Iron Pork 101

I thought back to the first time I met Kazi Dama, on Dave's and my second night hike with Pischering. When we got to our usual meeting spot, there he sat, chatting with Pischering. He appeared to be in his fifties, dressed in loose-fitting faded black cotton clothes, with close-cropped greying hair and an Asiatic or Native American look to him. When we approached he stood up and gave a short little bow. “Hi. I am Kazi Dama,” he said.

Pischering introduced us, and we started walking. Pischering and Kazi Dama raced ahead; clearly Pischering had been making an effort to accommodate our slower pace in previous weeks. As we scrambled to keep up with them, Dave slipped and twisted his ankle. When we finally caught up with them, we were out of breath, and Dave was limping painfully.

“Am so sorry,” Kazi Dama said. “Pischering and me no see each other long long time. We been so busy catching up we didn’t see you hurt. Let me look your ankle.” He removed Dave’s shoe and sock, and whistled when he saw the red and swollen ankle. Before we knew what was happening, Kazi Dama took what looked like a curly piece of bone out of a small bag he carried, and with one quick stroke slashed Dave’s ankle with it.

“Holy shit! What are you doing?” Dave yelled, looking at the squirt of dark blood pooling in the grass next to his foot.

“So sorry. Must move out bad blood,” said Kazi Dama, wiping the incision with a folded handkerchief. He then proceeded to apply what looked like a smooth grey stone to various parts of Dave’s leg and foot. Miraculously, the swelling seemed to subside. “Better?” he asked.

Dave stood up, incredulous. He walked in a small circle, then jumped up and down. “That is so weird! The pain is gone – it feels like I never twisted it at all! What kind of magic was that?”

Kazi Dama shrugged. “That is what to do, if you sprain ankle,” he said. “No is magic.”

“Kazi Dama, I’d like you to teach these boys about Iron Pork ,” said Pischering. “They move like old men, and if they want to hike with me, which they assure me they do, they need to get healthy.”

“Iron Pork?” we asked in unison. It sounded like a bad kung fu movie.

“Well,” said Kazi Dama. “Where to start?” He folded his legs under him and lit a cigarette. He inhaled, and then blew the smoke out slowly. “In my country,” he said, “people and pigs are good friends. You see, we live in the high mountains, and long long time ago, my ancestors had to survive for a long, long time what we call ‘the Great Cold’. During the Great Cold, winter never end. Always cold! Always ice and snow! No plants to eat. So, during Great Cold we eat pigs. Pigs were so strong, they survive good. They dig into ice and ground, find roots and other things to eat. My ancestors hunt pigs, and eat pig meat, use pig fur and pig skin for making many things. And you know what? Wild pig meat very good for them! Make strong! Best hunters make friends with pigs. They wait, in the cold, very still, until pig come. They talk with pig! They talk long time, all night long. Only if the pig say, ‘Take me,’ then hunter kill pig.”

“No living thing wants to die, unless maybe it’s sick,” Dave said skeptically.

“Ahh…,” said Kazi Dama, puffing on his cigarette. “You see, pigs do get sick, or hurt. Before Great Cold, pigs take care themself pretty good. They find wild herbs to heal themself. But during Great Cold, no more herbs! So we help them. They come to our caves and cry, and my ancestors take them in and help them. Pigs and people make deal: pigs give us food, and we help them when they sick or hurt. We also make promise to pigs, promise to never keep them in fences, promise they are always free. So Iron Pork come from killing and healing, together. Iron Pork maker, Khazan Doshi, was mighty hunter in Great Cold. He play with the pigs, ride on them in mountains, play with them in snow. Pigs teach him about healing roots. The hunting and healing art that he make, he call Iron Pork. Eating pigs make my people strong like iron, and pigs’ family love also strong like iron. Also, in our medicine we use iron for healing.”

“Iron for healing?” I said. “You mean, like iron pills?”

Kazi Dama laughed. “No,” he said. “Long ago, even before Great Cold, there was one terrible, beautiful night when fire snakes and dragons fill the sky. Then, people find smooth black and grey stones on ground. My ancestors think stones magic! They rub on pain places, on baby in belly, all over body, and they find out stones good for healing. Actually, stones are…” Kazi Dama quickly conferred with Pischering about the correct word choice. “…meteorites. Mostly iron! During Great Cold, we use stones to heal, because no herbs. On Dave’s leg, after bleed with sharp pig tooth, I use small meteorite.”

“So you fixed my ankle with a meteorite?” said Dave. “How does that work?”

“Don’t know,” Kazi Dama said. “I just know it work! When you hold in your hand you feel something,” he added mysteriously. He handed it to Dave.

Dave held onto the stone for a few minutes, and announced, “I don’t feel a thing!” I tried as well, and was similarly oblivious.

