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Discourse on Nourishing Life 養生論 嵇康 Hsi K’ang(223-262)

There are people nowadays who say that immortal sagehood can be attained though study, that immortality can with effort be reached. There are also those who put the longest life at one hundred and twenty years and claim it has always been so. They say all accounts of people living longer than this are nothing but lies. Both of these positions miss the way things are, so permit me to try, in my coarse way, to explain.

It is true that immortals cannot be seen with your eyes, but if we examine clearly and weigh all that has been written in the records and documents and all that has been transmitted by the former historians, their true existence is a certainty. They seem to be the special recipients of a unique ch’i(vital breath), the receiving of which comes about spontaneously. It is not something one can reach with an accumulation of learning. But if we talk about the proper care of oneself, according to  the principles, in order to maximize one’s allotted span of life, then it is certainly possible for a person to get, at the best, more than a thousand years, at the very least, several hundred. Nowadays, no one is skilled in this care, and therefore no one can achieve such longevity. How can I explain this?

If you take some drug to make yourself perspire, it will perhaps in some cases have no effect. But should you suffer some terrible embarrassment, sweat will literally pour forth. If you skip eating all morning, your mouth will water and you’ll dream of eating. Yet Tseng Tsu,[1] choked with grief, went seven foodless days without feeling hunger. If you sit up half the night, you ‘ss begin to nod off and dream of bed. But if inside you’re stirred with a great anxiety, the dawn will come before you fall asleep. You can brush energetically to get your hair to stand up or drink a strong wine to redden your face, but the results will only be marginal. Yet a young fellow when angry will redden with a fearsome face and his hair will push up against his hat. From these examples, I assert that the relationship of a person’s spirit to his body is like that of a country and its ruler. When the spirit is rash within, the body decays without, just as when the ruler on top is muddled, the country below falls to chaos.

Now, for those growing grain during the drought of Emperor T’ang,[2] there was from time to time the contribution of an isolated rainfall. When that was over, things returned to being parched and dried, and what depended on that single rain would later wither up; nonetheless, the benefits of that single rainfall can certainly not be gainsaid. Nowadays people often say that a single burst of rage is not sufficient to do violence to one’s innate nature or that a single bout of grief to harm one’s body. Treating these things lightly, they indulge themselves often, as if they did not recognize the benefits of a single rainfall, but looked forward to getting good grain from desiccated sprouts.

By this, the gentleman knows that form can stand only by relying on spirit, and that spirit in turn needs form for its existence. When one grasps how easily the system of life is unbalanced, one realizes the harm to life of even one such excess. Therefore, one’s innate nature is cultivated in order to preserve the spirit, and the mind is kept peaceful to keep whole the body. Love and hate must not come to rest in one’s feelings, nor must grief and joy be harbored in one’s thoughts. Drifting, insensate, the bodily ch’I is level and quiet. Then inhale and exhale in a rigorously controlled manner, and ingest the things which will nourish your body. This will bring form and spirit closer together, and will benefit you inside and out.

Now, if a field when planted yields ten measures of grain, it’s called a “prime” field, and it will be so named throughout the underheaven. No one realizes that under close and intense cultivation, it could yield more than one hundred measures. Planting a field is one thing, and arboriculture is quite another. With trees, successful planting lies in spreading them apart. It is said that a merchant can never make thousand percent profit, and a farmer has no prospects for a hundred measure yield. These are cases of clinging to the status quo and not changing. Beans make a person gain weight; elm seeds make one sleepy. The acacia relieves anger; the day-lily helps one forget sorrow. The wise and the foolish alike know these things.

Garlic and onion harm the eyes, and pork and fish are not life-prolonging foods. These facts too are common knowledge today. If lice live in your hair, they absorb the black, and a musk-deer that eats cypress leaves becomes cedar fragrant. The neck of people who live in high places develop goiters, and the people of Chin[3] have yellow teeth. Deducing from this, it is clear that the ch’i of everything you eat permeates the innate nature and pervades the body. There is nothing that does not elicit some reaction. Is it possible there is only steaming to make things heavy but none to make them light, injury to make things dark but none to make them bright, smoking to make things yellow but none to make things firm, perfuming to make things fragrant but none to make things endure? Thus Shen Nung’s[4] maxim, “Superior medicines nourish one’s life; middle medicines nourish one’s nature,” truly recognize the interrelation of innate nature and life, perfected through a course of support and nourishment.

