Daoism and Eco-art and Zhengbo

This article is a research report I wrote about Daoism and the artist Zheng Bo.

The West Lake in Hangzhou is a beautiful tourist attraction. There is a Daoist temple built in honor of Ge Hong, who has a significant place in the history of Daoism. Tourists enjoy the scenery at West Lake. According to Ge Hong, the energy of the landscape can flow into the body and even transform it as one observes, when the vitality of the landscape is aligned with and beneficial to the vitality of the individual. "Observation" is a natural and religious act in Daoism. This is why temples are often built close to mountains and water, in places where people can go and "observe" (Campany and Ge, 2002).

This flowing vitality in the landscape is called "Dao". Observing the Dao is an act of engaging in transformation, known as "cultivating the Dao", linking the external landscape, the cosmos and the inner body. In this process, the inner physical landscape is nourished by the vital energy or "qi" that flows through the earth (Campany and Ge, 2002).

At the same time, Ge Hong suggests that nature could save human beings from their own bodies. Humans are not subjects who observe objective nature. Subjectivity is based on "Dao", and human subjectivity comes from or is in some way inherited from or simulated by nature. Nature allows humans to think, imagine and act. Daoism sees nature as subjectivity, so that nature can be understood and experienced within the body (Campany and Ge, 2002).

The Dao De Jing says: "Humans follow earth, Earth follows heaven, Heaven follows Dao, Dao follows its subjective nature, Humanity, nature, and the transcendent cosmos are normatively modeled, and their ultimate norm is "Dao" (Ames and Hall, 2003). "Dao" is the norm of self-creation or self-emergence. "Dao" is a spontaneous creative process. Humans are unable to grasp nature objectively. Nature is omething that patterns, models, or informs us as human beings. Daoist understand the ultimate meaning of this patterning or modeling as "Dao". Human beings also shape, change and emerge because they have inherited these capacities from nature. "Dao" is subjectivity, and human subjectivity comes from following nature; Dao is self-generated, spontaneous and ultimately free (Miller, 2017).

The specific configuration and constellation of "Dao" in each life constitute the uniqueness of the individual life and the human species. So in Daoism the environment is within the human being, life is a process of infusion and perseverance, where the subjective energies of the universe transform and combine to form the uniqueness of the new individual (Kohn, 1993).

The "wuwei" in Dao De Jing advocates the cultivation of tranquillity, the reduction of desires, and non-interference in things. It advocates an ethic of the relationship between the self and the people, in which the nonaction of the former promotes the spontaneous behaviour of the latter. A pattern of meditative action can catalyse a harmonious alignment between people. Because of the spontaneous formation of coherence, Daoism has no need to govern others through direct involvement or interference in their affairs. "wuwei" is the ideal way to achieve enrichment and prosperity for people, it facilitates the transaction of world transformation, provides an environment and nourishment, and finally brings about change (Slingerland, 2003).

The concept of "qi" is understood here as a liquid vitality. "qi" flows in two ways: the projection (yang) and reception (yin). Whether it is air, water, blood, sexual fluid, or the subtle vitality of "qi", all are in constant flow (Ferguson, 2019). Daoism sees the physical experience of breathing as a fundamental pattern of yin and yang, replicated through the natural world and the abstract universe itself. The universe itself is a process of projecting and receiving liquid vitality that functions as a continuous breath or heartbeat. The transition from one state to another is natural and cyclical, and in this way, the body stays alive. The most important way of acting to stay healthy is to align with the macrocosmic patterns of the seasons (Forke, 1925).

During meditation, the function of the mouth is to transmit the liquid vitality of "qi" from the deity to the clergy. The mouth is the medium through which the cosmic forces are transacted. There is clearly an element of deep intimacy in this transfer of "qi". Whereas sex is considered to be a lower form of energy transaction transfer of fluid between the deity and the practitioner (Pregadio, 2006). With the intimate transfer of vital energy, through the internal organs of the body, the liquid vitality circulates through the body of the cleric.

Scriptures in Daoism are considered to be earthly traces of the cosmic meaning that mediates the universal "Dao". It is in dependence on the "Dao" that the scriptures is constituted; it is in dependence on the text that the "Dao" is made manifest. The "Dao" is the substance; the scriptures are the function. Meaning there is an interaction between the sacred scriptures and the ink on the page and the cosmic breath it produces. The gods are said to respond when humans recite these texts, which are traces of the originals condensed in the heavens (Robinet, 1993). The main requirement for the believer is to access the scriptures and learn how to use them. What it really is is how it is really used. Ultimately, then, the clergy's hermeneutic relationship to the text is not one of intellect or meaning, but of power and meaning through the liquid transmission of cosmic breath to the ink on the page, and the liquid vitality of the divine circulating within the clergy. This transformation of human beings within the cosmic framework that defines their sphere of meaning can be understood as the cultivation of the "Dao" (Robinet, 1993).

