Chapter 10: I’m Hungry

Old people often like to begin with a phrase: ren sheng zai shi, “a person born into the world.” Born into the world, all you want is a full belly and warm clothes; born into the world, who hasn’t had hard times? Speaking of the dead, there is another phrase: when he was in the world, zai shi, this was what he loved to eat most.

“In the world” says one thing more than “alive”: in this world, with a body. It needs to eat, to dress, to sleep; it gets cold, tired, ill, old. A person in the world: the first thing is not understanding anything; it is being hungry.

I’m hungry. I’m sleepy. My back hurts. I’m old. This body of mine is no good any more.

When people say these things, there is often a touch of disdain in the tone, a touch of helplessness, as if speaking of a not very obedient hired hand. My body: my hands, my stomach, my legs, my back. As if there were first a me living inside, and the body were mine, at my command; if it doesn’t obey, the fault is its.

People often don’t get on very well with this body.

When young, they seldom think of it. Staying up all night, drinking, working on an empty stomach, climbing to the top of a mountain in one go: it holds up through all of it. The body then is like a new car; press the accelerator and it goes, and the person sitting inside feels he can go wherever he likes.

Later it begins to make its views known. Stay up one night, and it takes three days to recover; eat something cold, and the stomach aches; sit too long, and the back goes stiff. People get annoyed: I still have so much to do, how can it be giving out already? A check-up at the hospital: this reading too high, that one too low, the doctor says be careful. Walking out of the hospital, the heart is heavy, as if betrayed by someone who had always been trusted.

Some go to war with the body. Think it fat, and they starve it; think it weak, and they drill it; think it ugly, and they go and alter it. Standing before the mirror, picking it over point by point: too much here, too little there, sagging here. The body becomes something to be disciplined, a servant who can never quite satisfy.

Some simply ignore it. They feel the body is a lower thing, eating and sleeping things one is forced to do, and what really matters is thinking, understanding, the heart, the soul. As the Chinese saying goes, the body in one camp, the heart in another: the body stuck on this side eating and sleeping, the heart always heading to that side, and what really counts is the heart.

And some, old and ill, lying in bed unable to get up, find the hardest thing is not the pain but the sentence: this body of mine is useless now. I’ve become good for nothing.

These shapes often assume the same thing: I am the one sitting inside the body, driving.

The body is the car, I am the driver. When the car is good, I drive it here and there; when the car breaks down, it is the car’s problem, I am still the same me, only stuck. The real me is not this heap of bones and flesh, but the one sitting inside, the heart, the one thinking.

So people fear the body. Fear it breaking down, growing old, disobeying, fear that one day it will stop and take the me sitting inside along with it.

Hunger shows this best.

You get up in the morning meaning to finish that important thing before eating. Half an hour of hunger, and the words won’t go in, the temper turns bad, someone in the family asks something and you answer more sharply than usual. Having eaten, you turn back into a reasonable person.

In that half hour, who said the sharp thing?

If there really were a me sitting in the body driving, and hunger were only the car having a bit of trouble, that me should be as before, calmly waiting for it to pass, as a person in a car that has run out of petrol is still the same person with the same temper. But when hunger comes, it isn’t only the stomach that changes: the way of thinking changes, the tone of speech changes, the way of looking at people changes. The one said to be sitting inside driving gets hungry along with it, irritable along with it.

There is more. Twist an ankle, and for a week the city you live in looks different. Steps you usually take two at a time become a hurdle to weigh up; the subway station that was close is far away; you start noticing where the lifts are, where the road is uneven. The city hasn’t moved, there isn’t one more brick; yet for that week he lives in another city. In winter, hands frozen stiff, typing is slow, a sentence is deleted and rewritten and in the end comes out very short; the one who receives it will think: why is he so cold today? Half of those few words were written by the frozen hands. After a sleepless night, the same matter the next day looks more annoying, harder, more tempting to drop. Growing old, one day someone finds he no longer wants to climb mountains, without having worked out any reason; his knees decided for him first.

When the body changes, the “I” changes along with it. There is no driver sitting inside, untouched. Every “I” that can be found is hungry with this body, sleepy with it, hurting with it, ageing with it.

But turned the other way, it doesn’t hold either: is the body then the real master, and the “I” only a by-product of it? That only swaps one master for another. The body is not an unmoving thing either: hunger comes and goes, the knees change year by year, the rice eaten becomes fingers, the breath breathed out returns to the room, and in a few years much of the body has been replaced once over. It falls ill, grows old, and one day will stop. Making the body the master is finding being another ground again.

