

It is through such trial and error processes that we develop abilities, learn, acquire knowledge.  Sensations – from the eyes and fingers in the case of the chopsticks – come together with muscle movements (hand and fingers).  Muscle movements and their effects on the world result in a change in sensations, adjustment of muscle movements, and this back and forth continues, until a goal is reached – in the case of the chopsticks, get to grab a piece of food, get the food into the mouth.  This trial and error process brings together our body and the world, and as the back and forth of sensory input and muscle output goes on, our sensations are organized into perception of objects and our movements into discernible actions directed toward these objects.  The objects we perceive in the world emerge through the feedback provided by the results of our actions.  An important feature of this trial and error process is that the more we do, the better we become at doing, at integrating perception and action.  Practice makes perfect.

This is also how we begin to learn a language, through a trial and error process, under someone’s guidance, pointing at the world, hearing a sound, vocalizing (moving lips, jaws, tongue, vocal cords), hearing our own sound and receiving feedback from our guide as well.  And in this way we organize our perception of the world into objects, objects we associate with specific sounds, and it is an organization compatible with that of our guides and teachers.

With trial and error, we learn and develop abilities on our own, by engaging with the world on our own, but also by copying others (sometimes even animals).  We also learn through socialization, under the guidance of others.  We learn because we may be driven to satisfy a need (eat or drink), be praised by a tutor, feel good about mastering something, or we could be just playing, getting our senses and muscles to work together.

We are all of course intimately familiar with what I have written above, with how we develop abilities, how we acquire knowledge, how we link our perceptions and actions.  We do it all the time, but usually we do not spend much time reflecting and thinking about it.  But our knowledge, our abilities, provide the basis for our experience of the world, how we perceive and act.

Many years ago, reading “The Savage Mind” by Claude Levi-Strauss, I came across what to me at the time was a remarkable passage describing the work of Harold Conklin:

“When he began his study of the classification of colours among the Hanunoo of the Philippines, Conklin was at first baffled by the apparent confusions and inconsistencies.  These however disappeared when the informants were asked to relate and contrast specimens instead of being asked to define isolated ones…  They distinguish colour into relatively light and relatively dark, and into those usual in fresh or succulent plants and those usual in dry or desiccated plants.  Thus the natives treat the shiny brown colour of newly cut bamboo as relatively green while we would regard it as nearer red if we had to classify it in terms of the simple opposition of red and green which is found in Hanunoo.”

Clearly we perceive the world very differently from the Hanunoo, in a sense their perceptual category of color cuts across several of our perceptual categories, including color, freshness, wetness.

However, we can understand how they perceive reality and organize their experience if we spend time with them, following them in their daily practices.

We experience the world through the interplay of our perceptions and actions.  What we can or cannot perceive, what we can or cannot do, shapes the ways in which we engage with and what we experience as reality.  Our experience of this reality reflects our abilities.  We may have needs, desires, seeking to satisfy them somehow, but without knowledge, without abilities, we have no clue how to direct our activities to fulfill these wants.  These abilities are the result of hard work, a long process of learning and cultivation, and can change through additional learning and hard work.

If I go into a forest expecting to find something to eat, I must be able for example to differentiate edible plants from the rest, my senses tell them apart from among the rest.  It is this ability, acquired through prior trial and error, through apprenticeship and training, that reveals these plants to my eyes, my hands, my nose, my mouth, as edible.

If instead I go into a grocery store, a different constellation of abilities is necessary: I need to read labels off packages, know what these labels refer to, how tasty and nutritious the packaged contents might be, and I need to know how to pay.  This might seem trivial after we get the hang of it, but don’t we remember, as kids we were taught how to purchase things, and we come across the learning phase even as adults, when we go to a foreign country or when new products or novel ways for paying appear.

For us to experience, to perceive and act, we must be able to discern and foreground specific features of reality, while backgrounding others.  To illustrate this point, I have found what is referred to as “gestalt pictures” very helpful.

We see the picture on the left as either a rabbit (ears pointing left) or as a duck (beak pointing left).  We have been taught to recognize rabbits and ducks, and we switch between viewing the picture as either.  But what if we did not know about ducks?  If we had never seen one, in flesh or in picture, and nobody had taught us to recognize it?  If we only knew about rabbits, it would be only a rabbit that we could possibly see in the picture, it would be the only thing we would recognize.