“Well,” said Kazi Dama. “Maybe nothing wrong now so feel nothing. Or, maybe you no pay enough attention! Mostly, stone seem to be…” He checked with Pischering again, then said with great difficulty, “…in-for-ma-tion amp-li-fi-er.”

“Information about what?” asked Dave.

At this point Pischering interjected, feeling perhaps a need to augment his friend’s limited skills in the English language. “We are getting ahead of ourselves here,” he said. “Kazi Dama is trying to educate you to get you ready to learn the basics of Iron Pork, and here you are asking him about the Pischering Field.”

“The Pischering Field?” Our curiosity was piqued. “What does Pischering have to do with Iron Pork?” we asked Kazi Dama.

“Pischering is a great Iron Pork master!” Kazi Dama said, with great delight.

“When I say ‘Pischering Field,’ I use the word ‘Pischering’ in its literal meaning of ‘human being’,” explained Pischering. “The human body emanates a kind of force field, which carries information about what’s going on inside the body. It is this information that the stone can help you sense,” he explained. “It is a basic human thing, not unique to Iron Pork. In my childhood we were taught to speak of this emanation as the Pischering Field.” He paused for a few seconds, as if wondering whether what he was going to say next would just confuse us even more. “You see, all people, all living things, hell – all things, period! – exist in one great field that connects all of us.”

Using Pischering as a translator, Kazi Dama added, “In my country we have our own word for the field. We call it ha. Ha is what animates all living things, ha is in the movements of the wind, the changes in the weather. Ha is the essence of life. It is what connects us to everyone and everything else. We celebrate it every time we laugh: Ha ha ha!” This statement seemed to trigger some genuine feelings of wellbeing in Kazi Dama, for he was seized by a fit of mirth that continued for some time: “Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Seeing that Dave and I were thoroughly baffled, Pischering added, “The important thing that Khazan Doshi learned from the pigs is how to be, how to simply be. You see, people are too smart for their own good. Khazan Doshi learned from the real world of animals how to simply be, how to live, to inhabit the body and enjoy existence. He learned how to cut through the crap and experience our drives, our needs, our lives in a healthy way. The tradition that he founded is called Iron Pork.”

Kazi Dama calmed down and cleared his throat, a comical, self-importance cough. He ceremoniously applied some lip balm and turned very serious. “Now I give you first lesson in Iron Pork,” he said. “Master these things and you will find contentment.”

I thought Kazi Dama would launch into a speech, but instead he pulled out two large business cards and handed one to me and one to Dave. I looked at mine, and was struck at what an odd thing it was. It was clearly handmade, cut out of a thick rice paper, with squiggly black ink markings that, I finally realized, were not Champogrlan but English. This is what the business card said:

IRON PORK LESSON ONE: THE FIVE APPETITES

TO UNDERSTAND YOURSELF, TO LIVE A HAPPY LIFE, KNOW THE FIVE APPETITES:

1. THE APPETITE FOR LIFE
2. THE APPETITE FOR LOVE
3. THE APPETITE FOR FOOD
4. THE APPETITE FOR POWER
5. THE APPETITE FOR SEX

THE KEYS TO THE HEALTHY FULFILLMENT OF THE FIVE APPETITES ARE ENJOYMENT AND APPRECIATION.

The Fire Sermon

A couple of months after I started acupuncture school, Pischering made his first appearance at SCCCM. It was evening, and Pischering had come to pick up Kazi Dama at the end of a clinical teaching shift. I believe they were planning on going out for a steak dinner at the Hindquarter. That same evening, there was a class going on in one of the larger classrooms. It was called Exploring the Five Elements, and it was being offered to students and to interested members of the general public. Chinese medicine utilizes this idea of the five elements, or five phases – Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water – quite extensively, and it is a model that is applicable not only to medicine and human physiology, but to all aspects of life. The class was being offered as a five-seminar series, with each seminar exploring one element from a variety of viewpoints. The organizer and facilitator was Dr. Finkelstein, a popular teacher of a style of acupuncture that was based almost completely on the five elements.

Quite by chance, the last speaker of the evening, someone promoting firewalking for personal growth, canceled at the last minute. Dr. Finkelstein intercepted Kazi Dama just as he was leaving the building, and asked him to fill in for the firewalker. “All you have to do is talk about fire for an hour!” he pleaded.

Kazi Dama patted Dr. Finkelstein reassuringly on the back. “I can do much better than that,” he said. “I will have my friend Pischering speak. He is a much better teacher than me. Look! Here he comes now!”

And that was how Pischering got roped into talking to a class full of acupuncture students and a handful of Surf City residents. After hearing that Pischering had spent part of his life as a healer in Africa, I was glad to have this opportunity to hear him speak to this group of future doctors. Maybe he would say something about being a doctor. I sat in on the class.

