So the understanding that there are these feelings which are also a part of nature and can be developed is the way out of seeing the feelings as purely negative, to be controlled. This is where that cosmology of Qi plays an important role. Before looking at the place of the heart in self-cultivation, we need to examine the role cosmology played in enabling Zhu Xi to overcome the dualism of the Tang Confucians. And to this end, Virág turns to "Zhang Zai and the Ethics of Qi." She says, "Zhang's conviction that all things were composed of Qi, and therefore shared a common underlying substance, effectively dissolved the boundary between self and world"—self and things— "that had been a prominent feature of the Tang commentarial perspective." Above all, and I underline, above all, as Qi could alternately have and not have form, "the hidden," when it has no form, "and the manifest," when it does have form, were part of a single ongoing process. So you see here what's at stake. We just saw the idea of the four seasons, the cycle of the four seasons as all rooted in springtime and the vitality of origination, which is compared to the ethical value of <i>ren</i>. So when it's not an opposition between two ontological entities, two things, but rather an alternation precisely of the hidden and the manifest, that is to say of <i>yin</i>, which is hidden, and <i>yang</i>, which is manifest —the two worlds of <i>yinjian</i> 陰間 and <i>yangjian</i> 陽間 in Chinese— it's an alternating and the Qi is always there as a substrate even when it is invisible. So to have form and to have no form. "When Qi collects together, differentiation is manifest and there is form," the ten thousand things that we see in the world lit by the sun. "When Qi does not collect together": usually it does not collect together but it <i>san</i> 散, so when it disperses. So now it collects and now it disperses. When it collects, there is form; when it disperses, there is no form. "When it has collected together," since thereafter it's going to be without form, when it has formed, "can we not call it temporary?" In other words, it's not a permanent state, it's a temporary state. "And when it has dispersed (<i>san</i>), how can we call it non-existence?" That it's disappeared, that it's dead, gone. No, it's just gone back into that alternating state of yin, of <i>kanbujian</i> 看不見, that is you cannot see it, cannot hear it, because it does not have form. So it is not non-existent, it's simply gone back into the phase of dispersal of Qi of, prior to, well, the invisible, that without form. "Therefore, when the sage looks around himself and investigates the world, he says, 'I know the cause of hiddenness and manifestation'; he does not say, 'I know the cause of existence and nonexistence'." <i>You</i> 有 and <i>wu</i> 無; <i>you</i> 幽 and <i>ming</i> 明. We come now to the crucial concept of <i>gan</i>, where we see the contrast between the idea of Su Shi 蘇軾, that the encounter with things produces inspiration and so the inspiration really comes from the impact of outside things on the inside world. And that is exactly the opposite of the point of view of Zhu Xi. So crucially, rather than emotions, feelings, and knowledge being the result of the impact of the outside world on the inner self, in Zhu Xi's view, they were an expression of the constant state of arousal. In a world with the inherent dynamic of two beginnings, <i>yin</i> and <i>yang</i>, Earth and Heaven, no form and having form, congealing, collecting, and then dispersing in this alternating two beginnings of <i>yin</i> and <i>yang</i>, Earth and Heaven. I quote: "Arousal is the marvelous quality of the nature," the inner nature, "and the nature is the substance of arousal… contracting and stretching, motion and stillness, ending and beginning can be unified" by precisely this process of seeing it as an alternating, ongoing process. "Thus, what marvelously animates the myriad things is called 'marvelous'," divine in fact, <i>shen</i> 神; "what penetrates the myriad things is called 'Dao'; and what comprises the substance (the body) of the myriad things is called 'the nature'." Virág cites Zhu Xi's own account of "the conceptual breakthrough occasioned by his reading of Zhang Zai's statement, 'The mind unites the nature and feelings'." Again, not the ontological division between inner and outer, nature and feelings, but that they are united by the mind. And that this occasion, reading this statement, a simple statement from Zhang Zai, is the basis for a conceptual breakthrough for Zhu Xi. "Earlier," says Zhu Xi, "I (had) read (Hu Hong's) 胡宏 theories, but he only spoke of the mind <i>vis-à-vis</i> the nature, and didn't utter a word about the feelings. Afterwards, when I read Zhang Zai's statement, 'The mind unites the nature and feelings', I realized that it was a great theoretical achievement, and only then did I find the character <i>qing</i> (emotions) being mentioned— one that was consistent with the