Categoria: English

The Chinese wisdom of caring: Feng Shui

Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

One advantage of globalization, one that is not only economic-financial but also cultural, is that it enables us to access values that are not well developed in our Western culture. Here, we will touch on the Chinese Feng-Shui. Literally, it means wind (feng) and water (shui). The wind carries Qi [pronounced, chi], the universal energy, and the water retains it.  On a personal level, it means “master of the prescriptions”: the wise one who, starting from the observation of nature and of close harmony with Qi, would point out the path of the winds and the flow of the waters and, this way, how to properly construct a dwelling.

Beatriz Bartoly, in her brilliant thesis of philosophy, of which I served as advisor, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), writes: «Feng Shui gives us a form of loving jealousy» –we would say caring and tenderness– «with respect to the banality in our existence, that in the West has long been discredited and underrated: to care for the plants, for the animals, to arrange the home, care for the cleaning, the maintenance of the bedrooms, preparation of meals, to adorn daily life with the prosaic, and simultaneously, with the majestic beauty of nature. However, more than buildings and human endeavors, the principal objective of this philosophy of life is conduct and action, because more than in the results, Feng-Shui is interested in the process. The value is in the action rather than its effect, in the conduct rather than the end result».

As is deduced, the philosophy of Feng-Shui is centered more in the subject than the object, more in the person than the environment and the house itself. The person must be involved in the process, to develop the perception of the environment, capture the energetic flows and the rhythms of nature. The person must assume a conduct in harmony with others, with the cosmos and the rhythmical processes of nature. The person who has created that interior ecology will be able to successfully organize its exterior ecology.

More than a science or art, Feng Shui is fundamentally a wisdom, an ecological-cosmic ethic of how to correctly distribute the Qi throughout our environment.

The multiple facets of Feng Shui represent the final synthesis of care in organizing the garden, the house or apartment, with a harmonious integration of the elements that are present. We can even say that the Chinese, as the classic Greeks, are tireless seekers of the dynamic equilibrium of all things. The supreme ideal of the Chinese tradition, that found its best expression in Buddhism and Taoism, represented by Lao-tzu (VI-V century a.C.) and by Zhuangzi (V-IV century a.C.), consists of procuring unity through a process of integrating the differences, especially the known polarities of yin/yang, masculine/feminine, space/time, celestial/terrestrial, among others. The Tao represents that integration, the ineffable reality with which it attempts to unify the person.

Tao means path and method, but also the mysterious and secret Energy that produces all the paths and projects all the means. It cannot be expressed in words.  Before it, only respectful silence suffices. It underlies the polarity of yin and yang and manifests itself though them. The human ideal is to reach such a profound union with Tao that the satori, the illumination, results. For Taoists, the supreme good is not found beyond death, as it is for Christians, but here, in time and history, through an experience of non-duality and integration in the Tao. A person who dies is submerged in, and unified with, the Tao.

To reach this union, harmony with the vital energy that courses through heaven and Earth, called Qi, is essential. Qi can not be translated, but is equivalent to the ruah of the Jews, the pneuma of the Greeks, the spiritus of the Latins, the axe of the yoruba/nago, the quantum vacuum of the cosmologists: expressions of the supreme and cosmic Energy that underlies and sustains all beings.

Through the strength of Qi, all things are transformed (see the I Ching, the Book of Changes), and permanently remain in process. The Qi flows in the human being through the meridians of acupuncture. It circulates in the Earth through the subterranean telluric veins, composed of the electromagnetic fields that lie along the meridians of ecopuncture that are interwoven along Earth’s surface. The expansion of Qi means life, when Qi retracts, there is death. When Qi acquires weight, it appears as matter, when it turns subtle, as spirit. Nature is the wise combination of the distinct states of Qi, from the heaviest to the lightest.

When Qi emerges in a given place, a harmonious scene is created, with soft winds and crystalline waters, sinuous mountains and green valleys. It invites the human being to build his abode, or locate an apartment there, where he can find himself “at home”.

The Chinese vision of the world favors the space, in contrast to the West, that favors time. Space for Taoism is the place of encounter, of confraternity, of the interactions of all with all, because all of us are carriers of the Qi energy that envelopes the space. The supreme expression of space is realized at home, in the garden, in the well cared for apartment.

