A LARGE AND A SMALL EARTH

TREE TIME CHI KUNG #4

Below is a fully revised version of a post dated 10 April 2024. This post has been translated from Dutch into English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon.

This is a sequel to:

AN UNKNOWN WORLD

… I still would return to China many times, but as a traveller I remain even more of an outsider than before. On a tentative last trip, I interrupt commitments and spend a few days at the Taoist Bai Yun Guan, the Temple of the White Cloud, in a suburb of Beijing. In a garden at the back of the complex is a stele, a standing stone, with an engraved drawing and text. It is the Nei Jing Tu, the 'Image of the Inner Landscape'. I had often seen reproductions of the stele's print, but now, in the quiet enclave of the monastery garden, I see in the wondrous image the essence of an entire culture. Simple in presentation, nimble and almost humorous, deep and fundamental in meaning. Mirroring in each other the outer and inner worlds…
An Inner Landscape - chapter 37. Family #3

To get acquainted, we shake hands. However long we hold each other: you remain you and I remain me. As boundaries, our skin is implacable. Through the palms of our hands and fingertips, we don't seem to get much further than each other's surface.

Through the openings of eyes and ears, the world does seem to be able to enter unhindered. That is pretence. The sound something makes and the light it reflects are merely messengers, not the thing itself. And once these touch the eardrum and retina, a conversion to an abstract neurological language follows, which seems to have little more to do with the perceived reality.