One Hand
Clapping:
The Taoe of Music
WholeArts and
The Psychic Internet is proud to present the
"Preface" and "Part One" of this
remarkable book by Daniel d'Quincy. "One Hand
Clapping: The Tao of Music," originally published by
WholeArts in 1991, is a book-length essay on the
performance of music from the perspective of Eastern
philosophy and religion. Mr. d'Quincy is a noted
composer, musician, author, inventor, educator, speaker,
and photographer. Please visit his unique music sites at WholeArts: syNThony, and the WholeArts Online Music Conservatory.
Page 51
Consider the
parable about how the stomach, the mouth, the hands, and
the legs fell to arguing one fine day. It occurred to the
mouth that the stomach was having all of the enjoyment
and doing none of the work. The legs searched out the
food, the hands cleaned and prepared it, the mouth chewed
it, and the stomach… Well, the stomach only enjoyed
it. And so, the mouth, the hands, and the legs, decided
to go on strike against the stomach. Pretty soon they
became weaker, and weaker, and began to waste away.
Suddenly they realized that it was the stomach that
nourished them and made them strong.
It may be
informative to consider how traditional Chinese medicine
conceives of the body and its functions. This exquisitely
subtle and effective science and art is exemplary of the
eastern approach to things in general. Chinese medicine
began its development through the millennia with an
implicit bow to the cohesiveness and integrity of Nature.
The connective principle is everything in Chinese
medicine. The theory of the circulation of energy through
the connective meridians of acupuncture is still regarded
today as primitive rubbish by most western doctors, and
one wonders if their resistance to it arises from a
fundamental refusal to countenance a body without (fully
replaceable) parts. So little interested was Chinese
medicine in analyzing the body into its respective organs
that, even today, traditional Chinese medicine fails to
account for the importance and precise location of many
organs – just as it incorporates a few organs that
medical doctors in the West do not recognize as real.
Doctors of Chinese medicine in our time of course know
the proper number and location of the physical organs,
but they continue to find the old schematic, and highly
imaginative, anatomical descriptions useful to their
specific purposes. Chinese doctors do not really treat
individual organs, and they do not adhere to the
reductionist equation of individual diseases with easily
isolated causes. For them, the human body is
imaginatively apperceived as an organic environment. The
health of its entirety depends on creating the right
conditions everywhere, bringing coolness and moisture to
the places that need those conditions, and providing for
warmth and dryness where they are needed. Basically, the
body is treated very much in the same way as one might
cultivate a garden. It was noted above how highly valued
is the Japanese art of gardening. A garden is in a way a
universe, a wholeness, unto itself. And it is the
wholeness of things in general that appeals to the
eastern mentality.
From the
Ego’s point of view, it seems that we are always
trying to determine what we are, and exclude what we are
not. To find the Ego, one must cut away and separate,
break things down and isolate the essentials. We saw how
futile that exercise can be. But from the point of view
of the Self, the things that we are and the things that
we are not revolve around each other in an intimate dance
of togetherness. We do not have to see ourselves as
isolated identities carried about in a sack of this
“too solid flesh.” From a purely biological
standpoint, one must admit that our skins serve as well
to join us to the world as to separate us from it. My
skin separates my insides from my outsides. But, the
inside or the outside, which is most particularly mine?
We breathe through our skins, and absorb the heat and
light of the sun, do we not? And where would we be
without the air we breathe and the sun we absorb? Are
they not just as much a part of us? Do we not incorporate
the sun and the air in our very tissues? A great German
philosopher and poet, Heinrich Heine, said in the 19th
century, "You are what you eat" because he
wanted us to consider where we would be without the water
we drink and the food we eat?[1] The idea
lay dormant, and it took more than a century before the
Hippies revived it, but the idea eventually sprouted
forth into the ecology and good-foods movements of today
- and better late than never.
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