The human being who wants to be happy must develop topofilia; love of the place where one lives and where one’s home and garden, or apartment, is found.  Feng Shui is the art and technique of building well the house, the garden, and of decorating the apartment with a sense of harmony and beauty.  In the face of the dismantling of caring and the present ecological crisis, the millenarian wisdom of Feng Shui helps us rebuild the alliance of sympathy and love with nature. That remakes the human presence (that the Greeks called ethos), based on caring and its multiple facets, such as tenderness, charity and cordiality.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

The essential caress that rescues our humanity

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The caress is one of the supreme expressions of tenderness which we dealt with in the previous article. Why do we say, the essential caress? Because we want to distinguish it from the caress as a pure psychological action, in function of a passing desire and without history. The caress-action does not involve the whole person. The caress is essential when it is transformed into an attitude, a way of being that defines one as a whole, in one’s psyche, thinking, will, one’s inner self, and relationships.

The organ of the caress is, fundamentally, the hand: the hand that touches, the hand that caresses, the hand that establishes relationships, that gives warmth, that brings calm. Through the hand and by the hand everyone reveals a tender mode of being. The caress touches the depth of the human being, where the personal Center is located. For the caress to be truly essential, one must cultivate the profound Self, the “I” that seeks the most intimate and truthful in ourselves, and not just the superficial ego of consciousness, always preoccupied with worries.

The caress that emerges from the Center produces repose, integration and trust. Hence its meaning. When caressing a child, a mother communicates the most guiding experience that exists: the fundamental trust in the goodness of life; the trust that deep down, and in spite of so many distortions, everything has meaning; the trust that peace is not a dream, that peace is the truest realization of life; the trust of shelter in the great Uterus.

Like tenderness, the caress demands total altruism, respect for the other and renunciation of any intention other than to like well and to love. It is not the skin to skin contact, but the giving of affection and love through the hand and skin, the skin that is our concrete self.

Affection does not exist without caresses, tenderness and caring. As the star must have an aura to shine, likewise affection needs the caress to survive. Caress of the skin, of the hair, of the hands, of the face, of the shoulders and of sexual intimacy, make affection and love concrete. The quality of the caress assures that the affection is not misleading, false or doubtful. The essential caress is as gentle as the soft opening of a door. There is no caress in the violence of slamming doors and windows, that is, in the invasion of the intimacy of a person.

Colombian psychiatrist Luis Carlos Restrepo, in his beautiful book on The Right to Tenderness, (El derecho a la ternura, Arango editores 2004), says: «The hand, a human organ par excellence, serves both to caress and to grab. The hand that grabs and the hand that caresses are two extreme facets of the possibilities of inter-human encounters».

In a wider cultural reflection, the hand that grabs embodies the way-of-being of the last four centuries, of the so-called modernity. The articulating axis of the modern paradigm is the will to grab everything, in order to posses and dominate. The whole Latin American Continent was grabbed and practically devastated by the religious and military invasion of the Iberians. And it extended to Africa, to China, to everything in the world that could be grabbed, and even to the Moon.

The modernists grabbed nature, dominating her, exploiting her goods and services with no consideration or respect for her limits, and without giving her the time to rest that would allow her to reproduce herself. Today we are harvesting the poisonous fruits of that practice, that lacks any type of caring or sense of caressing that which is alive and is vulnerable.

To grab is an expression of power, of manipulation, of turning the other or of things to my way of being.  Seen correctly, what has occurred is not a globalization that respects all cultures in their rich diversity. What has happened is a Westernization of the world, and in its most pedestrian form: the hamburgerization of the North-American life style, imposed on all corners of the planet.

The hand that caresses represents the necessary alternative: the caring-way-of-being, because «the caress is a hand full of patience, that touches without hurting and lets go, to allow mobility to the being with whom we enter into contact» (Restrepo).

In the present days it is urgent to rescue in human beings the dimension of the essential caress. It is within all of us, even if covered by a thick layer of materialistic ash, consumerism and futility. The essential caress returns to us our lost humanity. In its best meaning, it also strengthens the most universal ethical precept: to treat humanly each human being, this is, with understanding, acceptance, caring and with the essential caress.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, cybermelinaalfaro@bandalibre.com.

Tenderness: the life-blood of love

Leonardo Boff7 Comentários


The paths that connect the heart of a man to the heart of a woman are mysterious. Equally mysterious are the paths between the hearts of two men and similarly between the hearts of two women who find each other and declare their mutual love. From those connections is born the falling in love, love; and finally marriage or permanent union. Since we deal with liberties, the couples are exposed to imponderable events.

