A path forty years long

Where what I tell you came from: a village in Yunnan, a grandfather who healed, monastery manuscripts and twenty years on the road

My friend.

Before you read what I write, it is worth knowing who is speaking to you and where his knowledge comes from. Otherwise the words stay only words.

The village with no pharmacy

I was born in a small village in Yunnan province, in the south-west of China, right at the foot of the mountains. There the clouds live below the birds, and the air smells of wet earth and wild herbs all year round.

Our village had no pharmacy. No hospital. What it had was my grandfather, Shen Wei.

People simply called him the healer. He wore no white coat. He wore an old cotton robe the colour of a tea leaf and always smelled of cinnamon and wormwood. People came to him with pains that had not gone away for years. With a cough the town pills did nothing for. With a tiredness so deep that a person had forgotten what it is like to be alive.

My grandfather would sit down beside them. Look into their eyes. Touch the wrist with two fingers and listen to the pulse the way a musician listens to an instrument. He would say nothing for a few minutes. And then calmly tell them what had to be done.

And people left. And came back different.

At twelve I became his shadow.

We got up before dawn. He would say: a herb gathered before the sun has touched the dew carries in it the strength of the night and the strength of the beginning day at once. That is the most alive moment of a plant.

He taught me that the same plant gathered at a different time is a different medicine. Burdock root dug up in autumn, when the strength goes down, is one thing. In spring, when the strength is only starting to rise, another. Nettle leaves before the flowering are gold. After the flowering they are not the same.

Nature lives by a clock. By the seasons. By the phases of the moon. And whoever wants to use its strength must live by the same clock.

When I was sixteen my grandfather began showing me the manuscripts. Old notebooks in leather covers, written in the hand of his own teacher.

When I was twenty, my grandfather was gone. He died quietly, in his sleep, at ninety-one. To his last day he had a clear mind, a steady step and a calm heart. He never complained about his health. One morning he simply did not wake, like a candle that has burned down evenly and without smoke.

He said to me: what I have given you is seeds. The tree you must grow yourself.

Twenty years on the road

First there was the Emeishan monastery, where my grandfather's teacher lived. I spent three years there under an old monk named Chen Bo. He was a man of few words. He could keep silent a whole day and then say one sentence that turned all of your understanding over.

It was there that I first got into the closed monastery library.

Manuscripts that had never left the walls of the monastery. Texts on herbal healing from the Tang era. Formulas for cleansing the blood that were used at the imperial court. Breathing practices that bring the lungs back after a heavy illness. The tea rituals of the monks for a clear mind. Protocols of seasonal cleansing, season by season.

I learned them by heart. For hours. For nights. I would wake in the dark and repeat the formulas so as not to lose a single word.

Then there were years in another monastery, with a woman healer named Pei Lan. She was past eighty, small as a bird and sharp as a needle. She read no manuscripts. All her knowledge lived in her hands, in her eyes, in fingers that could listen to a body better than any device.

Then there was Tibet. Two years with a lama who practised Tibetan medicine. Other principles, other herbs, another way of looking at the body and at illness: through the three life forces, wind, bile and phlegm. These are not metaphors but precise categories that describe real states of the body, only in a different language.

And the essence turned out to be the same as in the Chinese tradition. The body wants to be healthy. Always. The healer's task is not to defeat the illness but to take away what stops the body from healing itself.

The return

Over the next twenty years thousands of stories passed through my hands. A woman worn down by chronic tiredness for twenty years, who was put back on her feet by three simple changes in what she ate. A man whose blood pressure the pills would not bring down until he changed his morning ritual. A young girl with an anxiety for which the doctors wanted to prescribe strong drugs, and which went away when we restored what her body was missing.

Every one of them taught me something new. Knowledge does not stop. It grows, if you are attentive.

Why I began to speak after all

For a long time I did not want to write any of this down. Knowledge that lives only in words on paper is dead knowledge — so my teacher said. It should pass from eyes to eyes, from hands to hands.

But the times have changed. The world has sped up. People fall ill faster than they manage to understand why. And I decided: let these words find those who are ready to hear them.

There are no promises of a magical healing here. But there is a path. Simple, tested by time, open to anyone.

And if you need nothing for now, simply read. I have left enough here to begin without spending a thing.