“Good evening,” Pischering began. “My name is J. Pischering. I am a good friend of Kazi Dama’s” – he bowed briefly in his friend’s direction – “and I understand I am to talk about fire this evening!” He paused for a moment, closing his eyes and gathering his thoughts.

Pischering opened his eyes and began his lecture. “If you think about it, numerology is the basis of all systems of thought,” he said. “Why do we have a seven-day week? A twenty-four hour day? A sixty-minute hour? Twelve inches to a foot? These measures are artifacts of the numerological thinking of our ancestors. Most systems of thought start with a numerology of Two: Nothing and Something. Space and Time. Matter and Energy. The Yin and Yang of Chinese culture. Among my people, the fundamental duality was expressed as Earth and Sky. I believe that the Chinese have something very similar – Heaven and Earth. They introduce Man in between, creating a numerology of Three. But the subject of this seminar series, as I understand it, is the numerology of Five.

“Let’s consider the five elements, shall we? Let’s start with another system of five elements, one that is utilized by the Hindus and Buddhists: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. What you will notice right away is that this series is a progression – a progression from the most substantial to the most rarified. This tells you that the worldview of the system in which it originated is based on the idea of transcendence, of ascending to ever more subtle realms until one arrives at the ‘quintessence’ , the highest and most subtle element that is beyond this realm. And indeed, this is the agenda of Hinduism and Buddhism and many other religious or spiritual systems.

“And what about the Chinese five elements – Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water? Wood burns to form fire; fire then makes ash which becomes earth; deep in the earth metals form; on the cold metal water condenses; water feeds the tree that makes wood, which feeds the fire, and so on. You immediately see that this is a cycle, not an ascending series like the Hindu/Buddhist five elements. What does this tell you about Chinese thought?”

“That it’s based on cycles?” ventured an enthusiastic first-year student.

“Exactly!” said Pischering. “And that is why your medicine works so well – because it understands interacting cycles, which is what human physiology is all about. Does this mean that the Chinese model is right and the other one is wrong? Of course not! They are simply different models. If the Shaivite yogi visualizes fire in his shoulder blades, and the Taoist alchemist visualizes fire in his heart or under the cauldron of his kidneys, is one of them putting the fire in the wrong place? Of course not! But is fire something that both of them, and every other human being, can relate to? Absolutely.

“I would like to argue tonight that fire is primary in a way that the other elements are not, and that an understanding of fire is very important if we are to come to an understanding of human nature. Why is fire primary? Well, think back to the fundamental dualities. Einstein’s mass and energy. Fire is energy. The fireball of the Big Bang. The Something in the Nothing/Something pair was originally pure energy. Fire. It is tempting, for us as water-based organisms, to think that water is primary. But long before there was water for the first organisms on this planet to evolve in, long before there was earth for the water to collect in, long long before there were plants to grow out of the water and earth, long before there was metal or any other kind of matter, there was energy. There was fire.

“In our neck of the universe, the immediate, obvious emanation of fiery energy is the sun. When we speak of ‘fire’ in the everyday sense, we are talking about the raw energy of the sun, trapped in matter by a plant, then released back out of matter as light and heat via the breaking of chemical bonds. Our metabolic ‘fire’ is one step removed; the solar energy that has been trapped by plants (or by animals who have eaten plants), then released within our bodies by the fire of digestion to fuel our life activities.

“Because our life itself is essentially solar fire expressing itself, it is very important to understand the nature of fire, to understand our own nature. Have you ever been camping, and it turned dark, and cold, and you got the fire going? How good it felt? How you were compelled to keep the fire going, how primal that need was? Imagine if you were the first human being to discover how to make fire! Before that, when it got dark at night it was that much easier for a tiger or lion to pounce on you and eat you for dinner! Imagine how cold it must have been in the winter, even under several layers of animal skin! With the fire, the animals were scared and stayed away. With the fire, you could stay warm. With the fire you had light at night, you could extend the activities of your day. With the fire you could cook! How much better life suddenly must have gotten!

“But there is a downside. All this burning of wood produces smoke, which as we now know contains carbon gases that trap solar radiation and cause global warming. All this burning of wood as the human population grows causes deforestation and desertification, and air pollution. Plants do this amazing thing where, powered by sunlight, they take carbon out of the carbon dioxide in the air, combine it with hydrogen and oxygen from the water in the ground, and make solid matter, make themselves out of these molecular building blocks. As a waste product they make the oxygen that we breathe. Every time we burn wood or any plant product, we release not just the stored solar light and heat; we also release carbon, in the form of greenhouse gases, back into the atmosphere. As we get more and more clever, we find other things to burn – gas, coal, petroleum – and the problems get worse and worse. The funny thing is, we are now so clever that we understand the damage we are doing, but we can’t stop! The reason we can’t stop is that this fiery spirit, this tendency to expand and spread and destroy, is in our very nature. We are fire, and how can fire control itself?