Existence itself is never established once and for always. It exists in permanent dialogue with the environment. That exchange leaves no one immune. Everyone lives exposed. Mutual loyalties are tested. In a marriage, passion is followed by daily life with its dull routine. In their lives together the two experience separations, volcanic passions erupt with fascination for another person. It is not uncommon that the ecstasy is followed by deception. There are twists, forgiveness, renewal of promises and reconciliation. But the wounds always remain, such that even when healed, scars remain as a reminder that once they bled.

Love is a living flame that burns, but that can diminish and slowly be covered with ashes, until it is extinguished. It is not that the persons come to hate each other, rather, they become indifferent to each other.  That is the death of love. The 11th verse of the Spiritual Canticle of the mystic Saint John of the Cross, which are songs of love between the soul and God, says with acute observation: «the pain of love is only healed with presence and closeness». Platonic, virtual love, or love at a distance are not enough. Love demands presence. Love needs the concrete closeness that, more than just the physical, is the face-to-face, and the heart feeling the throb of the heart of the other.

The mystic poet puts it well: love is an ache that, in my words, is only cured with what I would call essential tenderness. Tenderness is the life-blood of love. If you want to guard, fortify, and give sustainability to love, be tender with your companion. Without the balm of tenderness the sacred flame of love is not nourished.  It burns out.

What is tenderness? To begin with, let us set aside psychological and superficial concepts that identify tenderness as a mere emotion and the excitement of feeling the other’s presence. To concentrate only on feelings creates sentimentalism. Sentimentalism is a product of insufficiently integrated subjectivity. It bends in on itself and celebrates the sensations provoked by the other. It does not reach beyond itself.

Tenderness, by contrast, arises when one is not centered only in oneself, but reaches out in the direction of the other, feeling the other as other, participating in the existence of the other, and allowing oneself be touched by the history of the other’s life. The other marks the subject, by its lingering in the other, not for the sensations that it evokes in one, but for love, for the appreciation of the other and the value of that person’s life and struggle. “I love you not because you are beautiful; you are beautiful because I love you”.

Tenderness is the affection we give to others for themselves. Tenderness is caring without obsession. Tenderness is neither effeminacy nor renouncing of rigor. It is an affection that, in its own way, opens us to the knowledge of the other.  Speaking with the bishops in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis asked them for “the revolution of tenderness,” as a condition for a true pastoral encounter.

In reality we only know each other well when we have affection and feel involved with the person with whom we want to establish communion. Tenderness can and should coexist with extreme undertakings for a cause, as was truly exemplified by the absolute revolutionist Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1968). We hold dear his inspiring sentence: “we must be hardened but without losing tenderness” . Tenderness includes the creativity and self-realization of the person next to us and through the person we love.

A relationship of tenderness does not involve anguish, because it is free from the search for advantage and domination. Tenderness is the heart’s own strength, it is the profound desire to share paths. The anguish of the other is my anguish, their success is my success and their salvation or perdition is my salvation and, in deep down, not only mine but of all.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662),  XVII century French philosopher and mathematician, made an important distinction that helps us understand tenderness: he distinguished the esprit de finesse from the esprit de géometrie. The esprit de finesse is the spirit of purity, of sensibility, of caring and of tenderness. The spirit does not only think and reason. The spirit goes beyond: to reason it adds sensibility, intuition and the capacity of feeling in depth.  From the spirit of purity is born the world of excellencies, of the great dreams, of the values and commitments to which it is worth dedicating one’s time and energy.

The esprit de géometrie is the spirit of calculus and work, interested in efficacy and power. But where power is concentrated there is neither tenderness nor love. This is why authoritarian persons are hard and without tenderness and, sometimes, without pity.  But this is the mode of being that has dominated all modernity. It has cornered, and placed under great suspicion, all that is related to affection and tenderness.

From here also comes the terrifying vacuum of our “geometric” culture, with its plethora of sensations but without deep experiences; with fantastic accumulation of knowledge but with scant wisdom, with too much muscular vigor, too much sexualizing, too many artifacts of destruction, as shown by the serial killers, but without tenderness or the caring for one another, for the Earth, and her sons and daughters, for the common future of all.

Love and life are fragile. Their invincible strength comes from the tenderness with which we envelope and nourish them forever.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU

The ultimate cause of the ecological crisis: the destruction of the universal relationship

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

There are many causes of the ecological crisis. Here we address the most basic: the permanent rupture with the ultimate connectivity of the universe and its Creator that humans have introduced, nourished and perpetuated.

