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This book has been compiled from edited transcripts of lectures delivered in the 1960s by the late Haruchika Noguchi to members of Seitai Kyokai.

ZENSEI PUBLISHING COMPANY TOKYO JAPAN AKIKO NOGUCHI 1986 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. First published 1986 Printed in Tokyo

CONTENTS Chapter 1 Colds and Fatigue ....................................................... 9 Chapter 2 Bodily Tendencies ......................................................29 Chapter 3 Symptoms ................................................................46 Chapter 4 Having a Bath ...........................................................59 Chapter 5 Passing Through a Cold ..............................................70 Chapter 6 More about Baths ......................................................96 Chapter 7 Psychic Factors ....................................................... 110 Chapter 8 Leading the Imagination ........................................... 129 Chapter 9 Directing the Bodys Traffic ....................................... 146 Chapter 10 Different Kinds of Colds ............................................ 178

Chapter One Colds and Fatigue The season of colds is upon us, and the number of people with colds has suddenly increased, so I shall begin by roughly explaining, what to do if you catch one. There are many kinds of illnesses, but in my experience the illness that is most difficult to deal with is a cold. Years ago, I used to treat colds as if I were curing an illness, but because colds, take innumerable forms it is extremely difficult to put ones finger on what, exactly, a cold is. For example, it takes fourteen days for someone to pass through a bout of pneumonia, so what I have to do is make an effort for this number of days: the course of the illness is determined. Or take appendicitis: we know the course it takes, too. If you do yuki to the second lumbar vertebra, the pain will cease; and then if you do yuki 9 to the lymphatic vessels on the insides of the thighs, a bowel movement will naturally occur; until the bowel movement occurs, I let the stomach work a little excessively. That is all that is needed. So one illness takes so many days before a person recovers from it, and another illness takes a few more days. It is very simple, and I have never felt that any one illness is particularly difficult to deal with. With a cold, however, I may seriously set out to cure it, but it is passed through easily; or I may treat it lightly, but it changes into another kind of illness. So a cold is a very difficult thing to grasp. Consequently, I began looking into the question as to what kind of cold a person with such and such a body catches, and, again, what kind of transformations one must be on ones guard against with people who have such and such a body. These things differ from person to person in accordance with bodily constitution. Colds became the motivation, so to speak, for my entering upon the study of taiheki (bodily tendency). And then, because I sought to correct bodily habits by making use of illness, I began to think about the correction of taiheki; but, even so, colds still prove 10 difficult to deal with. If I take one lightly, it completely disappears before I have made use of it; alternatively, it just goes, on and on.

In fact, there is nothing so troublesome as a cold. When one begins, to give sh (seitai guidance), the most difficult illness to deal with is a cold. Even now, I inspect the whole body carefully when a person has a cold, but this by itself is not sufficient, so next I inquire into that persons past and everything else; only then can one broach the question as to how this cold will be passed through. If things go exactly as I have thought, then I feel that I have comprehended that persons body. So long as ones prognostications are mistaken in the case of a cold, one hasnt understood that persons body. When one catches a cold, the body usually becomes ordered as a result. Nevertheless, if in consequence one doesnt take a cold seriously, it will get worse. Still, if one has come to know someones body well, one will definitely not be mistaken in expecting the cold to take such and such a course, leaving a lingering effect in, say, this part of the body; that the effect left in 11 such and such a part of the body will soon be cured if a certain other part is treated; or that the cold will take such and such a course and this place will change for the better. I have been able to do this for about ten years now; before that it was difficult. Nevertheless, comprehending a cold is difficult even now. In the case of someone I know, I am not at all worried if he catches a cold, but in the case of someone whose body I do not understand yet, it is as difficult as ever it was. Though a cold is difficult to deal with, people think of one as being simply a cold, and they dismiss it. They say, Its just a cold. One can only call this way of thinking reckless. It has come to be said these days that if a woman catches a cold in the early stages of pregnancy, she may give birth to a deformed child. People now know that poliomyelitis and smallpox and illnesses like them are kinds of cold; they think of a cold in a manner rather different from the way they thought before. If all of us take this opportunity to change our ideas about a cold and take a greater interest in the subtle bodily change that is a cold, methods of treating colds that impair the health will 12 disappear, and I think that catching a cold will no longer result in the healths being damaged.

A healthy body has resilience. It has the capacity to expand and contract. We say that a part of the body that is always used excessively is a part that suffers, from biased fatigue. The excessive use of a certain part of the body is what we call biased movement, and in those parts, always affected by biased movement, biased fatigue builds up. You do not notice this yourself, but when such a part is felt, it is stiff, and the capacity of the muscles there to stretch and contract is greatly reduced. When this capacity becomes even less, it means that one has grown old, and when it is even more reduced, it means that you are in the grave; for when one is dead, this resilience completely disappears. Human beings gradually lose their bodily resilience, and then they die. So if you observe the whole process until death, you will see that the course of most peoples lives is determined, and that there is no such thing as sudden death. When I am inducing katsugen und in people, I sometimes come across a person 13 whose back is as rigid as a corpses. I ask him to relax, but he tenses himself instead. For a person like this, there is no difference between tensing himself and relaxing. Indeed, the more he tries to relax, the more he tenses himself. So his body has become wholly insensitive; he is unaware of illness or abnormalities, but nonetheless supposes that he is as strong as a horse. And then he suddenly collapses. If he suddenly dies, it is because his body is so stiff and dull that he has reached a stage one step before dying; his death may be unexpected, but in another way it is not unexpected at all. Because people suppose there is nothing wrong, they speak of an unexpected, sudden or accidental death and are frightened of high blood pressure, but if one looks at the body from the point of view of its elasticity, a persons suddenly succumbing to cerebral apoplexy or developing cancer is definitely not an accidental thing. Cancer, leukemia, hepatitis, cerebral apoplexy all these are illnesses that become serious before one is aware of them, and when one does become aware of them, it is too late: this is characteristic of todays illnesses. The root of this kind of thing is a 14 body that has become insensitive.
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When a cold is caught, an insensitive body to some extent recovers its elasticity. For this reason, the blood pressure of people with high blood pressure comes down. But it is less a matter of the blood pressure coming down than of the blood vessels becoming more supple. Blood vessels, too, have elasticity, and when they lose this elasticity and become stiff, they easily burst. In short, so long as the blood vessels are supple, they will not burst no matter how high the blood pressure climbs; but if they lose their elasticity, they will burst. So, rather than blood pressure, it is a matter of the degree of elasticity of the blood vessels, or of the hardening, of these vessels. But it is, not simply the blood vessels: if one lives in such a way as not to lose the elasticity of the whole body, or of ones whole being, including ones sensibility, ones health will not suddenly collapse; and if ones body has become stiff, catching a cold will solve the problem. So if, while using the body, biased fatigue becomes latent in a certain part of the body, this part loses its suppleness, and one catches a cold. After a cold has been 15 caught, this part recovers. So rather than thinking of a cold as an illness, I have come to think of it as being a curative activity. But because people think only of curing a cold without passing through it completely, the bodys weak points remain as they are and one catches cold again. Because people do not correct the biased fatigue or, more fundamentally, the bodys habitually biased activity which is the cause of their catching cold, and because only one part of the body does most of the work, the necessity arises for the body to catch a cold again. For as long as you can catch colds again and again, you have a kind of guarantee, but once you become unable to catch colds, the only thing that lies in the future is collapse. If you carefully observe people who succumb to cancer or apoplexy, what most of them have in common is that they do not even catch colds. But if you look at people who live long, they are in a way always sick: they are constantly catching colds or their nose suddenly starts running whenever the weather gets cool. The noses running is a manifestation of a kind of power of resistance to the various harmful things in the air, so if your nose runs, one can say that your 16 whole body is sensitive.

