Breath-Space and Seed-Time

It was wondrous enough as Coyote’s mischief, or Sun and Moon losing themselves in the dark love-making of solar eclipse. But in empirical fact, the birthplace of stars is now always everywhere, a quantum particle-burst blossoming out and flaring starlight where the mysterious fabric of gravity tightens. The more we know about it, the more wondrous it becomes, and we can see through knowing to the question that remains: Being, shadowy Being somehow ablaze with itself here, even after thinning and cooling for nearly fifteen billion years.

This is the Cosmos that modern science describes as space-time, a mysterious gravity-flexed fabric of continents and oceans, stars and galaxies, black holes and dark matter. Space-time is an uncannily literal translation of yü chou, one of ancient China’s foundational cosmological concepts. There are similarities, and yü chou too seems empirically accurate, but it is also something more, something primordial and alive and portrayed clearly in the pictographic dimensions of its ideograms.

The yü ideogram portrays breath spreading beneath a roof, rendered as the end-view of a traditional Chinese roof, its dragon-spine ridge and wing-curve slope. Hence: “the space beneath eaves” or “house.” Then by extension, it comes to mean “breath spreading free beneath the canopy of heaven,” from which is derived “the space beneath the canopy of heaven,” and on to “space,” “space itself as dwelling-place,” dwelling-place alive with primal breath. And so, the Cosmos as a living breath-infused expanse, as our breath-space home.

Similarly, the chou ideogram depicts a seed sprouting beneath the same dragon-spine wing-curve roof, from which comes the meaning “home” or “dwelling-place.” By extension, this becomes “a seed burgeoning forth beneath the canopy of heaven,” which came to mean “time,” “time itself as dwelling-place.” And this seed is also infused with that primal breath, making it the very image of a more primordial understanding of time. Rather than time as an imaginal dimension that seems to somehow leave us out of the fundamental movement of natural process, a kind of metaphysical river flowing past, chou recognizes the Cosmos as an all-encompassing present, a constant burgeoning forth to which we belong wholly. And so, the Cosmos as a generative self-emergent tissue, as our seed-time home.

Combined, yü and chou describe the two dimensions that weave together to form this Cosmos as a tissue of breath-emergent transformation. Vast and deep, everything and everywhere, including all the depths of our mental realm, this Being is always moving and changing. It is alive somehow—existence-tissue magically, mysteriously, inexplicably alive. It is whole—but not complete, never complete. Instead, it is pregnant through and through, subjective and objective realms a single generative tissue all dynamic energy in perpetual transformation. This is the Cosmos infused with an awesome sense of wonder and the sacred. There seems no other way to say it, for each of the ten thousand things, including everything that happens in the mind, seems to be miraculously burgeoning forth from a kind of emptiness at its own heart. And at the same time, it is always a burgeoning forth from an emptiness at the very heart of the Cosmos itself.

The pictographic images in yü chou are one way ancient China described this living Cosmos. Dragon, mythic embodiment of that shadowy starlit Being, dragon is another. Feared and revered as the venerable force of change, dragon is in constant transformation, writhing through all creation and destruction, all appearance and disappearance, shaping itself into the ten thousand things soaring through their traceless transformations, their origins and vanishings. This was seen as a kind of wondrous flight, captured in the ideogram for dragon, in which the image of a dragon’s body is graced with wings.

Our cultural assumptions tell us in so many ways that we “humans” are fundamentally other than “nature,” that we are not kindred. And that separation has led to the instrumental and exploitative relationship that has brought us so far into ecological collapse. If there is any hope, it must begin with a renewed sense of kinship between human and earth. Alive with the shelter of dragon-spine and wing-curve, this yü chou Cosmos is dragon’s realm, is indeed dragon itself. And according to ancient Chinese legend, we inhabitants of this realm are ourselves descended from dragons: Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice. Not long after primordial chaos separated into heaven and earth, Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice emerged half-dragon and half-human from Bright-Distance Mountain. They were the original couple, and Lady She-Voice gave birth to the first humans. So, we have dragon hearts pumping dragon blood, dragon minds thinking dragon thoughts. And our eyes, too, our wondrous eyes that can see through knowing to the question that remains: we look with dragon-deep eyes, and it is dragon gazing into dragon, into yü chou, this dwelling-place, this breath-seed home.