There is a profoundly mysterious and tragic dimension to the history of humanity and the universe. The Judeo-Christian tradition calls that fundamental frustration the sin of the world, and theology, following Saint Augustine, who invented the expression, calls it the original sin or original fall. Original here has nothing to do with the historical origins of this anti-phenomenon, or consequently, with the past. Rather, it relates to that which is original in the human being, which affects the fundamental and radical reason for human existence, and therefore, the present human condition.

This sin can neither be reduced to a mere moral dimension, or to an unsuccessful action by the human being. It refers to a globalized attitude, and thus, to a subversion of all human relations. It is about an ontological dimension to the human being, understood as a web of relationships. That web is distorted and corrupted, damaging all types of relationships.

It is important to emphasize that original sin is an interpretation of a fundamental experience, an answer to a challenging enigma. For example, the splendor of a blooming cherry tree in Japan exists simultaneously with a tsunami in Fukushima that devastates everything. There is a Mother Teresa of Calcutta who rescues desperate street people, and a Hitler who sends six million Jews to the gas chambers. Why this contradiction? Philosophers and theologians have long sought an answer. So far, without success.

Without going into the many possible interpretations, we accept one that is gaining ever greater consensus among religious thinkers: that is imperfection seen as a moment in the process of evolution. God did not create a universe that was instantaneously finished, a past event, totally perfect. Rather, God unleashed an open-ended and perfectible process that tends towards forms that are ever more complex, subtle and perfect. We hope that one day it will reach its Omega point.

Imperfection is not a defect, but a process of evolution. It does not express God’s final design for His creation, but a moment within an immense process. The earthly paradise does not mean nostalgia for a lost golden age, but the promise of a future yet to come. The first page of the Bible is actually the last. It comes at the beginning as a kind of scaled down model of the future, so that the readers are filled with hope for a happy ending to all of creation.

Saint Paul saw the sad condition of creation as a submission “to vanity” (mataiótes), not because of the human being, but because of God Himself. The exegetic sense of “vanity” points to the process of maturity.  Nature has not yet reached maturity. That is why in the present phase it is still far from the final goal. Because of that “all of creation still groans and suffers with labor pains” (Rm 8,22). The human being participates in this process of maturation, and also groans (Rm 8,23). All of creation anxiously awaits the full maturity of the sons and daughters of God, because between them and the rest of creation there exists a profound interdependency and connection. When that occurs, creation will also reach maturity, because, as Saint Paul says, “it will participate in the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God” (cf Rm 8,20).

Then the final design of God will be realized. Only then will God be able to speak the longed for words: “and He saw that all was good”. Now, these words are prophesies and promises for the future, because not all is good. Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of the hope principle put it well: «genesis is at the end, not the beginning». The human being’s delay in maturing implies a delay in creation. Human advances imply an advance of the whole. Humanity can be an instrument of liberation or an obstacle to the process of evolution.

And here is where the drama lies: when evolution reached the level of humanity, it attained a state of consciousness and liberty. The human being was created as a creator. Humans can intervene in nature for good, caring for her, or for bad, devastating her. It began, perhaps with the appearance of the homo habilis, 2.7 million years ago, when the instruments were created with which humans could intervene in nature, without respecting her rhythms. At the beginning it could have been a single act. But its repetition created an attitude of lack of caring. Instead of being together with everything, living together, humans set themselves above things, dominating them. And so it has been in crescendo, up to our times.

With this humans broke from the natural solidarity among all beings. They contravened the design of the Creator who wanted the human being as co-creator, whose genius would complete the imperfect creation. But instead, the human being assumed the place of God. The strength of human intelligence and will enabled humanity to feel like a small “god” and to behave as if in fact it were God.

This is the great separation from nature and the Creator that underlies the ecological crisis. The problem is in the type of human being that developed through history, more a «geophysical force of destruction» (E. Wilson) than a force for caring and preservation.

The remedy lies in re-connecting with all things. It is not necessary to be more religious, but more humble, more a part of nature, responsible for her sustainability, and more careful in all human activity.  Humanity must return to the Earth, from which it has exiled itself, and become her guardian. Then the natural contract will be remade. And by also opening up to the Creator, humanity’s infinite thirst would be satiated, and the reward would be peace.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.