Interviews From the Daoist World: Livia Kohn
Interviews From the Daoist World: Livia Kohn
Scholar of Daoism & Religious Studies, Translator and Publisher
Hello,
This is the second in a series of interviews with teachers, scholars and translators of Daoism. Livia Kohn is emeritus professor of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University, specialising in the study of Daoism. Livia’s books were among the first I read on Daoism. She has published on the subject from many perspectives and our interview picked up on some of these, whilst also looking at broader academic issues surrounding the study of Daoism.
How did you come to choose Daoism as your area of specialisation? Do you feel your academic study of Daoism has permeated through and affected your life more broadly?
Originally, I was interested in different languages and how language affects the way we think. For example, certain metaphors and grammar structures shape our thinking in certain ways. From here I got interested in Chinese language because it really is so different, and this in turn led to an interest in Chinese mythology and religion. Again, these were completely different from anything Western that I was familiar with at the time.
When I was a student at University of California at Berkeley in the mid seventies, I took several classes with Professor Edward Schafer. He was originally a literature person but then got really into Daoism. He taught some of the Daoism classes there, which I took and found absolutely fascinating. Whilst studying Chinese culture I learnt that they did things like taiji quan and I started practising it. I still teach taiji to this day. Then, a few years later qigong began showing up in the Western world and I got somewhat into qigong, yoga and meditation. Since then I’ve been moving back and forth between these practices.
Using only a few sentences, how would you capture the essence of Daoism for someone with little prior knowledge?
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the assumption that there is a cosmic vital energy that flows through everything and that you can manipulate in different ways. If this energy flows smoothly in your life, then all aspects of your life will go well. If there are kinks in it, then you will have issues. There’s a lot of techniques you can apply to do this, from fengshui, to breathing exercises, dietary practices, devotional activities, etc.
In the Western tradition, things like paradise and the afterlife are seen as totally different worlds, which are a total break from this world. Within the Chinese tradition, on the other hand, they’re seen as continuations. It’s through increased skill in cultivating harmony that something like transcendence is achieved. As you cultivate your qi and it becomes more subtle, it eventually becomes spirit, which then merges into cosmic spirit. All of this comes from working on harmony.
What's the most common misconception that people have about Daoism?
The most common misconception is that Daoists are people who don't do anything! That they are laidback, lazy and going with the flow, like a vegetable, or a leaf that just floats down the river and which never does anything.
Unusually for scholars of Daoism you’re trained in Religious Studies. What intellectual frameworks and ideas from Religious Studies do you think are most useful for understanding Daoism?
I think it's very important to have a comparative perspective, because this gives you a broader set of theories for interpreting something more specific like Daoism. For example, there’s a myth that relates to Laozi and Yinxi, the gatekeeper who supposedly asked Laozi to write down the Daode Jing as he was leaving China. In this story, they meet up outside of China and have all kinds of adventures, including converting the barbarians to Buddhism. Over the centuries, many details were added to the story and it reached a high point around the sixth or seventh centuries. When I was looking into this, I suddenly realised, “Oh my God, this is the classic myth of the hero’s journey!” If I didn’t have a background in Religious Studies and had read Jospeh Campbell’s study of the hero, I would never have seen that.
Have you found that your academic study and embodied practice support one another? Is it a kind of symbiotic relationship?
Yes, it’s a symbiotic relationship. As you’re exploring certain topics, that impacts how you do your own practice. Then your practice comes and gives you a question, which you then go and explore. People ask me what my own position or religion is. I say that I work with and teach qi. Instead of seeing concrete things and firm realities, I look at energetic qualities, as things flowing, coming up and going down. You have this overall sense of fluidity. You have an overall sense of things moving together, and you do as much in your life as possible to create a harmonious, smooth flow. Our lives are arranged as patterns of qi, and nothing is ever one directional.
Do you think when early texts like the Daode Jing speak about qi, they are referring to a kind of distinct, subtle, energetic substance or do you think they’re talking about breath, or perhaps a general term to describe processes of transformation?
We'd have to go look at the texts and at specific passages to see what they are talking about. I would say it goes back and forth, but that for the most part it refers to subtle energy.