“So this, my friends, is the conundrum of our species. Can we change our nature? Can we transcend? Or is our fire nature part and parcel of what we are and will it continue to ruin our world? This is your homework! Meditate on fire!”

And that was the end of what would come to be known as Pischering’s Fire Sermon. Some people clapped; the environmentalists in the crowd yelled, “Right on!”; quite a few people looked dazed or bummed out. One woman raised her hand and said loudly, “But what about the Nothingness that preceded the Something? You say that fire is primary; well, what about the Void that comes before? Maybe that’s our true nature.”

Pischering was halfway out the door, but he stopped, turned, looked at the woman, nodded admiringly, and said, “Very good! We have a Buddhist in the crowd! This is an excellent philosophical point, and worthy of our consideration. The numerology of One* is very appealing indeed. Good bye!”

A lot more people had questions, but Pischering and Kazi Dama were very hungry and they politely but quickly extricated themselves from the buzz around them so they could go eat their steaks.


*On this confusing point of the equivalence of the Void (zero) with what he calls the “numerology of One,” Pischering later explained to me that in his view, the yearning for the original state that is thought to precede existence is the same “yearning for the One” in all religions – whether they call it God or the Void or whatever.

Grateful

I immersed myself in my studies with an obsessive zeal, learning all I could about traditional Chinese medicine (“TCM”). I even finagled a part-time job with SCCCM as their continuing education coordinator, so that I could invite famous teachers from all over the country to give seminars for the local acupuncturists and interested students. This meant that in addition to the regular coursework, I arranged and attended courses on specialties such as traumatology, women’s health, pediatrics, qigong (Chinese breathing/exercise techniques), and moxa (a type of heat therapy, using burning mugwort herb over acupuncture points). But I learned the most from Kazi Dama. Because he wasn’t trained in traditional Chinese medicine, yet was an accomplished healer whose methods overlapped with acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, he was able to push me to think outside the TCM box. For instance, when he saw me memorizing the locations of acupuncture points by anatomical landmarks and proportionate measurements as I had been taught in class, Kazi Dama would instead have me press my thumb along the grooves between muscle groups, stopping whenever I felt a spot that seemed tight, loose, painful, energetically “sticky,” or otherwise odd. “That’s where the points really are! Find the real points!” he insisted. And he was always making me taste the herbs, not just memorize what they were good for.

But most of all, what I learned from Kazi Dama I learned by example. And the biggest lesson I learned from him was appreciation. Before meals, he would clap his hands together and mumble something in Champogrlan. Once, we were walking down the street and it started to rain. He looked up at the sky with a big smile on his face, and mumbled the same words. I asked him what he was always mumbling, and he looked at me and translated: “Thank you.”

“Thank you?”

“Yes. Thank you,” he repeated. “There is always something to be thankful for.”

And he was right. There was so much to be grateful for. My beautiful, wonderful wife A., who stuck by me through years of my figuring out what I wanted to do – how many people are lucky enough to meet, much less marry, their soulmate? And my amazing daughter S. – writer, musician, spelling bee winner, basketball player, back-scratch lover and soon-to-be teenager – so intelligent and athletic and just such a great kid. And my son L., the brave Red Hawk of our self-created tribe the White Tigers of the West (named after the ancient Chinese constellation; no white supremacy going on here), a boy with so much heart that it spills out and touches everyone around him, an inquisitive and sensual tiger cub who is as comfortable snuggling into bed with a stuffed animal and a good book as he is swordfighting with a stick or inventing things out of Lego.

This feeling of appreciation extended to every detail of my life, to my friends, to Pischering and Kazi Dama, to my teachers of Chinese medicine, to every patient I came into contact with at Scum’s teaching clinic, each of whom let me and my classmates into their private worlds of illness and pain. It was such an honor to be allowed in, to have a look-see via pulse and breath and a lot of questions, then to try to help them with our needles and herbs. And it was so satisfying when they felt better.

Kazi Dama’s and Pischering’s influence on my self-concept as a future healer was driven home to me one afternoon during a lunchtime demonstration at Scum. These brown bag meetings were organized by the student council, and usually consisted of a lecture or demo by a visiting healer of some type or other. On this particular day, the guest was a fifty-something Korean healer who went by the name of Blue Mountain . He was billed as a “Taoist master” (why was everyone calling himself a Taoist master?) whose specialty was the use of two tennis ball sized stone balls that he rolled around on you as a form of massage. He had been invited by my classmate Andy, who had undergone several treatments with Blue Mountain and was impressed with what they had done for his bad back.

Superficially, Blue Mountain was not unlike Kazi Dama. They looked to be of similar age, they were both Asian, they both wore funny clothes, they were both charismatic, and they were both healers who used stones in their work. But their approaches to healing were diametrically opposed. Kazi Dama was sensitive, rational, and did his best to produce no pain in his patients. Blue Mountain’s method was basically to find tight areas on the patient’s body, then crush those areas repeatedly by rolling his stone balls over them. The process was extremely painful, as I would find out.

