May the Force Be With You: A Western Discovery?

By Tara Tai

All around the table are the clink and clatter of chopsticks being put down. My mother sits diagonally from me, fingering the pills by her mug. One of them, I see, is a round, white tablet called Lamisil, terbinafine hydrochloride. She puts it into her mouth and swallows it along with a gulp of Chinese tea.

Then, my mother clears her throat and announces to my brother and me that she is considering taking a local yoga class. “After all, you two are out doing big things and your father spends most of his time in Texas. Since I’ve been in America for so long, I think it’s about time I learned what yoga is.”

I shoot my brother a puzzled glance. My mother had always been a strict adherent to the philosophy that antibiotics are God’s panacea to the world, so yoga…? And when did yoga, a Hindu philosophy, become an American tradition?

Elements of Eastern health therapy are beginning to pervade Western society. Recently, my high school started offering meditation classes. The sale of new extract supplements like ginseng and ginkgo biloba is flourishing in pharmacies and health stores across the nation. And even here in Boston, an increasingly large number of people have switched from coffee to herbal teas—stores such as Teavana and Tealuxe are exploding with business in the Boston and Cambridge area. Tealuxe, for example, which opened in December 1996, has tripled its customer base in just over a decade. What is driving this sudden upsurge of interest in facets of an Eastern lifestyle? Is it for health reasons? Or is it just more of the “Eastern exoticism” that has recently been depicted on so many mainstream pop culture artifacts?

East Meets West
Western interest in Eastern exoticism is hardly a modern phenomenon. As early as 138 B.C.E., the Silk Road already linked Europe and Asia. In the centuries that followed, demand for foreign spices spurred Western explorers Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama to find shorter, quicker routes to Asiatic countries. Yet it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that the West started recognizing the East as a potential hotspot for knowledge, and with this recognition came a renewed interest in the East and its disciplines.

By the mid-twentieth century, the development of penicillin and antibiotics was allowing the American population to live longer as a whole. Yet accompanying the blessing of longer life came “unbeatable” disorders such as cancer and later, HIV/AIDS. The changing sees monks perform amazing feats of temperature regulation. He presents his findings in his book titled The Relaxation Response, where he offers a form of meditation accessible to everyone.

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. The Relaxation Response continues to be a national bestseller, and millions of people in the United States are actively practicing meditation in an alternative attempt to lead a healthier life.

Eastern Exoticism: A Familiar Stranger
So history seems to give us inconclusive answers. On the one hand, transcendental meditation caught on only because the Beatles popularized it. However, the Relaxation Response, based on the same concepts as transcendental meditation, seems to have withstood the test of time.

But to what extent are Eastern and Western medicine incompatible? To what extent is Eastern medicine “other”? According to Kuriyama, in spite of the way in which Eastern health practices may be marketed in the Western world, there actually exist some striking similarities between the two medicinal traditions.

Take breathing, for example. In both Indian and Chinese medicine, control of the breath (the chi) is fundamental to self-transformation, but that breath only connects to the lungs in passing. Circulation of the breath is seen as a holistic movement, something that encompasses the entire body. “Therefore, when someone is ill, the basic idea is that somewhere the chi energy is blocked, which prevents the circulation throughout the entire body,” said Kuriyama.

Looking at this comparatively, we see that Western medicine also charts the flow of oxygen throughout the entire body. When oxygen is cut off from one particular limb, that limb is deprived of an essential, and ultimately becomes useless altogether. What is different here, however, is how the mind is used to focus the breath to various parts of the body. While Western medicine seems to spotlight the lungs when there is a problem with breathing, Eastern medicine utilizes the non-localized power of human concentration as a honing device. Skilled regulators of the breath can even demonstrate seemingly impossible feats of temperature control. According to Harrington, “Some Buddhist monks can produce enough heat to dry cold, wet sheets during meditation.”

Another parallel is the network of conduits that acupuncturists follow to direct chi. This network actually corresponds to Hippocrates network of veins by which medieval doctors let blood. Surprisingly, neither network resembles the actual network of blood vessels. According to Kuriyama, the modern consensus is that acupuncture was actually derived from bloodletting. What is different, though, is the nature of the treatments based on this network. Chinese therapies concentrate on retention of fluids such as chi, while the prime concern of European practitioners throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was evacuation of poisons. Only recently has Western medicine targeted retention.

One Way or Many?
Perhaps Eastern medicine is not as exotic as we believe it to be. Maybe we have been working towards a convergence of Western and Eastern practices for quite a while, and it has only started to clearly shine through now. Throughout the twentieth century, many Eastern practices were adopted, and merely renamed to be more accepted by the public. Benson’s relaxation response is one example of this. Subtle movements were and still are at hand, however. As Harrington points out, the popular movie series, Star Wars, is filled with the “East Meets West” concept: Yoda is the ancient wiseman teaching the young, white Luke Skywalker about the force. Qui-gon Jinn, the greatest Jedi alive, has a name eerily similar to qigong, a form of Chinese healing. In light of all this, perhaps we are only now recognizing Eastern medicine for what it truly is: whether trend or science, the East retains a wealth of knowledge from which the West can learn.