A quick note during lunch

This week I’m participating in a three day long intenstive seminar about Yin Zhai Fengshui practices here in Kaifeng.

The master’s name is Miao Tongqing and he is the teacher of my teacher Mr.Song.

Master Miao has been doing Fengshui for his entire life in the Henan countryside and specializes in both Yin/burial fengshui and Yang/house fengshui.

Since Yin Zhai is the root of all Fengshui, he suggested we should spend the week studying the fundamental traditions of that school including:

• the form school,

• Luan Tou Fengshui (a form school derivative that looks at land shapes),

• Li Qi Fengshui (compass Fengshui),

• The Xuan Kong flying stars school (a time space observation school that looks at how a landform or built structure transforms over the years),

• The San He School (a school that looks at changes in the earthly branches and heavenly stems to understand the cycles of fire, water, wood, and metal in nature).

• And other cool stuff.

I’m not ready to write a full summary of the program, but one thing I thought was genuinely interesting actually has to do with something I’ve heard master Yang say in the past about how different cultures learn.

Since master Yang began teaching in Canada he has taught Canadians, Americans, and people from all over the world, as well as, of cousre, ethnic Chinese people.

His observation about learning is that in a normal classroom situation Chinese people do not need to have all the information in order to grasp a subject while Westerners tend to prefer to have a complete theory laid out before they can really learn something.

These sounded like pleasant words until this morning when I was suddenly enlightened to the meaning of his idea.

I’m pretty familiar with form school Fengshui since I spent a lot of time over the past month mastering the Zang Shu/Book of Burial which is the first major treatise we currently have access to about Fengshui practices, but once the discussion went on to things like using the Stems and Branches to perform measurements which are outside the range of regular five elements creation and control relationships it was like being thrown in the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.

What I decided to do was really look into the core theory we were learning which is called the four offices theory in order to discover how it functions.

While the teacher taught these incomprehensible ideas about how water enters, passes through and exits places, I spent the whole morning reading about and figuring out why the stems and branches were being interpreted in this strange way completely foreign to the five elements framework I’m familiar with.

By the lunch break I had totally understood the core concept, but missed some of what the master had to say.

At lunch I aksed my Chinese classmates if they understood the stems and branches and every one of them said they were unsure and hadn’t mastered the theory, but at the same time they could produce practical information that I had totally missed on account of being confused about rudiments.

This is a really interseting reflection of what master Yang said since it shows, at least in my case that Western and Chinese learning styles are very different.

Basically as soon as I didn’t have a cognitive structure to fit the information in, I couldn’t actually take in the information until I’d put a structure in place while my classmates didn’t require the structure and could gradually fill it out, but perhaps over a longer period of time.

This isn’t about one style of learning being better than the other, but it is quite a fascinating observation and I think one of the clearer experiences I’ve personally experienced about where substantial differenes exist between Chinese and Western ways of viewing the world.

I actually came away from it thinking we could all probably learn a lot from each other since there is no doubt that structuring logic works very well to information retention and critical thinking, while being able to adapt quickly to new situations and bring in information in a way it can be used even though it is not yet fully complete is also an incredible cognitive tool.

I’ve been having some lovely discussions with a couple who belong to a local Daoist temple and look forward to the opprotunity to become more involved in this area of Kaifeng local culture. It is nice to make real connections and be able to engage in these fascinating studies with likeminded people, even if we often experience culture and the mind from very different perspectives (maybe it is that change in perspective that makes this learning and communication so attractive).

Very messy essay today as I have to head back to class soon.

Will report back again soon to tell you how it all went!!