Well, some people are islands in themselves and very deserted ones too. We often find them in the form of hermits and ascetics. Like the sadhu below, you may find them meditating at Durbar Square or Pashupatinath in Kathmandu. If you’re lucky, you may even run into any ang moh sadhu. Contrary to common beliefs, these people are not exactly Hindu holymen. If they were, they would be clean and properly-dressed priests presiding over some ceremony in the temple. These ascetics may believe in the gods and deities around them, but they are actually going against the religious establishment, going all out to seek their own independent Truth through ascetic practices.
Most of the rest of us are not “islands” like the sadhus. We have our families and friends, our colleagues and business associates. While it’s fair to say that the sadhus are solely responsible for their own cultivation and final success in finding the Truth, mere mortals like us are bound by household issues, responsibilities and obligation. Far from being a deserted island, we are like an element or organ in the Five Element Theory.
Every element or organ in the body has a parent and a son. Every organ or element controls another organ or element. Every controller is in turn controlled by another organ or element. This is the concept of holism in traditional Chinese medicine. When “fire” invades the liver, it affects the spleen. When the heart and the kidneys are not in harmony, symptoms like palpitations, insomnia and backaches may occur. When an organ like the lung is weak, you treat it’s parent organ, the spleen. When there is excess in the liver, you drain its son organ, the heart.
All this may sound bizarre to anyone not familiar with Taoism or the figurative nature of TCM, but these dynamic, pictorial representations of human physiology have resulted in effective treatment for numerous ailments over thousands of years. Accurate or not, scientific or not, the pattern described is obviously coherent with some unknown or unseen pattern in the universe.
But holism is not exclusive to TCM. I found that it’s also applicable in disciplines like psychiatry. It’s not just about prescribing medicines for the patient. It also involves the management of environmental factors and issues outside the patient’s immediate sphere of control – including the family, the workplace etc. Treating the individual or his symptoms alone is like treating just one of the organs in the complex framework of the whole. Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth. They all contribute to the health, sickness and recovery of the body as a whole. No man is an island. And no one is superman. We are mere mortals. We all have a breaking point. Stitching up the rope won’t solve the problem. You must lose the tension.