Blue Mountain’s worldview was quite different from the views of either traditional Chinese medicine or Iron Pork. He did not apply the theories of Chinese medicine to arrive at a sophisticated diagnosis. He just asked people where their discomfort was, then proceed to flatten those areas with his stone balls, ignoring their screams of pain. He believed that all pain was due to ghosts, not qi stagnation or bad circulation or some problem with the acupuncture channels. He believed that it was his calling to exorcise those ghosts – in his approach he was really more of a shaman and an exorcist than a physician.

Blue Mountain needed a volunteer to demonstrate his method, and I raised my hand. He had me sit on a thin futon he had unrolled in the student lounge, and asked me when my birthday was. He scribbled the information down on a notepad and made some quick calculations. He shook his head, saying “Ahh, very bad karma, very very bad.”

I grew a little concerned, wondering what bad omens his Korean astrology had yielded. He showed me his scribbled notes, pointing with a finger at the three lines of my birthdate. I gathered that he wasn’t doing astrology at all, but a simple numerology based on adding up the integers of my birth year, month, and day. His mathematics revealed that the year and day were “male,” but the month was “female.” This meant, Blue Mountain said, that my heart was a woman’s heart. This was an extremely bad configuration, he said, if you happened to be male. Fortunately, Blue Mountain had a fix. He announced that he would fix my karma: “Heaven tell me you very very bad karma. But no problem – Blue Mountain change your karma.” Apparently, Heaven told him all kinds of stuff: that he would attract disciples from all over the world, that he would start a school in the United States, that his stone balls could cure anything from kidney stones to cancer, that he should go to Reno for a weekend gambling trip.

Then, Blue Mountain asked me what my health problems were. I was actually not feeling too bad, but have a slightly arthritic left hip that sometimes bothers me, and my right shoulder had been hurting lately, so I pointed those areas out to him. He had me lie face down with my left knee bent out to the side, then proceded to roll the balls on my butt and hip. It was painful, but bearable if I breathed with it. Then, he had me roll over and he immediately began rolling the balls on the right side of my chest, on the pectoral muscles near the sternum. It was excruciating – it felt like he had plunged a dagger into my chest and was twisting it around in there. I screamed, but he didn’t let up. With difficulty, I overcame the urge to flip him over and knock him senseless or choke him. Finally, after several long minutes, he stopped. He had me get up and move around. “Better?” he asked.

Not wanting him to torture me anymore, I immediately nodded my head and said, “Better.” No wonder he thought he cured everyone he ever worked on! Blue Mountain positioned himself opposite me, sitting with knees crossed and hands together as if praying. His eyes were closed, and I wondered if Heaven was talking to him. He opened his eyes and announced, “Now Blue Mountain change your karma.” Then he started making a strange sound. It sounded like a big fly buzzing. Then he chanted another, higher-pitched sound, and announced that my bad karma had changed. I thanked him and took a seat in the audience, and he went on to treat several other people.

Blue Mountain was quite a hit with my schoolmates. He had the look: baggy Asian clothes, grey hair in a topknot, grey wispy beard. And he was a Taoist master! I think that acupuncture students are just naturally drawn to Taoist masters, especially if they do some kind of astrology. But I was not impressed. It seemed to me that he had something of a New Age scam going on, that capitalized on people’s insecurities and their wishes for health and wholeness. By first diagnosing your bad karma he brought out the insecurity, then he held out his treatment as a way to fix your aches and pains and the bad karma too – what a deal! And it seemed that many people felt they had to suffer to achieve health, or good karma, or whatever. I sure wasn’t one of those people! I much preferred Kazi Dama’s style of healing, which emphasized treating disease with minimal intervention, with subtle energetic interactions out at the periphery of the patient’s being – with gentle contact at the skin, usually on the limbs and usually away from the site of pain.

My experience with Blue Mountain made me realize that my training with Kazi Dama and with Pischering had molded my perceptions about life, about people, and about what it means to work as a healer. Blue Mountain was an extreme example, but he illustrated the psychology behind much alternative medicine: many people who are suffering are willing to suspend their disbelief it they are presented with a possible solution to their pain. Often, the more colorful and unbelievable the solution, the more appealing it is. I don’t doubt that Blue Mountain helped people; perhaps, sometimes getting your muscles crushed is just what you need, and maybe sometimes it’s good to face your pain. And shamanic healing is certainly valid; the expulsion of ghosts has been standard medical practice for many thousands of years, all over the world. But my encounter with Blue Mountain brought home the fact that my training with Pischering and Kazi Dama was shaping my overall attitude towards life, which was that compassion and appreciation and balance and clarity were the important things.
I couldn’t understand how Blue Mountain could claim to be a healer – an alleviator of suffering – if he caused so much pain to people all day long . I went home grateful that day, grateful to Blue Mountain for showing me what I am not, grateful to Kazi Dama and Pischering for helping me define what I am, grateful for the sun that shone on my back as I rode my bicycle home. My body flooded with endorphins, I went home to my family that day feeling grateful, just extremely grateful.