Why do peoples bodies grow stiff despite their possessing this activity whereby colds are caught? It is because they use various means to prevent colds and to cure them, and so dull their bodies to colds. You may, for example, rub yourself down regularly with a wet towel so that you do not catch colds any more, but all you are doing is making your whole body as insensitive as your face: you become as dull as those porters who made a living by wading up to their necks through rivers and carrying things across. If you look at those people who succumb to illnesses like apoplexy, a great number of them are the kind of people who rub themselves down with cold wet towels. But it is not only people who do this who succumb to apoplexy or whatever: many people succumb to these illnesses because they have made their bodies and minds stiff and insensitive. So, as long as you can feel stiffness in your shoulders or neck, you will not collapse, but if you become unable to feel stiffness in your body, you will. If only you pass through colds well, your blood pressure drops, the stiffness in your body disappears, and it will not 17 happen that a part of your body is affected by illness. So if you catch colds, you will not succumb to apoplexy. Just have a look at the past of someone who has apoplexy. At a certain time this kind of person stops having colds: there is definitely such a time. If you do katsugen und for a certain period you catch colds readily, and then you catch them less often. If you observe carefully what happens during the period when colds are caught readily, you will see that the biased movement in various parts of the body is corrected, and that muscles which are stiff recover their resilience. So if you observe the body carefully, you realize that today the cold will relax this part of the body and that the next day it will result in that parts recovering, and so you will understand how long a cold will take to run its course. If you make observations in this way, you will come to understand that colds have different characters according as the biased movement of the body differs, and that there are many ways of passing through a cold depending on the parts in which biased movement accumulates. So while you 18

do not completely understand the characteristics of a persons body, you cannot give him sh for a cold. Or rather it is difficult to use a cold in such a way that his body is made better after he has passed through it. Some people may attempt to interrupt a cold by trying to lower a fever in order to cure the cold quickly, or by trying to stop a cough, but while they are receiving, treatment, their bodies grow stiff and gradually become insensitive. My principal concern is to order the body, so I am against disordering the body in order to cure an illness. For example, when a finger has gangrene, it is cut off and you are told that you have been cured, but that mutilation lasts for ever. This is not healing: all you are doing is giving the body another injury in addition to the gangrene in the name of curing it. This is not a real cure. Many women have their wombs and ovaries removed. If this is done, the unhappy husband for a time provides an outlet for the energy of his wife, who vents her anger on him for no reason; but when her womb has been removed, it is natural that the way she expends energy should change; she cannot control this. So it is 19 misconceived to think of this kind of thing as constituting a cure. Unless one treats the body in such a way that it is maintained in a natural state, without impairing its natural workings, and without dulling or debilitating it, you cannot call what you do curative in the true sense. These days many people have various organs removed, so that it is very inconvenient for someone like myself, who uses the natural activities of the body for the maintenance of the health. There is nobody walking about without a heart, but there are any number of people who are lacking a kidney, a womb or ovaries, and even though one may try to cure them in an ideal way, it is impossible. So I must ask each person whether he or she has had something removed. The worst kind of people say, They said it might develop into cancer, so I had my stomach removed. If you dont have a stomach, you wont get cancer there Well, why dont you have your head cut off? You wont have any illnesses at all after that. In any event, one should maintain ones natural body in as natural a way as possible. This being the case, it is surely more 20 significant to properly catch a cold and properly pass through it than to use all sorts of methods to cure it. So if, instead of