In Method of the Nine Perfected, each stage of internal vision and internal observation must take place on a specific date, a date determined by the sixty-day cycle of the Chinese calendar. The text functions like a combination lock in which the various cycles of the body, the deity and the calendar are unified. The organs of the body are not simply the physical material of the heart or the lungs, but the cycle of energy that they regulate, the circulation of liquid vitality through the body. Furthermore, the dates on the calendar are abstractions derived from the cycles of the sun around the earth, the stars in the sky, the planets and the moon. These celestial bodies can also be understood as energy transformation systems in which the liquid vitality is transformed through predictable cycles of yin and yang This process involves the interplay of complex cycles of energy transformation that operate on the principle of the waxing and waning of yin and yang at different frequencies or cycles (Miller, 2009).

The book Zhuangzi mentioned that the gap between the individual and the environment is reduced to an absolute minimum and that the person is able to know more, hear more and see more. In this way, the transformed body becomes extremely sensitive and is able to absorb more of the world's perceptions than an ordinary person (Zhuang and Ma, 2003). These signs are the special way in which the transformed Daoist body is able to perceive and integrate with its natural environment, a body that is absolutely porous, a body that is completely open to its environment, allowing the practitioner's mind to fully engage and respond to its environment. "Cultivation of Dao" is a thoroughly somatic process that takes place in and through the body, as a network of liquid vital yin-yang processes (Komjathy, 2014).

The only way to encounter the "Dao" is through the direct life and material experience of the body. However, the materiality of the body naturally implies that it occupies a particular location and shapes its experience through the body's encounter with its surroundings. In the same way that the Daoist tradition focuses on the body as the substrate of transformation, it also focuses on the environment, the space in which the practitioner's bodily transformation takes place (Miller, 2017).

In Perfected Purple Yang, it is mentioned that Daoists associate the body, the mountain and the sky together because of their foundational spatiality. The body is meaningful because it contains the space that the deity can inhabit and encounter (Miller, 2009). Like the body, the mountains and the sky are all pervaded by the same "emptiness", they are ultimately interconnected. The human body is the product of an interior emptiness that is identical to the emptiness of nature and the emptiness of the heavens. The human body, in its dimension as emptiness, is at the same time the ecological body and the heavenly bodies. In the tradition of Chinese religious practice, one can project one's soul beyond the rainbow and the clouds (Schafer, 2005).

The mountain, like the body, is understood as a porous system whose internal transformations are of particular interest to Daoists. The individual needs to have genuine faith to access these internal texts. In encounters with rare plants, minerals and other "concretions" of liquid vitality, the practitioner's physical vitality is transformed through contact with the vitality of the mountain (Campany, 2000). Daoism is a tradition extremely focused on the body as the locus of devotional experience when it comes to the body, so the Daoist experience is an ecological experience. Without the body, without the ground, there is no universe. All three spheres are interconnected and are symbiotic spheres of the vitality. The "environmental problem" is therefore in a way the problem of the body and the problem of the universe. The sky, the earth and the body are empty constellations, and liquid vitality circulates in these three dimensions.

Daoism trains people in ways of experiencing the world within the body. At the simplest level, these traditions focus on attention to the breath. At a more advanced level, they train people to develop complex experiences of energy flowing in and through the body, experiences that most people ignore most of the time. This tradition of bodily practices can be understood as non-discursive bodily practices that place the body in the world, and training in these bodily disciplines overcomes the experience of the world as other and the world in the body and provides an aesthetic or sensory basis for ecologically sensitive codes of behaviour. The Daoist tradition continues the caution or restraint found in early Confucian moral theory and has developed a number of precept-focused collections of texts where the goal of self-restraint is to achieve maximum prosperity for the individual or community. The key element here is that when one recognises the existence of multiple subjective forces within the individual body and in the dynamics of the natural environment, the goal is to blend, harmonise and regulate these forces in order to produce the maximum positive effect. The moral issue here is not what one should aim for as a subjective individual, but how to produce greater overall prosperity by limiting certain practices in oneself and in others (Girardot, Miller and Liu, 2001).

The concept of these precepts also suggests that the basic moral problem facing human beings is their inability to exercise proper restraint and humility, which results in excessive violence and destruction. These precepts can therefore be read as recording what the fifth- to sixth-century Daoists saw as the fundamental problems in the world arising from man's lack of self-restraint. All these problems can be read as problems stemming from the porous connection between the body and the world; they are ecological problems. The precepts are described in a negative way, suggesting that the main problem facing humanity at the time was not a decline in positive activity in the world, but an excess of violent activity, and that some self-restraint on the part of individuals was required in the first place in order to promote the appropriate level of interactive engagement to produce community flourishing (Girardot, Miller and Liu, 2001).