A little bit the feeling of being in China
As I write this and prepare for the start of the summer holiday courses, I realise that some of you are still enjoying a well-deserved holiday. Some of you have braved the perils of the corona measures. Vaccination passport, PRC tests, border checks and discussions with friends, family and holiday destinations survived. But it is worth it… enjoying the foreign sun, far away from the misery at home.
I am not such a hero. After it had dried up a bit here in South Limburg, I left for the North. The intention was Sweden, but it became Drenthe and Groningen.
And the reasons for that are simple.
After a year of hard work, I no longer had the energy or inclination to fight with the authorities. And I miss China…
I haven’t been to China for at least two years. Usually, homesickness starts to rear its ugly head after a year. A holiday in France or Sweden can’t take away that feeling, so I decided to go to a very small part of China to get that feeling after all.
In the botanical garden of Haren (Groningen), Chinese garden architects and builders have recreated a Ming garden with original materials brought over by boat. Exactly as you would find it in HangZhou.
As soon as you step through the gate, you imagine yourself in the province of Zhejiang. Especially on a hot and sultry day like when I was walking around.
Besides all the different beautiful gardens and greenhouses, with their enormous diversity of plants, the Ming garden is really the highlight of my visit. There are also tours given by enthusiastic and knowledgeable guides, who can tell you everything about the construction, design and plants in the Ming Garden. But what they don’t tell you is that this Ming garden is a representation of the human body in Chinese medicine. For anyone interested in acupuncture and Chinese herbs, it is a feast of recognition when you walk around.
The whole garden is walled and on top of the wall is the back of the dragon. This is the skin with the Wei Qi. If you approach the garden wall from the outside, you will see Sophora trees surrounding the wall. In Chinese herbal medicine, the Sophora tree eliminates the external pathogen Wind-Cold and here at this garden it is no different. The Sophora tree keeps “evil devils” out of the garden.
Arriving at the entrance of the garden, to the left and right of the gate are the male and female lion dragons. They symbolise the right and left nostril, the entrance through which everything is checked to see if it is not harmful to the body. By stepping over the beam on the ground of the gate, which is supposed to stop spirits, you enter the “Garden of the 3 Friends”. You have arrived in the Lungs. The “3 Friends” are symbolised here by the pine, the bamboo and the maple” They symbolise Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism respectively. It is the “garden room” that makes contact with the outside world and welcomes the outside world into the inside. The outer wall bends inwards here and above the moon gate you can see the head of the dragon moving across the wall. This piece of wall moving in here is the pericardium and the moon gate under the dragon’s head therefore leads to the Heart. The Heart is depicted as a room in the Ming garden with a Tea House and the camellia plants complete the tea room of the Heart. And so my walk through the Inner Landscape continues in Groningen. I had little time for the rest of the hortus botanicus that day (I will come back for that tomorrow). With my writing book, I sat at the pond for hours. For a moment, I imagined myself in HangZhou or SuZhou… and I noticed that I felt like reading my classical medical texts again and having the conversations with you. I am looking forward to the coming encounters in practice and during the trainings and courses.
But I also miss my friends and colleagues in HangZhou and Chengdu… A botanical garden and Zoom meetings can ease the homesickness a little, but they cannot replace the real friendly meetings with tea, eating together and singing and talking…