thinking in terms of cures for various diseases, you once master living in such a way as to pass through a cold properly, the kind of numbed body that tends to get cancer or apoplexy can be corrected. So there is no need for you to get illnesses like these. If you use your head too much and it gets tired, you will catch a cold. After putting too much of a burden on your digestive organs, you will catch a cold. And after your kidneys have worked too hard, you will catch a cold. If biased movement occurs in one part of the body or another, and one part has to work too hard, you will catch a cold. People who drink too much alcohol and whose liver is constantly swollen catch the kind of cold that is connected with the liver. People who always eat too much rich food and whose kidneys are swollen catch the kind of cold that is connected with the kidneys. Congenital worriers catch the kind of cold that is connected with the nervous system. In this way, each person catches the kind of cold that suits him; first those parts affected by 21 biased fatigue recover their resilience, and after the cold has been passed through, the body becomes resilient and refreshed. So a cold is not something to be cured, it is something that must be passed through. But though one may try to have someone pass through a cold, it cannot be done unless one knows the characteristics of that persons body well. By making these characteristics my starting point, I came to find the characteristics of taiheki. In any event, colds pose a problem. Most people do not change ways of life that result in the accumulation of biased fatigue, and they only interrupt the colds they catch again and again, so that it is natural that their bodies should never become sound. Colds and diarrhea are the most important of the bodys ways of maintaining itself in good condition; or, to put it another way, repeated slight colds and light bouts of diarrhea are bodily activities that lead to the bodys becoming sound. Whether a cold or a bout of diarrhea leads to the bodys remaining sound and as new or whether it leads to some parts becoming stiff or the bodys losing its resilience depends on whether it is dealt with without forcing things or not. If 22 you intend to use the method of yuki on someone who has not fallen seriously ill, then how he passes through a cold or a bout of diarrhea becomes the most important question.
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Sensitive people readily catch colds, and the kind of person who often catches a light cold has a sound body. So I often catch colds. But I pass through them within forty minutes to two hours. In most cases, once I have sneezed twenty times, the cold has left the body. Each time one sneezes when one has a cold the whole body relaxes more and more. I am used to this, so, I can recognize what is happening. Thus, depending on the part of the body in which a sneeze, so to speak finds an echo, I say to myself, I must have drunk a little too much, I must have eaten a little too much, or I must have used my head a little too much. So every time I sneeze when I have a cold, I examine myself concerning the way I have been using my body. My way of dealing with a cold is very simple. I breathe deeply and continuously into my spine. As I breathe in this way, the spine gradually straightens and arches backwards; when the spine becomes 23 completely arched, it perspires slightly. It takes about two or three minutes. Then I twist my body two or three times. And that is all. As one passes ki through ones spine, there are spots where it passes through with difficulty: these are the places where there is biased fatigue. One concentrates ki there, and breathes through these places. If, after that, the ki still passes through with difficulty, someone else can do yuki to these places. I generally do katsugen und. That is all there is to my method of treatment; I usually pass through a cold only by breathing through my spine. Even though other people say all sorts of things, I use as a way of keeping healthy, and as a constant standby, breathing through the spine. I have ordered my body for forty years only by means of passing ki through my backbone. When I have diarrhea, I breathe through my lumbar vertebrae; when I have a cold, I breathe through my thoracic vertebrae; and with this alone it is all over. This breathing through the spine is no different to gassh gyki (breathing through ones palms after putting them together) except that one is breathing through 24 ones spine; and you can do this sitting, or lying down, or standing. As I am doing calligraphy, say, or giving sh to someone, I pass ki through my backbone. Even now, when I am

talking like this, I can pass ki through my backbone. Thus, there is, no need to set aside a special time for doing this. People who can set aside so many minutes or hours every day for the purpose of maintaining their health are fortunate, but a way of keeping healthy that cannot be followed by busy people poses a problem. But if you become skilled at breathing through your spine, only one or two breaths are sufficient. At the moment my back is perspiring; this is evidence that ki is passing, through my spine. If there is no perspiration, this shows that you have only the intention of passing ki through your spine, and are not actually doing it. As, you pass ki through your spine a certain place will begin perspiring, and then you can say, Ah, the cold is of this kind. Thus, for me, colds are not much of a nuisance. When you pass ki through your backbone, the place that perspires is invariably determined. It is, because everyone has 25 habitual ways of using the body, and biased fatigue becomes latent in a certain place. So, having come to know the habitual ways in which the body moves, or the place where fatigue gathers, one need only deal with this part in order to really pass through a cold. It is enough to give a little help to this place, so it is very simple if only you know the place on a persons body where fatigue becomes latent. On the other hand, it becomes very difficult if you start asking, What part of the body should I touch in order to cure a cold? or What method of cure should I use in the case of a cold? or How do I do yuki in order to cure a cold? If you come to be able to cure a cold perfectly, you can deal with any disease. If you can help someone pass through a cold well, one can perhaps say that you are able to cure difficult diseases. Though they say cancer is difficult to treat, the difficulty cannot be compared with the difficulty of treating a cold. Even with cancer, if you catch a cold it will get better. Recently, cold germs have been used against cancer, and the cancer has disappeared, and there is now the hypothesis that catching a cold is a way of treating cancer. But this is not 26 confined to cancer, nor to hardened arteries; I think a cold is the most efficacious remedy for a dulled body.

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You will probably want to know the place to which sh should be given, but from our point of view, if the place where biased fatigue has become latent the place that has lost its resilience is rectified, then the body will no longer need to have a cold, and it will recover. The important thing is to create a body that does not need a cold, so one can say it is sufficient only to give sh to the place that needs it. As to where this place is, one can only say that a hundred people differ in a hundred different ways. A person will soon recover if you can find exactly where this place is on his body, but you will not be successful if you make a wrong guess, no matter how strenuously you may treat his body. When it comes to giving sh for a cold, it is so difficult that one cannot lay down any guidelines. But to put the matter in a nutshell: if you simply lay your hand on the place where fatigue usually gathers, the place that is generally used excessively, so that a response arises, in it, that is sufficient. Thus, to explain sh for a cold, one can 27 only say that it consists in doing yuki to the place where fatigue has become latent. This kind of place already wants yuki done to it. The phenomenon we call a cold is an activity that occurs in a body that is trying to get better, so that while the body is dull, a cold will not be caught. The act of catching a cold is itself a demand for recovery, so that if a response arises in the body, it will get better. In fact, when yuki is done in this way, anyone will pass through a cold in one evening. If it lasts two or three days, then the body is fairly dull, and so it is better to gain, so far as is possible, the kind of body that recovers from a cold within the day on which it is caught, and that catches colds readily. It is not good to have so dull a body that it takes three or four days to pass through a cold; even so, as long as you are catching colds, you are still all right. 28