Do you think that the notion of qi goes to the heart of the difference between Eastern and Western philosophical worldviews?
Yes, absolutely. Qi is continuously dynamic. It keeps on flowing. You can't grab it and it's not static. On the other hand, the bulk of Ancient Greece, India and the later Western traditions were all into substances. Whether it’s a block that is stable and solid or the idea of an immutable soul, these ideas don’t exist in the Chinese world. It’s very difficult for people who have grown up with a Western perspective to shift over to this energy based, continuously dynamic model.
You have written about Daoism and Western science in your book Science & The Dao: From the Big Bang to Lived Perfection. How should we understand the relationship between the two? Is there conflict or harmony?
If you look at standard Western science, you won’t find much of an overlap. If you look at the margins, there’s a lot. If you read the book, you'll find that practically all the science that I'm referring to is off the chart, or at least took a long time to become mainstream. For example, it took a very long time for it to be accepted that the body has very subtle particles that emit light, called biophotons. The person who fist found this in experiments was a physicist and biologist from Germany called Fritz-Albert Popp. At first he was considered ridiculous and actually fired from his job. Then he went to a French lab for a while and eventually people in other places found the same thing.
So, what I look at is the margins of science, people who are firmly trained and solid scientists doing hardcore research, but whose thinking and conclusions are beyond those of standard Western science. Another similar scientist is Bruce Lipton, who wrote The Biology of Belief. He went against dominant doctrine and said that emotions and thoughts can have a direct impact on cell structure. So, it’s not only genes that determine life, which is the main model nowadays. Lipton showed very conclusively that the way we live strongly influences which part of our genetic code gets activated. This aligns with something that Daoism has always said; that our thinking and emotions strongly impacts our physical health.
What is the state of research regarding evidence for the kind of qi that flows through the body’s meridian system?
There’s different ways in which Western scientists are approaching qi. One is through the myofascial system; the connective tissue of the body. Western biologists and medicine practitioners have ignored this for a long time, but now they’re coming to realise that the myofascial system is a major connective, energetic pattern that holds the whole body together. There’s also been studies that show acupuncture accesses and adjusts this system. However, we’re still a long way off developing an understanding of qi that produces a real paradigm shift in the West.
Daoist studies in the West has developed greatly within the last thirty years or so. What do you think are some of the remaining issues in the field?
Over the last five or ten years, a combination of anthropology and textual study has started to develop, which has caused researchers to become increasingly alert to local differences within Daoism. Researchers go to a certain location, study the rituals and the methods, look at the texts and then try to figure out where it all comes from historically. So, we are getting a much better sense of this great variety within the tradition.
There’s still a lot more to be done in terms of looking at later Daoist texts. There are Daoists writing important commentaries and separate treatises all the way through to the twentieth century, which have not really been studied. If we look at internal alchemy, which has a million different schools, only one or two have really been studied. The relationship between Daoism and literature could also use another look. How does Daoist poetry relate to other poetry from the same or different periods? Even in medicine, we have medical texts that are being translated and we have more information about it all, but how exactly they all relate to one another and to the medicine of different periods still needs plenty of work.
Lastly, please could you tell readers about any of your upcoming publications or events that they may be interested in?
First, I run a publishing house called Three Pines Press that publishes a wide selection of books on various aspects of Daoist history, theory and practice. Connected with that, I also run a a lecture series called DaoExplore. Lectures are an hour long and held every second Thursday at 11am EST. For those that can’t attend, recordings are also made available. I’ve done these for over a year now and there’s a catalogue of thirty past lectures that you can also get recordings for. You can find a summary of all past talks via our website and people can also suggest topics for future talks too. We also have the International Daoist Conference, which is held almost every year. Next year it will in the second weekend of June in Leeds, England.
Thanks for reading this edition of the Nüwa Newsletter. Let me know what you thought of this interview in the comments below, and don’t forget to share this piece with anyone you know who might find it interesting!
道炁長存,
Oscar
Interested to hear about the conference in Leeds. I enjoyed one of Livia's books a couple of years ago.
Thank you 🙏🏽