The Order of the Green-Lipped Monkey

I drove to the Surf City College of Chinese Medicine and parked in the lot kiddy-corner to the school, across the street from the beach. What a great location for a school – I could go for dips in the ocean in between classes! I was a little bit anxious, since I hadn’t been in school for years and didn’t really know what to expect. It was true, I had signed up almost on a whim, in response to Kazi Dama’s invitation, but the fact was that I was ready for a change in my life. I had been working as a university administrator for about five years, and although I felt capable and appreciated in that capacity, a part of me was dissatisfied with my job. I wanted to help people in an immediate, one-on-one way. Having seen Kazi Dama perform his miracle on Dave’s sprained ankle, and intrigued by what little I knew about the Iron Pork tradition, I decided that I would explore the healer’s path as a possible new career.

Also, at about this time, Dave had started hanging out with Pischering more and more, just the two of them. This was a new pattern, as we had until then always spent time with him together, the three of us. I have to admit that I was a little jealous. But overall I was secretly relieved. Dave had for the past year or so been suffering through the aftershocks of a particularly messy breakup, and I had been his chief counselor and emotional support. Naturally, when Pischering started talking about Rohini and how devastating the end of that relationship was, Dave’s ears perked up and he shifted his attention from me to Pischering, who appeared to know far better than I how to balance the appetites and regain sanity. This left me with more free time than I was used to, and the recognition that I wanted to spend some of that time learning about health and healing.

I walked into the school building and asked some students where the “Bamboo Room” was. According to my schedule, that was where my first class, Fundamentals of Traditional Chinese Medicine, would meet. The semester had started a couple of weeks earlier, and I was acutely aware of how much I had missed. The teacher, a friendly Chinese doctor named Geoffrey Wong, was lecturing about the different kinds of qi, or vital energy, about how it was produced, how it flowed through the body in channels, and so on. It was fascinating, but it might as well have been taught in a foreign language. As a matter of fact, I was convinced at times that he was speaking in a foreign language, between Dr. Wong’s heavy accent and the many Chinese medical terms he was using. Nevertheless, I enjoyed his class and looked forward to buying the textbook and catching up with my classmates.

The next class, Acupuncture 101, was less satisfying. The teacher, an older American woman with white hair and a no-nonsense manner, launched immediately into a review of the Lung and Large Intestine acupuncture channels. I was greatly discouraged because I had missed the previous two classes, and thought I would never catch up. She taught the location of the acupuncture points with a cartographer’s precision, and I doubted whether I would ever be able to locate the points accurately enough to pass her exams.

Finally, at the end of the day, it was time for Kazi Dama’s class. Because he was not trained in traditional Chinese medicine, and was not a licensed acupuncturist, the school officially called him a “visiting practitioner” and allowed him to teach clinical classes, provided he didn’t pierce patients’ skin. As I would soon find out, the skin-piercing provision did not present a problem.

The first patient that day suffered from excruciating menstrual cramps, and was actually in the throes of cramps at the time of her visit. She lay curled up in pain on the massage table. Kazi Dama approached the woman with calm compassion, asked her a few questions, then gently touched her temples with great reverence. He stayed in this position for a few minutes, then walked slowly around the table, seeming to be feeling for something with his fingertips in the air around the patient and at the surface of her skin. Once he had worked his way down to the foot of the table, he appeared to find what he was looking for, and touched a point on the patient’s ankle with his index finger. “Liver 4,” some of the students whispered to each other. “Feel better now?” Kazi Dama asked. The woman nodded, then fell into a deep sleep. One of the students, who had his fingers on the patient’s pulse, gasped. “Her pulse just calmed right down!” he exclaimed. Kazi Dama smiled. Then, he pulled one of his stones out of his pocket and applied it to the point on the woman’s ankle, and held the tip of a fat gold needle at several points on her belly, using his other hand. Then he herded us out of the treatment room, saying, “Now we let her rest.”

Once we were back in the herb pharmacy, where Kazi Dama gave the students free rein in the creation of an appropriate herb formula for the patient, the students pummeled him with questions. “How did you pick Liver 4?” “Why didn’t you check her pulse?” “What were you doing when you held her head?”

Kazi Dama laughed, and said, “You want to make things more complicated than they are! Always, what I do is the same: feel the Pischering Field, feel the ha, find where it is out of balance, then balance it. Your Chinese medicine is essentially the same, but you rely on intermediate steps – check the pulse, look at the tongue, etc. Why not just perceive the field? Anybody can do it!”