Both ends are wrong, so what remains can only be this: no one is master of anyone. It is being, here, showing itself as a body that gets hungry; and within this body, showing itself as a person who can say “I’m hungry.” The body and the “I” are both shapes of this one time of being; neither sits behind the other, driving.

In the days, this sentence lands like this. It is not that you have a stomach, the stomach is hungry, and you are above it managing it; in that half hour, the hunger is you; the irritation that rises with it is you, and the sharp thing said is you too. There is no unhungry master sitting inside waiting for the stomach to return to normal. What people own is often the body of their youth: the one that went the moment you pressed the accelerator, that thought nothing of a night without sleep. When the body begins to make its views known, they say “this body isn’t like me any more,” “it’s dragging me down,” as if the real me were still the young one, shut inside an old, broken one. But where is there a young me shut in? What is being now is just this one: the stiff back, the blurred eyes, the one who needs the banister on the stairs. It is not a house you live in; it is you, now. The body of youth was you, this one now is you too, and the one that will one day lie in bed needing to be fed is wholly you as well. The moment you say “a body like this isn’t me,” a driver who resents the car has sat down inside; but no one has ever sat down inside this place, and no body owes anyone sitting inside it.

And that “world”? Born into the world: what is the world?

The handiest idea is to take the world as a big box set out in advance: a person is born, put into it, lives there some decades, and is carried out again. The box is there, people come and go, the box doesn’t change.

Anyone who has twisted an ankle knows it isn’t so. The same city, for someone who runs every day, is a very large map, dozens of streets all his; for an old man on a walking stick, it is those three hundred meters from his front door to the market. Which is the real city? If the world were a ready-made box, only one would be real and the rest mistaken. But the runner is not mistaken, nor is the old man on his stick; every hurdle in those three hundred meters is a real hurdle.

It can only be put this way: the world is not set out there in advance; it shows itself together with the body. If this body can walk, the world is a road; if it can’t, the world is a hurdle. Being in the world means just this: this one time of being, with its body, meeting its world.

Here we meet one of being’s “not”s: being with a body, you can only meet the world this body can meet, walk only the roads these two legs can reach, eat only the food this mouth can take.

Some won’t accept it and want to leave the world: the world is too noisy, too tiring, too entangled; they want to find a place to get out of all this. Go and live in the mountains a while, and it really is quieter; drop some entanglements, and the days really are lighter. But if “leaving the world” means going outside the world, then one must ask: where is outside? Living in the mountains, you still have to eat, and the rice is grown by people down the mountain; you still fall ill, and when ill you still have to go down to find a doctor; you still fear the cold in winter and draw mosquitoes in summer. The heart that has seen through worldly things also does its seeing through in a body that has had breakfast. What can be left is only a certain world: leaving a city, taking up another way of living. After leaving, a person is still in the world, only in another place.

Being in the world, there is no exit.

And there is that more respectable way of leaving the world: the body in one camp, the heart in another. What really counts is the heart; the body is only the half left behind.

The heart really does fly. But while it flies, what is the body doing?

Put your hand on your chest now. Something there is beating, once, once more. Did you make it beat? While you were reading just now you didn’t think of it at all, and it went on beating; last night, asleep, it was beating too; for many years before you learned to say the word “I,” it was beating already. In your whole life you have never once ordered it to beat, and it has never once waited for your order.

Clearest of all is sleep every night. Each night you lie down, and after a while the one who all day was thinking, planning, saying “I want such and such” disappears; no one remembers how they fell asleep. That night the body does not stop: breath after breath, more even than by day; it turns over, mends bit by bit what the day wore out, turns the food eaten into tomorrow’s strength. That “I” lets go every night, lets go completely; it is this body that takes over, all night long, and hands back in the morning.

If only the heart really counted, then each night when the heart let go, a person should not be for some hours. But on a night of deep sleep, being does not break off. What takes over that night, without the least effort, is exactly the half that is looked down on. However far the heart flies, it flies out from this beating chest.

This is not to enshrine the body as a ground more reliable than the heart. It too changes, and will stop. It is only the place where one sees most clearly: being does not wait for people to think of it before it is, nor for them to look after it. While people have put their minds wholly elsewhere, it goes on being, beat by beat, moving by itself.

Being with a body, there is one more thing that can’t be avoided: what goes on in this body, no one else can take over.

Pain in the body is always in a very particular place: a back tooth, the left knee, that patch of the lower back. When it hurts, the whole world shrinks to that place, and nothing else can be attended to. However much those beside you ache for you, they can’t take away a bit of it. This too is one of being’s “not”s: the pain of this place hurts only in this place.

