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Introducing Voices on the Mountain
80 Plays2 years ago
In this episode we introduce our podcasts co-hosts Steven Wong and Asher Loring. We hope you our listeners are as big of TCM geeks as we are, enjoy!
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey,
Introductions and Podcast Purpose
00:00:02
Speaker
Steven. What's up, Asher? How you doing? How you doing, man? Good. So this is our little intro episode. I thought we'd go over who we are and what we're doing here. Great.
Meeting Backstory and Shared Knowledge
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm Asher Loring. I had the pleasure of meeting Steven at the student in Colorado. And I immediately knew that he had some knowledge that he could drop
00:00:25
Speaker
and make people's heads spin. So I have been pestering them ever since. Nice. And I am Stephen Wong. I met Asher when I was teaching. I just gotten back to Colorado from China after a remarkably long stay. Unexpected, by the way, of 11 years. And I knew Asher had both a kicking sense of humor and great dedication to the art we practice. And so you got to make that connection.
00:00:55
Speaker
Sweet.
Educational Gaps in Medicine
00:00:55
Speaker
So we've been talking for a while over the years and we thought we would turn some of those conversations into a podcast. Hopefully that we could answer and fill out some of the breadth and depth of our medicine that is lacking in our education out here. So true. And Asher also gave me a ton of insight into, I didn't even know what was being taught out here because everything I learned from the ground up was all in China. So I didn't know who Machocho was. I didn't know any of that when I first got here.
00:01:24
Speaker
And so Asher's going to, he's been super helpful in helping me figure out where there's confusion, deficits and such in the training and the textbooks and so forth. Confusion, mistranslations, all that stuff. So all the good things.
00:01:41
Speaker
You know, it's an interesting thing. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of practitioners, well, students really who are learning this medicine, and then as they graduate even into practitioners, sometimes they're taught not to question, which is really annoying. I mean, you'll even hear people like some of the teachers literally be like, don't question this. And I always appreciated it. Asher was always first the forefront, the vanguard of questioning. Like this doesn't make sense. And if it doesn't make sense, you really ought to listen to your instincts.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, and I always appreciate Steven because there's never a question that was too pushy or far out for him to answer or to accept and try to broaden everyone's knowledge base. Nice. Too pushy, too pulley, too graspy, too plucky, too rolly. That's a 20-night joke for you out there. I definitely got the, you know, don't ask why, just memorize and it'll make sense later. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So
Podcast Origins and Name
00:02:38
Speaker
we're calling the podcast Voices on the Mountain.
00:02:41
Speaker
We're calling it that because of both of our voices. I live out in Hawaii on the mountain of Mauna Loa. That's right. I'm in Denver, Boulder. Grew up in Boulder. Came back to Denver. Also, my last name is Wong. For those of you Wongs out there or those familiar of Wong, oftentimes when two Wongs meet, it's not a joke, by the way, but when two Wongs meet, they'll be like,
00:03:03
Speaker
King or Yellow? Well, I'm the Yellow one, and hence Yellow Mountain, so the name of my clinic is Yellow Mountain Clinic because it's an Ima for people, too. But if you guys do get a chance to go to China, big shout out to Anhui Yellow Mountain, best mountain in China, and that's not just my bias. Also, get some great tea. At the base of Anhui Mountain, there's a little city called Qiman, and they do a famous Qiman Hong Cha, which is sometimes translated as Ki Mun, K-E-M-U-N.
00:03:33
Speaker
You know, all those old wacky, waygiles, way of pronouncing stuff. So if you see kimun, red tea or black tea, sorry, we call it red tea in China. Americans call that black tea. And if you see that bad boy, that came straight from, should be straight from Yellow Mountain on Hui. Awesome. Well, we love good tea. We have a couple of tea firms out here in Hawaii. Oh, yeah. We grow good green tea, black tea, but not white tea. White tea is the one that we don't have the right climate for. Too warm?
00:04:03
Speaker
Maybe. I'm not the tea connoisseur. Yeah, nor am I. I'll drink it. It's a great place to learn Chinese for any of you guys in China too. If you want a good place to practice Chinese, just go hang out in the tea markets and they'll just be chatting. They'll chat you up a storm for a couple hours and just taste different teas. Yeah, we're missing tea rooms out here. We don't have that kind of like coffee set in the tea rooms, the go-rooms. Man, I wish we'd go. Right.
00:04:31
Speaker
I feel like France maybe hit it for a while, right? They've got the salons and stuff. Sure, exactly. But yeah, not us. Starbucks just doesn't stoke the imagination. No, it's not a cultural like pillar in the same way that the tea rooms are. Ah, it's a good point. And then there's actually a third reason.
00:04:50
Speaker
Do you want to get into that theme, the Confucius tie-in? Oh, yes.
Philosophical Insights: Confucius and Taoism
00:04:55
Speaker
One of my favorite phrases that I was introduced to in China was a phrase from Confucius that he said, those who are drawn to the mountains, have a tendency or an innate drawn to the mountains, are
00:05:15
Speaker
of the compassionate humane persuasion. So the way to say that in Chinese is Renji Yao Shan. And then he goes on and describes their kind of qualities. And he summarizes it in basically three words. He said Renji Jing, which is these same compassionate humane people. That's like the overriding personality trait of theirs. They're also prone to stillness or in this case, non-action is the same word.
00:05:40
Speaker
and then renja shou. These same humane people are also gifted with longevity. And then he parallels that with the opposite, which he refers to as churja. So renja, for those of you who have studied any Confucianism, ren, which is actually a standing man radical with the character for two next to it,
00:06:00
Speaker
Then that's for compassionate humaneness pretty much the most important thing in Confucianism and then the opposite would be Georgia which he actually uses the word sure which is for knowledge but it actually most people would acknowledge or say that it's referring to the
00:06:16
Speaker
fourth tone where you put a sun radical underneath it called zhi or wisdom. So he talks about zhi zhi yao shui, which means those people who are not necessarily wise, but it means like self introspectively wise, are drawn to them water.
00:06:33
Speaker
those same self, retrospectively wise people are prone to action, and then which means they're gifted with happiness. And Confucius's idea basically was, obviously he'd spent most of his life cultivating his own philosophy and theory and just so many different things. He's really the most, I think by far Confucius, the one thing he should be known as is like
00:06:58
Speaker
the world's best student. Yes, he's maybe the best teacher too, but he actually starts from him being the best student because he's always willing to learn and ready and excited to learn other things too from pretty much everybody. Different quote for that one in case you guys are nerding out on Confucius.
00:07:13
Speaker
here, he's basically saying the Confucian way, which is the Ren way, is more or less finding meaning in life by helping others, and then you yourself find meaning. Whereas the other way, Drurya way, is more or less referring to the Taoist path, which is if you understand yourself and really do all the work to introspectively
00:07:34
Speaker
you know, check everything out that's happening inside, figure out your motives, all that stuff, and really understand yourself fully, that everything that you do will be genuine, and everything that then comes out will positively affect other people because it's coming from... So it's actually his way of being pretty
00:07:52
Speaker
I mean, especially from way back then and being hit from his status for being like really open-minded, saying Daoism and Confucianism can both lead to a meaningful life. It's just kind of opposite paths, one from the inside out, one from the outside in. That
Invitation to Explore Traditional Chinese Medicine
00:08:06
Speaker
was not too long. No, it's beautiful. It's like 12 words on either side. It takes a little while to get to it. Takes up less space on your body than do.
00:08:19
Speaker
Well, if you're like us and are drawn to the mountains, then join us for our podcast. We'll be diving deep into all the intricacies of traditional Chinese medicine. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing you guys on the mountain.