One of the students, a pretty young lady in her third year, asked, “And why did you use Liver 4? Is it because it’s the Metal point on a Wood channel, and metal controls wood?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but Kazi Dama apparently did, or maybe he didn’t and considered the question irrelevant. “I did not ‘use Liver 4’!” he said emphatically. “I used the point that needed to be used. This is the big mistake with your Chinese medicine! You think that individual points ‘do’ specific things! In truth, they are a way to access a field in your body that is out of balance with your overall Pischering Field, and possibly with the greater fields in which you live. You want to make things simple, to believe that a point does something, like stop cramps or eliminate nausea, but treating the point won’t do those things if the patient’s imbalance is due to something else. So cut through the in-between steps! Don’t prescribe a point like it’s a drug! Just feel the imbalance and correct it!”

There was some mumbling and grumbling of the “easy for you to say” variety, then finally one student asked the question that everyone wanted to ask. “Why don’t you use needles? I mean, why don’t you insert needles into the skin?”

Kazi Dama seemed to weigh in his mind what he was about to say, then said, “I know you are here at this school to become acupuncturists, to learn how to stick needles in people. Your acupuncture is good medicine, and it works. I come from another tradition, one that is similar, but a little different, that also works. If they both work, then no problem! But I will tell you why I don’t insert needles. I believe that metals affect the Pischering Field directly by their physical properties. There is something about skinny metal wires that directly affects the Pischering Field by being nearby, by simply touching the skin – maybe they function as a kind of antenna that emits or absorbs ha as necessary, or maybe they interact with the electromagnetic signaling system of our cells and tissues.” He sounded out the word “electromagnetic” as if he had been practicing it in front of a mirror. “But you don’t have to pierce the skin! The only advantage of piercing the skin with needles, as far as I can tell, is that you create a way to keep the needle where it is so you can do other things. Like work on your herbs!” he said, prompting us to get to work on the formula.

Since this was my first day in school, all I did was weigh out herbs that the more senior students had decided should go into the formula. The pretty senior showed me how to use the quaint Chinese hand scales that we were expected to utilize, and I got to work weighing out the fragrant roots, bark, and leaves with another freshman. For the most part, Kazi Dama ignored us, but occasionally he would sniff the air, glance over at what we were doing, come over, and nibble on a small piece of this or that herb. Most of the time he just grunted and left us alone, but a couple of times he would taste an herb and tell us not to include it in the formula.

“What’s wrong with this herb?” asked one of the seniors.

“Nothing wrong with it. Just not the right herb for her.”

“What do you call it in your tradition?”

“Don’t call it anything. We don’t have this herb. Probably not a mountain herb.”

“Then how do you know it’s not right for her?”

Kazi Dama sighed. “Herbs are a little more straightforward than acupuncture points,” he explained. “They actually work in the body and ‘do things.’ You can generally tell what herbs do based on how they taste. This one is too pungent and warm for her. She’s already too hot. It will just dry her out.” This response was extremely puzzling to me, but it seemed to make sense to everybody else, so I didn’t say anything.

One of the students appeared to get frustrated that Kazi Dama was rejecting some of their herb choices. “But it’s part of the formula,” he protested.

Kazi Dama sat the student down, then gathered all of us together, saying, “Listen everyone – this is important. Herbs are superficially like pharmaceuticals, but they are not the same. Herbs are creatures, like you or me. Even if they are dead and dried, their essence, their ha, is still there. It is their ha that interacts with the patient’s ha, and brings about healing. Don’t treat herbs like little medicines. Treat them as wise beings who will help your patient. It is too easy to simply prepare a formula that somebody else came up with. Instead, you must think and feel which herbs are the correct ones. Too many of your formulas are far too large – there are so many personalities at work that the patient’s ha gets confused. Always keep in mind: who is the king herb? Who is the queen? Who are the advisors? A nation with too many rulers, or weak rulers with a huge army, or with too many advisors, is not good – this will only breed only chaos.”

After the woman with cramps left, pain-free and extremely grateful, the next patient failed to show up so we had an hour free. I seized the opportunity to ask Kazi Dama about being a healer. “Kazi Dama, how do you know, I mean really know, that this is the right profession for you?”

Kazi Dama pondered my question for a few moments, then replied. “Unfortunately, at this point in your career it is very hard to know. You have interest in helping people, and that is a good start. But also, maybe you also have fantasies about helping people. What I mean is, if you have not worked in a healing profession before, maybe you like the idea of healing; you can’t know anything about the actual practice of healing. But the idea is good too, the interest is good. They are both signs that you have compassion for your fellow human beings, and that is the root of all healing. As to whether you will be a good doctor, or whether you will like being a doctor, you will find out only after you have been doctoring for a while.”