But people nowadays do not look into these things. Nothing more than the five grain is seen, blinded as people are by addiction to glaring sights and sounds. Their eyes are blunted by deep red and yellow, and their ears are enslaved to raucous music. The spicy flavors they consume fry their vital organs; the wines stew their stomachs and entrails; the spices and aromatics rot their bones and marrow; and alternating passions of joy and anger pervert their proper ch’i; dwelling on worries dissipates their spirit essence; suffering and pleasures wreak havoc on their equilibrium. The attacks on their petty persons come from all sides. The body so easily exhausted must meet enemies from inside and out. Not being made of wood or stone, can we last long under these conditions?

People today both laugh at and pity those who go to extremes with themselves, those who eat and drink without measure and then fall victim to a myriad of illnesses, those who indulge tirelessly in sex until their vitality comes to a weary end. The banes of the wind and the cold, the injuries of the hundred toxins will plague them with a host of obstacles only halfway along life’s allotted span.

We say they are not skilled at maintaining life. Where do they lose touch with the basic principles in caring for themselves? They perish by the most subtle points. The subtle points compound to become harm, and the compounding of harm adds up to decline. From decline comes whiteness, and from whiteness comes agedness, and agedness brings on the end. Enclosed in this syndrome, a person has no way out. People of only average understanding or less refer to this as ‘natural’. Even though victims come to a minor realization of things, it is invariably expressed as remorse as soon as the disaster is actually encountered. Never are people aware and cautious about the many dangers before symptoms manifest themselves. For this reason, Lord Huan was already gripped by fatal illness before he realized it, and yet he cursed the physician Pien Ch’üeh’s early diagnosis.[5] He mistakenly thought that the day one first feels the pain is the day an illness begins. What harmed him had its trivial origins, but he sought help only after the ailment was obvious, and the cure, therefore, was unsuccessful.

Travel around the world of ordinary men and you will find they all have the same slice of longevity. Look up, look down; there are no exceptions. This span of life is said to be all that nature’s principles allow. The numbers alone make it self-evident, and the company makes for each one’s solace. Even when someone has heard stories about “nourishing life,” he will say they’re untrue, basing his judgment on what he can see around him. Slightly better than this person is someone who approaches, wary as a fox, and although he gets a wee bit closer, does not know where to begin. Slightly better than this is someone who energetically consumes elixirs, then decides after six months or a year that there is no visible effect and he is wasting his efforts, and thus gives up along the way. Perhaps such people feel their attempts are like a trickle into the oceans, while water leaks in torrents out the other side. They want to sit down and watch for obvious rewards. Perhaps they are people who have suppressed their feelings or held their desires in check, lopped off and discarded their worldly ambitions. But the objects of temptations are always directly before their eyes and ears, and the goal of their nobler aspirations lies several dozen years away. So fearing that they’ll lose both, they lack inner resolve; inside the heart is fighting with itself and outside things are luring them from the path. The forces combine to drag them from the way, and they too fall in defeat.

Only by reason can we know the subtlety of esoteric things, not by perception with our eyes. This may be likened to the Yü-chane tree, growing for seven years before it is recognizable. Now with hasty and tempestuous hearts, we climb on the path of stillness and quietude. Our idea is for hasty progress, but events come slowly; our expectations focus on the near future, but responses to our efforts are far-off, and thus no one is able to reach to the end. Those who push anxiously do not seek on, because they see no immediate results, and those who do seek on fail in the endeavor for lack of concentration. Those who incline toward one side or the other achieve nothing for lack of breadth, and those who pursue occult practices become quagmire in the byways. In all efforts of this sort, of ten thousand people who seek long life, not a single one can succeed.

Those truly skilled at nourishing life are not at all this way. Clear, empty, quiet, expansive, they reduce the selfish and minimize desires. Knowing the harm that fame and status do to virtue, they simply ignore them, leave them beyond the confines of their lives. It is not a case of wanting these things and forcibly forestalling them. They recognize the harm that the rich-flavored does one’s innate nature and discard it, pay it no heed. It is not that they hunger for such things and then control themselves. External things entangle the heart, so they have no presence. Spirit ch’i along is manifest, by virtue of its purity. Those skilled at nourishing life are open wide, without worry or grief, at peace without thoughts and ponderings. They preserve this state with oneness, nourish it with harmony. Harmony with the principles brings daily advance, becoming one with the great flow. Afterward one is infused with the numinous nutrient, imbued with the ambrosial spring waters, basked in the dawning sun, and made tranquil with the ch’in zither’s five strings. So with nonaction, it comes in and of itself, the body subtle and the heart profound, forgetting pleasure so that joy is complete, abandoning the trappings of life so that the person may be preserved. Proceeding in this manner, one’s life span could compare with Hsien Men’s;[6] one could compete in years with Wang Ch’iao.[7] How could anyone think that such people do not exist！

Translated by Kenneth J. DeWoskin