Does that mean each person is shut in his own body, each hurting his own pain, no one able to reach anyone?

Anyone who has been ill knows: lying in bed unable to get up, nothing left of you but a burning body, someone pours a glass of water, helps you sit up to drink it, tucks the quilt in for you. That glass of water went from another’s hand to your mouth; that supporting hand reached from outside to the place that hurt most. When a person is most nothing but a body is exactly when others are closest.

Pain has an edge, and the edge is real; but the edge is not a wall. The body is a person’s edge, and exactly where others can reach him: pouring a glass of water, holding down a hand, can only touch on this edge.

When people grow old, this body stops obeying, one thing after another: the hand holding the chopsticks begins to shake, and the food picked up drops back into the bowl; climbing the stairs needs the banister, a rest at every floor. Many old people grieve over this and say the body “won’t do as it’s told any more.” But when did it ever do as it was told? The heartbeat never obeyed anyone; falling asleep never obeyed anyone. It was never an obedient servant; when young, it just happened to be heading the same way as the person. Now the ways have parted, and only now is it clear: the two were always walking together, and neither was leading the other.

When those shaking hands can’t hold the food, another pair of chopsticks often reaches over from beside and puts the food into the bowl for him.

Later still, some old people can no longer hold chopsticks at all and must be fed mouthful by mouthful. The ones feeding are often their children. Many years ago, at a table just like this, he held a small bowl, blew on the food to cool it, and fed it spoonful by spoonful into a small mouth; when the small mouth wouldn’t open, he coaxed it, pulled faces, pretended the spoon was an aeroplane flying in. Now the small mouth has grown up, and the one holding the bowl has become this child. The spoon goes over, the old man opens his mouth and chews slowly; a little spills from the corner of his mouth, and it is wiped with a towel. No one says anything.

A mouthful of rice, from a hand to a mouth. A whole life in the world begins like this, and toward the end it is like this again. In the decades between, people think they have always walked alone; there was not a day they could do without what others handed them.

“This body of mine is useless, I’ve become good for nothing”: the old man saying this is being. This mouthful he is fed is being; his chewing is being; the little that spills from the corner of his mouth, and is wiped away, is being too. He doesn’t need first to be of use to deserve to be fed this mouthful.

The human body leans on other beings, and birds are the same.

You cut your hand. First a little blood flows, and the blood clots by itself; then the edges of the cut go red, hot, a bit painful; after a few days it scabs over; a few days more, the scab falls off, and underneath is a layer of tender new skin. No one inside directs its growth, and no one approves its healing. It grows by itself.

A bird in winter, unable to find food, fluffs up its feathers and huddles into a ball, motionless on a branch, using sparingly the little warmth in its body. At daybreak, when the sun comes out, it shakes its feathers and flies down to look for food.

None of these bodies is anyone’s car. The wound healing is the body growing; the bird fluffing its feathers is the bird getting through the winter. They move by themselves, leaning on earth, water, light, warmth, leaning on other beings, being moment by moment.

This is “leaning on being is being.” Being by leaning on rice, on water, on light, on the glass of water someone handed you. Leaning on these, it is; there is no need, behind these, to lean on something greater and invisible.

The rice leans on the field, the field on the rain, the rain on the sea and wind, and the questions go on down. Whether at the very end there is something that leans on nothing, people have argued for thousands of years, and this layer need not be settled first. The rice in the bowl doesn’t wait for this question to be answered before it is rice: it is in the bowl now, hot, fragrant, and eaten it becomes strength; it is not left hanging. Leaning on is not owing; leaning on other beings, this time of its being is already fully being. Link after link, and whichever link you come to, that link is whole.

Nor is this to say that nothing has its reasons, and things just are any old how. A seed needs soil, water, warmth to sprout; a wound needs to be clean and nourished to heal; a person needs food to eat, a place to live, people to look after him, to live. These conditions are real, and lacking any one of them the days really will be hard, may even end. Being does not deny these. What being says is only: these conditions, these leanings, are matters between being and being; there is no thing standing outside everything whose nod must be waited for before all this can lean together.

Being in the world is just this: a body that gets hungry, sleepy, hurts, grows old, in this world, leaning on other beings, being moment by moment. Inside there is no driver, underneath there is no unmoving ground, outside there is no exit.

On the night of the illness, you wake in the small hours, thirsty. Before you have said anything, the person by the bed is already awake, getting up to pour water.

The one pouring the water is not thirsty.