A Pan of Water

Posted on by Krishnan Venkatesh


A clear-sighted psychologist, Xunzi may have been the first writer to pick out the tendency to mental fixation (蔽, bì) a crucial factor in political life, and one that cannot be ignored if leadership is ever to become an art or science. Since most of us are confused and driven by obsessions we are barely conscious of, in the form of desires, aversions, fears, and anxieties, we accept as normal the consequent roiling agitation produced by our obsessions and are surprised when a calmer person points out our inner turbulence to us; and even if we were capable of noticing our own subliminal agitations, it would be difficult for many to see beyond the tumult to a state of obsessionless lucidity, which we can barely imagine. Like any good Confucian, Xunzi uses something familiar to describe something very unusual:

The mind may be compared to a pan of water. If you place the pan on a level and do not jar it, then the heavy sediment will settle to the bottom and the clear water will collect on top, so that you can see your beard and eyebrows in it and examine the lines of your face. But if a faint wind passes over the top of the water, the heavy sediment will be stirred up from the bottom and the clear water will become mingled with it, so that you can no longer get a clear reflection of even a large object. The mind is the same way. If you guide it with reason, nourish it with clarity, and do not allow external objects to unbalance it, then it will be capable of determining right and wrong and of resolving doubts. But if you allow petty external objects to pull it about, so that its proper form becomes altered and its inner balance is upset, then it will not be capable of making even gross distinctions.  (Tr. Hsün Tzu, Watson, 131-2)

Mind — if by “mind” we mean the conscious ratiocinative and deliberative faculty –is a mistranslation of 心 (xīn), which literally means heart. But heart is also a mistranslation, because for the last four hundred years in the West it has been taken to express the merely emotional faculties, which are often at war with the merely ratiocinative. Modern translators will sometimes fall back on the phrase heart-mind, because thoughts and feelings emerge from the same center. We might say that all emotions stem from thoughts on some level, but it is not true to say that first we have a thought that then produces the emotion. Instead, all thought has some affective coloring, and in our experience thoughts and emotions emerge simultaneously or intertwined — and it always feels as if they emerge from the center of our beings, deep inside our bosoms, and not from beneath our skullcaps. 

   Thus by heart-mind the Chinese thinker fuses together all of our mental and emotional faculties. If we are terrified of death, it affects our whole being — our thoughts, our desires, our actions. If we find someone beautiful and are moved by desire, our entire spirit and body are stirred towards one end. When we are moved by opposing things — for example, desire for sex and love of virtue — our entire life, psychological as well as physical, is tormented by the opposition. Some people might say that when we are possessed by a desire or an error, our whole self is distorted by the possession, and it is really impossible for us to recognize it, since the mind has also been corrupted. However, Xunzi is both a pessimist about human nature and an optimist about human possibilities: he insists that it is possible for us to see and correct ourselves. Through reason and cultivated skills in self-reflection, we can notice when we are confused, and can actually step outside our own fixations and watch them in action. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t even notice that there is such a thing as fixation.

   To Xunzi, a well educated person is able to discern and evaluate accurately the people and situations in front of him at any given moment. This is not possible for a human being whose heart-mind is confused. Xunzi does not mean just intellectually confused, for a person might have intellectual clarity but be deeply confused in his heart — for example, the man who has carefully studied Thucydides and all the great theorists of war but whose every impulse is dominated by insecurity about his own manhood as well as fear of death. Such a man has a turbid heart-mind and will not judge clearly in the moment. If you guide it with reason, nourish it with clarity, and do not allow external objects to unbalance it, then it will be capable of determining right and wrong and of resolving doubts. For most of us this will obviously need work, as well as good teachers and friends. 

   The use of the image of still water as opposed to muddied water to express states of soul has become something of a cliché in later Asian teachings, but Xunzi was the originator. I have heard other teachers talk about a “muddy pond,” but Xunzi in his literary brilliance settles upon a pan of water: so homely, so ordinary, that it passes beneath our notice — just like the agitation of our heart-mind.

Published by Krishnan Venkatesh

Born in Malaysia in 1960 to a South Indian Brahmin father and a Hakka Chinese mother, Venkatesh was brought up in England and studied English literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he obtained First Class honors. He subsequently did research for over four years on Shakespeare at the University of Muenster, Germany, as a wissenschaftlicher mitarbeiter for the great Shakespeare scholar Marvin Spevack. From 1986-89 he taught literature and philosophy at Shanxi University, People’s Republic of China. Both his personal and academic background make him well suited to being a “bridge” between various traditions. Since 1989 he has taught at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, both in the two Western Great Books programs (for which the college is most famous) and was one of the shapers of the unique Eastern Classics Master’s program, in which he has taught for over 20 years. The program involves close study of the classics of China, India and Japan, as well as rigorous immersion in Classical Chinese or Sanskrit for the sake of greater intimacy with the texts. Venkatesh has taught in all areas of the program, including Chinese and Sanskrit. From 2003-2008 he was the dean of graduate studies at the college. With Socrates in the Phaedrus, he is skeptical of the value of writing and therefore of publication, and believes strongly in conversation as the most powerful mode of learning – the “writing in the heart.” St. John’s College has been an ideal academic home for him because of the shared belief in the power of discussion within a sincere community of learning. In the last decade he has spent a total of about two years in India. His recent areas of work have included the Pali Canon of the Buddha, the Japanese philosopher Dogen, and the mathematical books of Johannes Kepler. The lifelong companions at his bedside include Montaigne, Chaucer, Thomas Hardy the poet, Blake, Wordsworth, Zhuangzi, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Austen, Balzac, and Laxness -- a beautiful fellowship. Shakespeare is always close at hand.

2 thoughts on “A Pan of Water”

  1. Krishnan,

    I have often wondered myself why the Chinese seem to speak in terms of a composite ‘mind-heart’. And in fact the word ‘heart’ is used in a sentence when physically and biologically it can only mean the mind!

    But once you get used to the Chinese manner of ‘oral’ or ‘imagery’ in speech you sub-consciously treat the two organs as connected or as one in a neurological sense, and that in speech or conversation when we relate or refer to intellectual matters or thinking or analysis or reason and logic, these are the works of the brain but intuition or intuitiveness or emotive feelings are the works of the heart for there is no logic or reason involved; but the two are co-joined as if the mind is the ‘manner and form’ and the heart is the ‘spirit’.

    But of course the foundation of it all is founded on a mother’s intuitive love or a son’s intuitive filiality, for these basic Chinese traditional cultural values are not matters that are worked out through the learning or mechanics or logic and reason of the mind. And the Confucian and Taoist Masters simply explaining these values as in harmony with the Tao is just adding a mystery to a mystery – simply saying it is beyond definition or explication. Chinese chess!

    Vince

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