ideas of Mencius. Mencius said, 'The feeling of compassion is the beginning of humaneness'. Humaneness is the nature and compassion is the feeling." And both of them are there from the beginning. "This is the mind as regarded from (the point of view of) the feelings. He also said, 'Humaneness, rightness, ritual propriety, and wisdom (the four) are rooted in the mind', and this is the mind as regarded from the (point of view of its) nature." So "the mind encompasses the nature and feelings: the nature is the substance and the feelings the function." <i>Ti</i> 體, <i>yong</i> 用, two absolutely fundamental categories for analyzing the coherence of the world at all levels in the Daoxue tradition. So "the nature is the substance (the body) and the feelings are the function." So what you have here again is the practice of structuring values: the feelings, the function, the practice, the expression, when they take form, <i>youxing</i> 有形, as opposed to the nature, is that which is there before there's movement. So "the character 'mind'," he says, "is simply the etymological root and therefore the terms 'nature' and 'feelings' share the same radical, 'mind'." Now that doesn't make any sense unless you look at the Chinese characters and then you see that the character for <i>xin</i> 心 or the character for mind and heart is to be found on the left side of both the character for nature and the character for emotions. So that's what he means, it's the etymological root and both nature and feeling share that same radical for mind. And as I've already suggested, this is also about before and after movement. Nature and feelings are not the only polarities unified within the heart. I quote: "The nature is the state before movement," <i>weidong</i> 未動, hasn't yet moved, "and the feelings are the state after movement. The mind encompasses both the states before and after movement": both of them, the nature and the emotions. "This blurring of absolute distinctions" or even oppositions derives from the <i>Doctrine of the Mean</i>, the <i>Zhongyong</i>, which says, "The state before joy and anger, sadness and happiness, have been aroused is called 'equilibrium' and when they are aroused and all hit their proper measure, it is called 'harmony'." <i>zhonghe</i> 中和. So if the nature is expressing itself, has been cultivated and is expressing itself, then when one shifts from prior to movement to movement, the movement expresses naturally that which is there in the nature. The feeling of compassion expresses the nature of <i>ren</i>. Zhu Xi summarizes the contrast as between the human mind, <i>renxin</i> 人心, as opposed to the Dao mind, the mind of the Dao. So the alternating states of "hidden" and "manifest" carried over into an analysis of the dynamics of human nature and shows that emotions need not be "tumultuous waves" of "bad desires." I quote: "When Mencius said that the feelings could be considered good, he meant that proper emotions were those that flowed out from the nature and originally possessed nothing that was not good." For Zhu Xi, bad desires come from the "human mind," good from the "Dao mind." The former—the human mind— derived from "the selfishness of the physical body." Very interesting! Once again that term <i>si</i> 私, private, private interests as opposed to public interest, but here the opposition is not between private and public, but between the private and that which is correct: the latter, the mind of the Dao, derives from the "correctness of the innate nature and destiny." Learning, therefore, could not be only book learning; it had also to be self-reflection and nurture of the Dao mind. So how do we nurture that inner mind, that inner nature, that <i>liangxin</i>, that good heart? One of the key concepts is <i>jing</i> 敬, which we've already seen again in the Warring States' versions of Confucian self-cultivation: not just <i>cheng</i> 誠, sincerity, but also <i>jing</i>, translated as reverence. Curie Virág gives it a more of a paraphrase than a translation: she calls it "inner mental attentiveness." A very nice paraphrase for getting us to think outside of the strictly religious box of, "oh, reverence is reverence with respect to God": inner mental attentiveness. Since the "mind is originally clear" and simply "concealed by things and affairs," outside things, "if we summon this mind," the original mind, "it will spontaneously and of itself know right from wrong (and) good from bad." The conscience of this good heart is innate, as long as one is attentive to it and cultivates it. To recover the Dao mind, Zhu Xi called for "fixing one's mental energy." Mental energy here translates the Chinese <i>jingshen</i> 精神, which is often translated as spirit, this, yes, one's spirit, [she] translates mental energy. How do you do it? By means of <i>jing</i>, inner mental attentiveness. That Zhu Xi saw this activity as "overcoming the self," <i>keji</i> 克己, "and returning to ritual propriety," <i>fuli</i> 復禮, is clear from