Yang sheng is not just about physical or breathing exercises, it is cultivating the art of living in all its rich variety and interest. Underneath all of that rich variety, however, is a unity of being that is ultimately supportive and nourishing; most traditional societies know this, and are structured to develop this understanding over the course of a life.
I remember one day back in China when I was young, I heard three teachers of completely different disciplines use the same words to describe what they were doing. At a morning taichi class, the teacher said “Your qi must reach the tip of the sword, just as if it were reaching the tip of your finger!”
At noon, the calligraphy teacher insisted “Don’t just hold the brush in your hand – the qi must flow through and reach through the brush into the ink!”
And later I heard an acupuncture teacher explaining to a beginner: “Stand properly! Your intent must pass into the needle, and your qi must flow to the tip of the needle. Only then can you rectify the qi of the patient!”
That was when I realised that the whole of Chinese traditional society was designed to foster an understanding of fundamental cosmic principles, learned by experience, and by different experiences in different disciplines. The goal of this was to produce a complete person, a real human being.
A gentleman (and many women) in traditional China would learn music, calligraphy, painting and the game of Go — in Chinese, “Wei Qi” or “surrounding chess.” Qín qí shü hùa were the four arts of the cultivated person, literally “zither, chess, writing and painting”. All of these arts introduce different facets of the same cosmic principles.
Let us take the most apparently trivial: the game of Go …
Art of Living and Weiqi
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The Fat Monk 