Chapter Two Bodily Tendencies When it comes to the question as to where, on a certain persons body, fatigue is latent, there is no other way than carefully examining how this person uses his or her body. This poses an extremely difficult problem. But fortunately we are able to classify taiheki by determining types, with what we call a stabilograph, whereby the distribution of the bodys mass can be measured, and by clarifying the characteristics of each body; so that understanding the habitual ways in which the body is used is fairly simple. With each taiheki, we have inquired into those places where biased fatigue is latent in other words, where the ki is obstructed and when we approach the problem in this way, it is not so difficult. For example, there are people whose 29 bodies tend to become stooped. When their bodies are tired, they always bend forwards. When you see someone who is bent forwards, it seems that things are not going well with him. Even though he bends forwards for reasons of business, a hotel manager, for example, somehow gives a servile impression. So that when you see someone who is bent forwards, you wonder whether he has debts or some other worry on his mind. But there are people who unconsciously adopt this joyless posture. If it is a result of tiredness, it is rather understandable, but there are people who, although they are not tired, have a habit of bending forwards, and when they try to raise their heads, they thrust their chins out instead. When someone says Good morning to a person like this, he raises his chin in response, but in the belief that he is bowing. His usually adopting a melancholy posture but taking an arrogant attitude when he bows is not intentional: it is simply a bodily habit. When someone who habitually bends forwards catches a cold, sweating will occur if you do yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra, which is the place where sweating may be 30 encouraged. It will not be a cold sweat, it will be the kind that adjusts bodily temperature. You can find the fifth thoracic vertebra on someone by getting him to bend his neck forwards. When he does this, the last bone in his neck the seventh
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cervical vertebra will be thrust out. The fifth thoracic vertebra is the fifth bone in the spine down from the last bone in the neck. It is immediately below the point where the space between the shoulder blades is narrowest. If, when he has a cold, you touch the backbone of somebody who has a tendency to bend forwards, you will find that only this bone is thrust out; and if you check the bones above and below it, the resilience of only this fifth thoracic vertebra will feel reduced. Thus, though you may not know how a certain person habitually uses his body, if the fifth thoracic vertebra does not move properly inwards and outwards and is, the only bone to be thrust out, this, person has the habit of bending forwards. When this kind of person catches a cold, it begins, by affecting the nose and the throat. So the first signs occur in the nose. To go into more detail: the root of the habit of bending forwards lies in the first 31 lumbar vertebra, which is the bone that moves most when you arch yourself backwards. Because, in the case of people with this bodily habit, the first lumbar vertebra moves with difficulty and the structure of the body is weak in this place, the body bends forwards. In the case of a person like this, the fifth thoracic vertebra has a tendency to become dull, and then a cold begins in the nose. More precisely, a cold begins in the area between the nose and the throat, and it then proceeds to affect the nose on the one hand, and the throat on the other. It is a characteristic of such a person when he catches a cold that strength drains from the first lumbar vertebra. If you touch the first lumbar vertebra of someone whose fifth thoracic vertebra is thrust out, you will find that it is rigid and moves with difficulty. If both these conditions are present the fifth thoracic vertebra thrust out and the first lumbar vertebra rigid you may conclude that the person in question has the kind of taiheki that is characterized by bending forwards. When a person with the habit of bending forwards catches a cold, he will get better if yuki is done to the fifth thoracic vertebra, 32 and when he has recovered, the first lumbar vertebra will also have recovered its resilience. So one waits until the day when resilience returns to the first lumbar vertebra. If this bone recovers its resilience while yuki is being done to the fifth thoracic vertebra, then the cold is already disappearing. If this

does not happen while yuki is being done, then yuki should be tried again on the next occasion. Thus the time when the first lumbar vertebra begins to recover its resilience is the time when the cold begins to disappear. For there is a kind of oscillation in the body between periods of tension and periods of relaxation, and in accordance with this, one can work out how many days it will take to recover from a cold. This, however, is extremely difficult. It is enough for you to observe the condition of the first lumbar vertebra as you do yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra: if it begins to regain its resilience, you may say that the body has recovered, or that it will recover within a day; if it still feels irresilient, then the cold is still there while it remains rigid, the body temperature may climb higher or the bodys condition may be such that the cold will continue to develop. Thus, if you pay 33 attention only to the way the fifth thoracic vertebra is thrust out and to the way the first lumbar vertebra moves, you wont make a mistake. Again, when this kind of person has a cold, the cold will move to the windpipe if he is too active at a time when the fifth thoracic vertebra is still not right. If this happens, he will start coughing when he goes to bed, though he wont cough much while he is up. A person whose windpipe is chronically enlarged will not cough ordinarily but will find himself coughing when he goes to bed. When one lies down, the whole body generally relaxes, but in his case only the windpipe will not relax. But if he uses a smaller pillow and puts it under his neck so that his head is slightly thrown back, he will not cough and he will be able to sleep. In any event, an abnormality occurs in the windpipe. When this happens, the seventh cervical vertebra and the first thoracic vertebra have drawn close together, and have been thrust outwards. So people who have this condition before they catch a cold do not pass through a cold smoothly and without complications, but the cold goes to the windpipe, and only after that do they 34 recover; it takes a fairly long time. So one should be prepared for this more or less from the beginning. When this happens, laymen say, The colds got worse, but from our point of view it has not got worse; instead, we have foreseen that this

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development is one part of the process that people like this go through. If you become able to judge how far someones cold will spread, dealing with it will become extremely straightforward. People whose fifth thoracic vertebra is thrust out catch colds in the nose or the nasal passages, and the cold subsequently spreads to the throat and windpipe. More often it is the windpipe that is affected rather than the throat, and the process of the cold will continue until the first lumbar vertebra has recovered its resilience. Once this vertebra begins moving properly, the cold is already getting better. In the case of people whose seventh cervical vertebra and first thoracic vertebra are in an abnormal condition, a cold will not get better until it has spread to the windpipe. If someone who habitually bends forwards and whose seventh cervical and first thoracic vertebrae are in an abnormal 35 condition repeatedly catches colds that do not spread so far as the windpipe, his shoulders will gradually become more and more rounded, and a disease of the respiratory organs will result. The kind of person who habitually bends forwards, bringing his shoulders forwards at the same time, has a body that is susceptible to respiratory diseases. We know that tuberculosis is an infectious disease, but a susceptibility to tuberculosis is also an hereditary thing. Even if you separate the children of tubercular parents from their parents, you will find that their susceptibility to tuberculosis is greater than in the case of ordinary people. This susceptibility derives from their bone structure, and is therefore hereditary. In what way is their bone structure abnormal? These people have that habit of bending forwards which I have been talking about, and, in addition, the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae are constantly moving together and apart; if you touch these vertebrae, they are over-sensitive and they move about excessively. Only this place is excessively elastic. If, however, the health of a person who has this condition becomes 36 poor, the capacity of these bones to move suddenly grows less. When, in the case of this kind of person, the resilience of the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae is lost, illness becomes a long-drawn-out process. It seems that a person has recovered from a cold, but he catches one again; or he seems to have caught a cold, but it disappears. Catching cold and recovery

