Qi is the cosmic breath that unites disparate forms.

Causality is relationships of resonance and resemblance. Connection, contact, and compulsion is the intimacy of similar Qi.

As we have mentioned earlier, for the Chinese, causation is primarily an inner transformation. Qi does not “cause” change; Qi is present before, during, and after any metamorphosis.

This ability for one thing to influence another is called in Chinese gan ying, which is usually translated “resonance.”5 If Qi is the link, resonance is the method.

Qi is not so much a force added to lifeless matter but the state of being of any phenomena. For the Chinese, Qi is the pulsation of the cosmos itself.

There is no standard or absolute—what is health for one person may be sickness in another. There is no notion of “normal” Yin-Yang—only the unique challenges and possibilities of each human life.

“In China, the purpose of painting is to rediscover the elemental and continuous course of the cosmic pulsation through the figurative representation of a landscape. … The tension created by the correlation between the lines and the washes, the visible and the invisible, fullness and emptiness, endows the landscape with a power to suggest more than

Knowledge, within the Chinese framework, consists in the accurate perception of the inner movement of the web of phenomena. The desire for knowledge is the desire to understand the interrelationships or patterns within that web, and to become attuned to the unfolding dynamic.

In the Chinese view, the truth of things is imminent; in the Western, truth is transcendent.