passages such as the following: "To explain 'holding on to inner mental attentiveness' doesn't require many words. Just appreciate fully the flavor of these phrases from Cheng Yi: 'be ordered and solemn', 'be dignified and grave', 'change your countenance', 'set your thoughts in order', 'regulate your dress and dignify your gaze'." So all of these phrases from Cheng Yi. "Appreciate fully the flavor of these phrases," he [Zhu Xi] says, "and make a concrete effort at doing what they say. Then what is called by Cheng Yi 'correcting ourselves within'," <i>zhinei</i> 直內, literally making yourself straight, "and 'concentrating on one thing'," <i>zhuyi</i> 主一, "naturally will entail no additional measures. The mind and body will become reverent, and the outer and inner, one." So it's about in fact ritual training, <i>keji fuli</i>, ritual training. "Sit as though you were impersonating an ancestor," the ancient rituals of sacrifice to the ancestors, "sit as though you were impersonating an ancestor, stand as though you were performing a sacrifice." "The head should be upright, the eyes looking straight ahead, the feet steady, the hands respectful, the mouth quiet and composed, the bearing solemn"— these are all aspects of inner mental attentiveness, of reverence. "Reverence, he adds, is like standing or having the eyes closed: when one opens the eyes or starts moving, one will see and act with "rightness." So we see <i>ren</i> associated with <i>yi</i>. <i>Ren</i> is the <i>weidong</i>, as long as you are standing motionless, eyes closed, standing in this <i>liangxin</i>, in this good heart, this heart of the Dao, then when you open your eyes and move in the outside world, come back into the outside world, you will act with "rightness," correctness. So the relationship between the two states of stillness and activity, <i>weidong</i> and <i>yidong</i>, is like "breathing, in which inhaling and exhaling simply give way one to another": Expression that goes again back to the Daoist statement in Laozi, <i>tugu naxin</i> 吐故納新, to spit out the old, exhale, breathe in the new, <i>naxin</i>. So, this is the ritual training. And here I would like to look for a moment with you at a contemporary account of ritual training so that we can see that what he is describing here may not be so impossible for us to understand in our contemporary world. And here I would like to just quote from a very recent article that appeared in the <i>Atlantic</i>, after the Las Vegas shootings. "Neuroscientific research conducted over the past few decades has found that prayer can radically reshape the human brain, leading to increased focus and peace. In the 1990s, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg famously studied the brain scans of 150 people from different religions, from Franciscan nuns to Buddhist monks. He found that those who engaged deeply in prayer for 12 minutes a day over a couple of months had activated frontal lobes and quiet parietal lobes. The result? Those who prayed regularly were more focused, less anxious, and felt more connected to other people. Sara Lazar (Harvard) expanded on Newberg's findings in 2014. A Harvard neuroscientist, Lazar had been surprised to find how much her life improved as a result of meditating for a few minutes during yoga classes, which she initially attended purely as a form of physical therapy. So she conducted several studies and found that a half-hour of meditation each day yielded differences in brain volume after just eight weeks. Brain scans showed thickening in four areas: the posterior cingulate involved in mind wandering, the left hippocampus involved in learning, cognition, memory, and emotional regulation, the temporoparietal junction involved in empathy and compassion (ah!), and the pons involved in the production of regulatory neurotransmitters. The scans also showed that the amygdala involved in anxiety, fear, and stress got smaller." And if you go and find this article on the Internet and you click on the video where Sarah Lazar explains this for, in a TED talk, you will see that she shows how this is the exact opposite of what happens in animals. So that it's the human being's capacity to act on, through his mind or through his heart, to act on events that can transform them and transform the brain through this ritual practice, whether it's meditation or prayer. So what we can say in summary is that Zhu Xi is looking for a middle path: "Probing principle through the investigation of things" is the active pole of still reverence. I quote: "Those who devote themselves to seeking it within think that broad investigation is to rush towards the external realm. Those who devote themselves towards broad investigation" —he's thinking of Lü Zuqian— "think that inner examination is a narrow endeavor. Both are instances of degenerating into one-sidedness. This is the great shortcoming of all students." So find the middle path between Lü Zuqian and Lu Jiuyuan— that's what he is saying.