Kazi Dama appeared to be lost in thought for a minute or two. Then, he said, “In my case, medicine was what I grew up with. It was simply expected that I would be a healer. There were times when I was bored with it, with endless lines of sick people outside the door. There were times when I did other things, but I always came back to medicine. There are worse things you could do with your life. There are more and more sick people, and more and more unhappy people, in the world. It is good, to help people. But also, I think I am lucky. I have the temperament for it.” He paused, then pointed at a scroll on the herb room wall. It was a Chinese painting of a scruffy-looking man wearing clothes made out of leaves. The man, who had two little horns sticking out of his messy hair, was chomping on some green herbs – you could see the stems and some leaves sticking out of his mouth. “Who is that man?” Kazi Dama asked.

Nobody seemed to know, so a student went to get Geoffrey Wong from the teachers’ lounge. The affable teacher took one look at the scroll and said, “That is Shen Nong. He is the Divine Farmer. He is the god of herbal medicine.”

“What is he eating?” Kazi Dama asked.

“Herbs,” replied Dr. Wong.

“Do you know what kind of herb?” Kazi Dama queried.

Dr. Wong walked up to the scroll, looked closely, then hazarded a guess in Chinese: “Ma…? Da Ma?”

Kazi Dama repeated the word: “Da Ma? Dama?! Just like my name!” Then he laughed and laughed. “Dama! Dama! This Shen Nong is definitely a member of the Order of the Green-Lipped Monkey! Ha ha ha ha!”

By this point, a number of students from other classes had gathered around, curious about the loudly-laughing new teacher. I asked the obvious question. “Kazi Dama, what is the Order of the Green-Lipped Monkey?”

When he regained his composure, Kazi Dama said, “Well, since you are asking about what it takes to be a good doctor, I might as well start from the beginning. You see, there are different kinds of doctors. I will tell you now about one kind. People get interested in medicine for different reasons. Some of you have yourselves been ill, or you feel a lack of wholeness and seek ways to remedy this. Some of you are interested in acupuncture, in how the energy of the body flows and works to regulate health. Others of you are naturally drawn to herbs. Some of you got interested in the last five to ten years, maybe after watching a TV show or reading a book. But some of you have been very interested in herbs as long as you can remember. You are the ones who liked to eat strange plants in the yard, or on walks in the woods, when you were a child. You eat strange plants – even if they are very bitter – because you are curious, and you like the interaction with the plants, you like how they make you feel. You are members of the Order of the Green-Lipped Monkey. You are my kind of doctor.”

With a little prodding, Kazi Dama continued. “The founder of my tradition was a man named Khazan Doshi. He was a member of the Order of the Green-Lipped Monkey. But the Order is much much older than even him. We say that long ago, before there were people, there were monkeys. Of course, all monkeys eat leaves, so you could say they all had green lips. But a few monkeys discovered special plants, special bitter dark green plants, that had a special effect. The plants made the monkeys wise. The monkeys liked this, so they ate the special plants quite regularly, staining their lips and mouths a dark green. My tradition, the Iron Pork lineage of Champogrla, is directly descended from those monkeys. It is said that Khazan Doshi ate champo leaves, and that is how he saw into the future, saw how our people could avoid extinction during the Great Cold. Until quite recently in Champogrla, on special occasions like our New Year’s Day in the springtime, clowns would wear green lipstick to show this association. The clown-monkeys are fools, rascals, but in their craziness they are also wise.”

One of my classmates, a friendly New Yorker named Andy, asked, “Kazi Dama, what do you mean, the plants made the monkeys wise? What kind of effect did the plants have? And what does this have to do with being a doctor?”

Kazi Dama looked very pleased with Andy. “Ahh, now you ask the good questions,” he said. He took a sip from a cup of tea he kept on the herb room table. “The plants let the monkeys see the big picture. The plants let the monkeys take a step back from playing the monkey game, to see deeply into life. And that is what a good doctor must do: see deeply into life.”

Andy said, “Are you talking about drugs?”

Kazi Dama looked him squarely in the eye and responded, “That is a very good choice of words. What are drugs? ‘Drug’ means medicine, but ‘drug’ also means a substance that affects the mind. These plants are both. From the very beginning, members of the Order of the Green-Lipped Monkey were in the minority. Most monkeys, and now most people, are not compelled to have this sort of relationship with plants. Indeed, one could argue that such plants can cause great harm. I understand the public health aspect of this argument. But I will tell you this: if you are this kind of doctor, no laws, no prejudice will change you. This is simply the way you are. And because there have always been people like you, we have what we now call herbal medicine. Most people won’t try strange, bad-tasting herbs. But the green-lipped monkey tries them all! I consider myself lucky to be a green-lipped monkey! If you are one too, you have chosen a good profession for yourself!” Then, he hastened to add, “If you are not a green-lipped monkey, that’s OK too! You can still be a great doctor! You can still see deeply into life! Thank you everybody! Good night!”