Taoist Poetry on Breathing

Taoist poetry on breathing! What’s not to like? Here is a stanza by Lü Dongbin.

觀浪止息聞水聲  
退潮靜心聽沙響  
Observing the waves I make my breathing circular  
and listen within to the sound of the water,

As the tide ebbs I still my mind and hear the sound of the sand

Taoist language often contains many levels of meaning, so let’s unpack these two lines and see what is going on below the surface. This is one take, anyway.

First Line:

觀浪 guan lang: “Observing the waves”

I can imagine Ancestor Lü meditating by the sea, inspired by the rhythms of the water. Waves are also a metaphor for random thoughts.

止息 zhi xi: “I make my breathing circular”

This term is a little trickier. In Chinese it could easily be read as “stop the breath.” But xi has a special Taoist meaning. It is the space between the inhale and the exhale, and between the exhale and the inhale: that little gap when the breath turns around. When we take out that gap, our breathing becomes very circular, just like the waves on the sea. Where one wave ends and the next begins is not distinct. It is one continuous process.

聞水聲 wen shui sheng: “listen within to the sound of the water”

The poem uses two different words for listen. Again, there is a special Taoist meaning here. Wen means to listen inside the body; ting means to listen outside the body. In the first line the author is listening within, to the sound of water inside his body.

This line could be referring to a number of internal processes. When we become very still, we can hear the air going in and out of the lungs (not the sound of the breath in the nose, but the sound inside the torso). It actually does sound like waves.

It could also be the movement of our jing energy in the torso. Sometimes water refers to jing.

There is also a slow, swelling cycle of qi in the body that feels a lot like a wave. Not sure what it is, but the line could be referring to this too. My bet, though, is on the sound of the breath in the lungs.

Second Line:

退潮 tui chao: “As the tide ebbs”

Pretty straightforward. Ancestor Lü is still hangin’ on the beach.

靜心 jing xin: “I still my mind”

The order of characters in Taoist texts matters. Still mind (jing xin) is different from mind still (xin jing). “Still our mind” is youwei: we work to still the mind. “Mind is still” is wuwei: our mind is naturally still. Here the author is working to still his mind.

聽沙響 ting sha xiang: “hear the sound of the sand”

Here is where it gets a little deeper. In the first line he is working to hear the sound of the waves, a fairly short cycle. In the second line he stills his mind to hear the sound of the water in the sand as the tide slowly ebbs. A tide cycle is about 12 hours, a fair bit longer than a wave. We would need to be pretty still to hear such a subtle sound!