Similarly, on the left, we see a tree with birds flying over it; but we can also see – if we switch foreground and background – a gorilla and a lion.  Again, if we had not been taught to recognize gorillas or lions, we could not possibly see them in the picture.  The range of our perceptions is limited by our knowledge.

We all become acutely aware of this dependence of our experience of the world on our abilities whenever we learn something new.  For example, with a new language, when we slowly learn to recognize the script and the sounds and comprehend them as meaningful text and utterances.  When we learn how to use a new tool, how to hold it, what sound it makes when used properly or improperly.  Or when we taste a new dish or drink, learning to distinguish the different flavors.

The way we experience the world reflects very closely the way we are.  What we are, what we bring along with us to our encounters with reality, gives form and meaning to our experience.

A lot of people I have talked with will readily agree with this view.  Very frequently, they will go on to say that it is the beliefs and principles we have that shape our perceptions, that provide us with a sense of who we are and what our goals are, that orient us in the world and guide our actions.  It is these that we bring along with us, they would say, that define essentially who we are, and give rise to the differences in our experiences.

We are all fairly familiar with the inadequacies and limitations of beliefs and principles for describing ourselves and our experiences.  When we are confronted with experiences that contradict our beliefs we find ways to push these experiences aside, sweep them under the rug as it is, keeping what we describe as our beliefs intact.  And oh so many times we act contrary to our principles…

Beliefs and principles are abstractions of course, too crude to capture our concrete attitudes and patterns of behavior in all their diversity and mutability.  Sometimes, they may be adequate as a communication shorthand, but they are not very helpful for approaching the basis of our perceptions and our conduct, how we experience the world.  I think it is more helpful to look instead at concrete patterns of behavior, and the experiences associated with them.

For example, we taste and smell food and drink before we fully consume it – and if we cannot tell whether it is spoiled or contaminated we might get into trouble.  If we know enough, plants and mushrooms in the fields appear to us as food, medicine, building material, this and that or the other.  But if we do not know enough, they are all an undifferentiated jumble, which we approach without any expectation or means to obtain food, medicine or anything else.

In an urban setting, driving, the physical act of driving, encompasses among many other things knowledge about the car itself, about the road conditions, observing signs for lanes, stops, warnings, as well as monitoring, predicting and reacting to other drivers’ behavior.  Successful driving hinges on the continuous congruence between our expectations, our actions, and what actually happens.

Along the same lines, our experience of interacting socially with each other is shaped by the clothes one wears, their skin color, gender, accent, manners, and so on.  We use such cues to place someone, develop a sense of what our interaction might be like, what we might want it to be like, and we conduct ourselves accordingly.  Some of these cues we may consider very important, some not as much.  We differ of course which ones we pay more or less attention to; and of course there are aspects of someone’s appearance or behavior we might be oblivious to, not accustomed to noticing.  It is interesting to note that we often get quite uncomfortable if we have misplaced or cannot place someone, we get confused or even angry – we might get quite upset, for example, if we cannot readily tell someone’s gender.

The knowledge, the abilities through which we experience the world, perceive and act, do not derive from beliefs and principles. Beliefs and principles are abstractions that only point to these abilities of ours.  The abilities themselves however are the result of learning, reinforcement, and refinement through years of socialization in our cultural milieu.

Leshan

I was going through some old pictures I took several years ago in Leshan, a city in Sichuan, known widely for a statue of a Giant Buddha.  The area is strewn with Buddhist temples, sculptures, statues, found in caves, tunnels, the hillsides.  In one of the tunnels I ran across the statue on the right, depicting an androgynous form, its right-half being that of a woman.  The statue reminded me of Ardhanarishvara, a form of the Hindu god Shiva.

Ardhanarishvara

I had first become aware of Ardhanarishvara and seen statues many years ago, in South India.  The deity made a very strong impression on me, and before I left India I purchased a small bronze statue, a tourist trinket, a picture of which is on the left.

A western eye might stay with the half-male/half-female aspect, glide over differences from the Leshan statue, such as which side is the male, which the female.  In Hinduism, Ardhanarishvara depicts the union of Shiva and his companion Parvati, the union of masculine and feminine forces.  In the body of a marriage, the right side is that of the male, the left that of the female.  And this is reflected in the somatization of marital problems by women in North India: they are sometimes embodied as pain or even paralysis of the left side (described in Helman, C.G. (1994) Culture, Health and Illness).