constantly alternate, and there are two possibilities as to the future: either the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae will recover their resilience, or this person will succumb to a disease like tuberculosis that goes with these bones becoming stiffer and eventually unable to move. If these vertebrae move closer together, pneumonia will result, and if they move further apart, tuberculosis or some disease of the lungs similar in one way or another to tuberculosis will ensue. One should realize, therefore, that recovery from a cold is both protracted and complicated in the case of a person who habitually bends forwards if, in addition to his fifth thoracic vertebra being thrust out, his third and fourth thoracic vertebrae are stiff. If it is only the fifth thoracic vertebra that is the problem, recovery is simple; in 37 this case, all you need do is keep an eye on the first lumbar vertebra. If, however, the seventh cervical vertebra and the first thoracic vertebra are in an abnormal condition, you should realize that the cold will move to the windpipe, there will be a fever, and the cold will not be passed through in one night. In most cases, you need observe only these places when you are treating people who habitually bend forwards. Once the first lumbar vertebra begins to move properly, recovery is always on its way. Even in the case of a person whose third and fourth thoracic vertebrae are in an abnormal condition, a cold will not necessarily develop into pneumonia or some other lung disorder; if the first lumbar vertebra regains its resilience, this kind of person will recover, too. That said, no matter how much you may treat the first lumbar vertebra directly in an attempt to make it sound, it is of no avail. If you are going to do anything, do yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra and let the process take its course. And if, beforehand, you have done yuki to the seventh cervical vertebra and the third thoracic vertebra, a cold will be passed through comparatively rapidly. 38 A cure, therefore, does not consist in actually curing an illness, but in helping the body to pass smoothly through an illness without the process being impeded; for this purpose, we correct those important parts of the body that are in an abnormal condition, order the body, and wait for it to pass through the illness.

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These days, people think of illness only as something to be feared, and they suppose that the slightest indisposition must be cured completely and as quickly as possible; they take no account of the living activity of the body as a whole, or of the bodys natural workings. Because, for reasons of work or whatever, people think only of curing an illness quickly or, for example, stopping a bout of diarrhea as soon as possible, the natural balance of the body is gradually lost; and more and more people become unable to pass through a cold smoothly. If, however, yuki is used and a number of colds are passed through, one comes to pass through a cold more quickly each time, and one catches colds on account of very minor, bodily changes. When this happens, one feels that one wants yuki done to a certain place; if yuki is done to this place, one 39 quickly recovers, and in the end a cold does not last more than a night. If you use methods other than yuki and say each time, Ive cured my cold, Ive cured my cold, you gradually become so dulled that you cannot pass through a cold properly, and even after recovery fatigue remains in the body. If you use yuki, the fatigue disappears, the body feels refreshed, and various parts of the body recover their resilience; this does not happen with other methods. Thus, even though we may speak in both cases of passing through a cold, a natural recovery and a cure are somewhat different. I feel that, looked at from another point of view, an approach to illness that thinks only in terms of a quick cure is a means of whittling away your life-span. It is untrue to say that a quick cure is a good thing. But neither is it true to say that a slow recovery is a good thing. What is desirable is that the body should naturally pass through an illness in the way that suits it. If possible, the body should be in a sensitive condition so that it can pass through an illness quickly. If one considers the human body in terms of its resilience, a cold is a good opportunity for the body to 40 recover this resilience. A sudden and unexpected severe illness is simply the result of the bodys having become insensitive and losing its resilience, and if you carefully observe the body, you can see that a cold is nothing to be frightened of. Nevertheless, one has to be careful about complications, as in the case of people who have the habit of bending forwards and whose third and fourth thoracic vertebrae are extremely far apart.

A characteristic of human beings is that they can stand on one leg. On the sole of the foot are three points of support on which the weight of the body bears, and this is why you can stand upright on one leg. A monkey, however, bends forwards when it stands. This is because it has only two points of support on its foot, on the outer side and at the back; and so it cannot stand upright. When weight is brought to bear on the three Points on the sole of your foot, your lower back straightens and you can stand upright. But the monkey has no curve in its lumbar vertebrae, so that when it stands, its body will not straighten up. Among human beings, however, there are people one of whose legs has three points of support like 41 normal people, but whose other leg is like a monkeys. One could perhaps say that such a body is primitive in some respect, that it is half a monkeys; for one side of it is straight, whereas the other bends forwards. This kind of body constantly twists itself. If you observe a person with such a body carefully, you will see that when he looks to the right, his body faces towards the left; with this kind of person, the third lumbar vertebra the one opposite the navel is twisted. A person whose body is habitually twisted in this way is in a normal condition when the twisting of the body is centered on the third lumbar vertebra. No matter what part of the body has something wrong with it, it will recover simply as a-result of ones returning the third lumbar vertebra to its normal twisted condition. But if the third lumbar vertebra is not twisted, and another part is twisted instead, this state will result in a colds not being passed through smoothly. Again, when a person whose body is habitually twisted catches a cold, the resilience of the fifth thoracic vertebra is reduced. If the tenth thoracic vertebra is also twisted, whenever he makes a movement, the movement will start from that vertebra. 42 When a person with this condition catches a cold, the cold does not begin in the nose, but in the throat, and it then goes on to affect the kidneys or bladder. The course of recovery from a cold is the same for everyone whose body is habitually twisted, and if the third lumbar vertebra is adjusted, recovery is on its way once this vertebra starts becoming twisted. With the kind of body that habitually bends forwards, however, recovery will come about once the first lumbar vertebra begins to be thrust out. But with people
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whose bodies are habitually twisted, recovery is on its way if, when you check the third lumbar vertebra, the resistance on both sides is the same. But if the tenth thoracic vertebra is twisted, a cold that begins in the throat will cause disorders in the bladder or kidneys. Therefore, if after having caught a cold, a person develops nephritis or bladder catarrh, it is never fortuitous; it is because the body has this kind of tendency. This is the way that people whose bodies are habitually twisted pass through a cold. With adults, this is obvious, but parents who do not realize that their child has a body that is habitually twisted say, Our 43 sons got a tendency to develop complications, and he will definitely get nephritis. So they pack him off to bed almost before he has caught a cold and while he still hasnt got nephritis, they cut down on certain of his foods. But no matter what they do, he still develops a secondary illness. If, however, you tell the child to cross his legs in bed so that his third lumbar vertebra may become twisted, this alone will prevent secondary complications from arising, and he will recover. Children are generally resilient, and so a child with this kind of body will usually recover overnight merely as a result of sleeping with his legs crossed or bent. A cold is not something that unexpectedly develops into one complication or another, nor is it something that, for no particular reason, takes a long time to pass through, or, for no particular reason, is quickly recovered from: depending on the habitual ways in which the body is used, the way of passing through a cold differs, as does the way of recovery. If you understand the habitual ways in which someone uses his body, matters are very simple. But further explanation would complicate things, and, having roughly described the case of a 44 person whose body is habitually twisted and that of a person who habitually bends forwards, I feel that this is sufficient. There are also people who are biased either to the right or to the left. When these people catch a cold, they get diarrhea. Rather, until they get diarrhea or the bowels suddenly loosen, the cold will not get better. With these people, change always originates in the second lumbar vertebra. With others, a cold affects the head, and yet others have muscular aches and pains here and there. Among people whose bodies are habitually twisted, there are some who have

muscular pains akin to those of rheumatism when they catch a cold: with these people, it is the tenth lumbar vertebra that is the problem. Thus, unless one grasps the habits and structural characteristics of a persons body so that he may be assisted to pass through a cold naturally, one cannot wait for recovery with equanimity. One must also understand the bodily habits of people of the vertical type and the open-closed type. 45

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Chapter Three Symptoms There are certain symptoms that everybody manifests with a cold: a high temperature, sneezing, feeling chilly, the head hurting, the teeth hurting, the eyes watering. These symptoms result from the impairment of the functions of the carotid blood vessels, and if this area is treated, each of these symptoms grows lighter and disappears. If one does yuki to the muscles that lie alongside the carotid blood vessels (musculi sternocleidomastodei), starting at the top and moving gradually down to behind the collarbone, where the infraclavicular fossa lies, recovery will be hastened. If, in addition, one does yuki to the point on the outer side of the arch of the foot in which a dull pain is felt when it is pressed (yuki may also be done here in the case of a sore throat), as well as to the 46 underside of the third metatarsal bone, recovery will be certain. Doing yuki to these points is also effective in the case of too frequent urination, so that stimulating these points seems to have an influence on the functioning of the urinary system. Another interesting point: whenever someone catches a cold, the muscles running alongside the carotid blood vessels become hard; in the case of someone who has pneumonia, if you do yuki to the infraclavicular fossa, which lies just behind the collarbone, the temperature comes down; and so it seems clear that the infraclavicular fossa has some connection with the functioning of the blood vessels of the lungs. Hardening of these muscles occurs also in, for example, people who look pale because they have used their brain too much or because they are anxious about debts, and in people who, because of a disastrous love affair, have developed a respiratory illness; if you treat this phenomenon as you would in the case of a cold, it will disappear. It works, too, in the case of someone who is depressed after failing an examination; he will recover his spirits. After discovering the course a cold will 47 take, people whose responsibility it is to guide others towards health may think to make someone happy by telling him or her that matters will be simple because the cold will take such and
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such a course. Some people become indignant when too low an estimate is put on their cold, and they adopt what might be called inflationary tactics: they do their best never to recover, and after they have recovered they wont admit it. These people seem to dislike being told, Your cold is light. It is as though you were telling them, Your wallets looking a bit light. In the past, whenever I thought someone would recover easily, it always took a long time. I wondered again and again whether I had made a misjudgment. But it wasnt a misjudgment on my part, the problem had to do with the other persons mind. So when you really think about how a cold is passed through, you mustnt think only of the body, but of the persons deepest feelings, too, or of the movement of his or her subconscious. Otherwise, someone may say, What a dreadfully rude man! He didnt take my illness seriously at all! When this kind of resentful feeling arises, a person resists you, and his or her 48 cold will not easily get better. It would be simple if we had to think only of the bodys condition, of doing yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra, and of recovery as coming about when the first lumbar vertebra regains its resilience. But when, for example, a child who feels that what he wants is not being given to him, or that his parents attention is distracted elsewhere, catches a cold, it provides him with the opportunity to satisfy his demands. As a result, the cold is even more troublesome. In order to cure a cold, therefore, you have to study subconscious factors as well. All this may seem troublesome, but there are common ways of passing through colds. Although one person may develop a high temperature, sweat, and after that develop diarrhea, and another may sneeze, or the color of his urine may change, there are certain set courses that colds take. If you know these, you can predict with a fair degree of accuracy how a cold will proceed. Theres no need to know how you should treat everyone. It is sufficient to know the kinds of colds the members of your family, including yourself, catch; and in the case of your children you should know whether 49 their colds belong to the type you catch or your spouse catches. Within each family, there will be two basic types of cold, though there may be some mixture between them. A child will catch colds of his fathers type or his mothers type, though sometimes a child will catch colds that have the characteristics of both his parents types. In a family with five children, perhaps

one child will catch colds in which the characteristics of his parents colds are combined; the rest will catch colds that belong to one or other of their parents types. In this way, colds have certain characteristics, and in a large family you can see these characteristics clearly. Since, in one family, there will be two basic types of cold and a combination of these types, you do not need to know the way to cure everybodys colds. The combination cold comes under the two basic types, so that you need know only the latter. If, for example, you think your husband has the kind of body that habitually bends forwards, I want you to remember what I said about the fifth thoracic vertebra and the first lumbar vertebra. And if you think your husband is so twisted as to be positively cross-grained, you should remember 50 what to do in the case of a person whose body is habitually twisted. If your husbands main interest is in food, you need only remember what to do in the case of someone who belongs to the lateral type. Thus, you need only remember what is applicable to your household, and you may forget the rest. As I always say, when you do katsugen sh (seitai guidance given by means of katsugen und), your hands will move of themselves and, through the subconscious, they remember and do all the difficult things I have been speaking about today. The subconscious really is a convenient thing. But in comparison with doing katsugen sh unconsciously, curing a cold by doing yuki to a place you have singled out is much more satisfying. So though a cold will definitely be cured if you do katsugen sh, you can set aside the straightforward purpose of curing a cold out of a desire to observe the process of passing through and recovering from a cold, and treat a cold by means of conscious observation. When your observations are spot on, it is immensely satisfying it is better than winning a game of chess! 51 Your health is something that you yourself should maintain, but while there are people who are good at curing illnesses around, everybody depends on them and forgets that one passes through an illness by means of ones own strength; and nobody thinks of curing himself by taking into account the way he uses his body. The existence of people who can cure illnesses sometimes has effects opposite to those intended, and I have
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often thought it would be a good thing to stop giving sh in the near future; but though Ive said to myself time and time again, Im going to stop doing sh, it is, to be honest, interesting to do it its certainly better than losing a game of chess! We know that recovery is straightforward if katsugen sh is done, but I find it a little unsatisfying. That is why I began quite unnecessarily as you must see the study of taiheki, of bodily tendency. Truly, you do not need to know about this kind of thing. All you need do is place your hands on the others body, let your hands move as they will and do sh in this way, and the other will recover. So it is quite sufficient to say that there are various ways of passing through a cold, and that, 52 depending on the person, a cold will last a long time or a short time, and he will have diarrhea, fits of sneezing, or whatever. It does not matter whether you do katsugen sh consciously or unconsciously. Nor does it matter whether you believe in its efficacy or not. You may timidly attempt to do yuki, and be surprised when it proves effective and an illness gets better. As you do it again and again, your confidence will grow. If you say, Ill do it once I feel confident about it, you will never become confident. It is arrogance to suppose that you must be confident before you can do something. There is nobody who lives by means of confidence. Living is not something that is done by means of confidence, you know. You were living at a time when you didnt think about how you should live. Doing yuki is much the same: if you have remembered how to do it, you dont need to think about it as you do it. If you do it, you will begin to understand it. And once you have understood it, there is no harm in thinking about it. These days, many people think a lot about things, and so I specially want to ask you to plunge in and concentrate on actually doing yuki. 53 An important matter to keep in mind when you are doing sh to someone for a cold, is that even though both sides of the lumbar region may seem to be swollen, you shouldnt treat both sides at the same time. See on which side there is pain when you touch the fifth thoracic vertebra; if it hurts on the right, you should treat the right side of the lumbar region; if on the left, the left. A person catches cold on one side of the body and then the cold moves to the other side; and so you should treat one side and then the other, and not both at the same time. Otherwise the process of passing through the cold will be retarded. Treat one side, and once you feel it is better, treat the

other. At this stage, the other side is not yet affected by the cold; nevertheless, you should treat the left side once the right has recovered, or vice versa. This is the key to doing sh in the case of a cold. Before people catch a cold, they generally begin moving about a lot in their sleep. This results from the bodys desire to get rid of, one by one, pockets of biased fatigue that are latent in the body. People say that you catch a cold because you toss and turn in bed, but moving about a lot is in fact part 54 of the process of catching a cold. Attempting to stop this moving about is far from being the way to prevent yourself from catching a cold; rather, your body will become such that it cannot do without a serious illness. One mother was worried about the way her child tossed and turned in bed, and so she tried to make him sleep without moving about by tucking the bedclothes in extra tightly. The result was that the child kept catching cold and developed pneumonia. I said to the mother, The child is not moving about enough in his sleep, and thats why his colds develop into pneumonia. While hes sleeping, let him move about more freely. Then he will rid himself of fatigue and his colds wont be serious. No, no, she replied. If he moves about a lot in bed, he catches cold, and thats why Ive been tucking him in as tightly as possible so that he cant move. And thats precisely why he got pneumonia instead of catching a cold, I said. And if you go on doing that, I expect the same will happen again. She was taken aback, and afterwards let the child sleep as he wanted. Tossing, and 55 turning in ones bed is in fact a kind of katsugen und whereby fatigue is got rid of, so that it is wrong to try to suppress it. It is not because someone tosses and turns in his sleep that he catches a cold; tossing and turning is part of the process of catching a cold. A demand to get rid of biased fatigue or the entry of one of the bodys periodic cycles into an ascending phase arises, and after that a cold develops. Once one has caught a cold, ones fatigue becomes spread throughout the body in a balanced way, and one stops tossing and turning in
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bed. So when you sleep, it is important to be able to wholly relax, particularly when you are catching a cold. I often say, If you dont want to catch someone elses cold, dont sleep in the same room with him or her. I say this particularly in the case of a new bride who is worried that her husband might not like her tossing and turning in bed, but in fact a cold is not an infectious thing. Still, it sometimes happens that a new bride cannot relax unless she sleeps alone, and in this kind of case it is convenient to say that a cold is infectious. I have never thought of a cold as being an infectious thing. You catch a cold if your 56 body is in such a condition that it should catch a cold, and if you catch a cold from somebody else, youve made a good bargain. Your body becomes stronger when you catch a cold, and so catching a cold from someone else is nothing to be worried about. Nevertheless, I say, A colds infectious, so sleep separately, because that way a person recovers more quickly; sleeping relaxedly is important to curing a cold. So you shouldnt be worrying about this or that when you go to sleep. If you do, you cant relax. You have got to empty your mind. Something that is even worse than worrying is watching television in bed. If you do this, ocular fatigue will affect the third thoracic vertebra and cause abnormalities in the respiratory system. It is for this reason that some people those in whose heads energy easily builds up catch cold if they watch television too much. You could call this kind of cold a television cold, and since television can be the cause of a cold, the worst possible thing is to watch it when you are in bed with a cold. The fact that you are in a strange posture as you watch makes it even worse. 57 So if you have a cold, you should darken the room and leave the television off. But there is nothing wrong with listening to the radio or to music. So the best thing to do is to sleep in a room that has no television. 58

Chapter Four Having a Bath People who catch cold usually wonder whether they should have a bath. It often happens that a cold gets worse if you have a bath, and I think that this is why people often feel cautious about having one. But though a bath can cause a change for the worse, it can also, depending on how it is used, bring about a change for the better. So if someone assumes that you can have a bath when you have a cold and asks me how to go about having one, I think thats very good. But if you ask, Should I have a bath or shouldnt l?, one can only say that you should think for yourself, and that if you feel like having one, do, and if you dont, dont. The effect of having a bath is that the hot water stimulates the skin and thereby heightens the workings of the whole of the body. And if you warm your body by 59 staying in a hot bath for a while, it also encourages sweating. From this point of view, it is a good idea to have a bath when you have a cold. I have even given baths to babies who have colds, and have cured them in this way. It is simply a matter of making use of differences in the temperature of the water, and if you can do that, giving an infant a bath will lead to his passing through a cold much more quickly than if he had not been given one. But depending on how you use a bath, a cold may turn for the worse, and so you must be extremely careful. Here are some things to keep in mind with respect to having baths. Dont have a bath just before going to bed. People often say its a good thing to warm yourself up just before going to bed, but the human body is not like a teapot; its temperature will drop by as much as it has gone up, and it doesnt simply drop, it drops too much. If you are up, your temperature will adjust itself, but if you are in bed, this doesnt happen. So you should only have a bath just before going to bed in order to relax your body when it is extremely tired. Removing fatigue from your body is rather like 60 removing harshness from vegetables: it is a good thing to soak yourself for a long time in a tepid bath. Some people, however, may have a cerebral hemorrhage if they do this. Nevertheless, someone who is partially paralyzed as a result of an apopleptic stroke will be put on the road to recovery if he soaks himself in
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a tepid bath for a long time, since this encourages the expansion of the blood vessels and makes them less liable to shrink. Some people soak themselves in a tepid bath in order to prevent apoplexy, but if you do that, you will get apoplexy. There were some individuals I heard of who, in order to prevent apoplexy, went to a spa that was known for its efficacy in curing the partial paralysis that results from a stroke. The result? Three of them succumbed to apoplexy one after the other. I think its rather silly to confuse curing partial paralysis with the prevention of apoplexy, and in most cases you shouldnt soak yourself in a lukewarm bath in order to recover from a cold or have a long, hot bath to warm yourself up just before going to bed. The important thing is to tighten up the body. You should take a bath in such a way that the body is instantly tightened up and 61 sweats freely. For an adult, the usual temperature for tightening up the body in this way is between 42 and 45 degrees Centigrade (107.6 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit). A temperature of 40 or 41 degrees (104 or 105.8F) is too low. The borderline between lukewarm and hot is 42 degrees. If 42 degrees is comfortably hot, then your bodys sensitivity is normal. If 42 degrees seems lukewarm and 45 degrees seems just right, your body is that of someone who is 45 or 46 years old. Old age is catching up on you! And if you like a temperature of around 46 degrees (114.8F), you really are old. But a normal body feels that a temperature of around 42, 43 or 44 degrees is comfortable.* The temperature that is suitable increases according as your fatigue is great. If you find a temperature of 45 degrees or above comfortable, rather than being a sign of senility, it in fact shows that the fatigue toxins in your body have increased greatly. For example, if you have drunk a lot the 62 previous day, the temperature you find comfortable will be higher. In my experience, if I have had a little whisky, I find that the bath temperature that is comfortable is 1 degree higher than it was the day before.
*

It should be noted that the Japanese tend to like their baths hotter than Western people generally do, and that the design of the Japanese bath is different from that of the usual Western bath.

When the body is in a normal condition, the most comfortable temperature is between 42 and 45 degrees. If your body is tired, has some kind of abnormality, or is about to catch cold, then the temperature that feels comfortable is higher. But there is no need to think about finding the exact temperature that suits the condition of your body: if, when you get out of the bath, parts of your body have become reddened whereas others have not that is to say, the reddening is uneven and the whole body is not equally red and especially if one leg is less red than the other, then you already have a cold, even though you dont realize it. The cold is just about to manifest itself. So if, after getting, out of the bath and drying yourself, you find that one leg is less red than the other, it is a good idea to put that leg back into the hot water of the bath for a brief while. Generally speaking, the way to warm it is to put it in water 1 or 2 degrees higher than the temperature of the 63 bath you have just had for two minutes, so that it becomes equally as red as the other leg. So if, after having had your bath and dried yourself, one leg has not become red, raise the temperature of the bath by 1 or 2 degrees and put that leg in for two minutes. If, when you take it out, it as red as the other leg, your cold will disappear. If, after getting out of the bath, neither leg has become red, you have eaten something that disagrees with you. When you have been poisoned by something or have drunk too much, so that your digestive organs are in an abnormal state, neither leg becomes red. So when your body becomes red but both legs below the knee do not, it is the result of an abnormality caused by something you have eaten or drunk. In such a case, you should raise the temperature of the bath by 2 degrees and warm both legs again. It sometimes happens that only the feet do not become red. This is due to an abnormality in the throat, and you should warm the feet again in the way I have just described. The temperature of the bath may feel comfortable, but if the whole of the body does not become equally red, it tells 64 you that the temperature was not high enough for the parts that havent become red, and that these parts werent warmed enough. Dont put your trust only in what you think you feel. Look at the color of your skin and make sure.
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If you have eaten or drunk something that is bad for you, it is a good idea to gradually raise the temperature of your bath while you are in it. If, however, you do this when you have a cold, the body will become excessively loosened and it will take very much longer to pass through the cold. In fact, this way of having a bath has an extremely bad effect on the way you pass through a cold. So you should check the temperature of the water before you get in the bath. I was in Kyoto a little while ago, and I got into a bath whose temperature was supposed to be 40 degrees. But it was only at the surface that it was hot. Beneath the surface it was cool. I put on the gas and heated up, the water while I was in the bath. By the time all the water had reached a temperature of 40 degrees, my body was so loosened that it had become like a vegetable that has been boiled slowly to remove 65 the bitterness. Still, if you have eaten or drunk something bad, having a bath in this way is a good method of getting rid of the toxins. Some years ago I was talking about this sort of thing, and in the audience was a rather miserable-looking fellow who didnt have much money. But after that he suddenly became prosperous, and would even bring presents for my students. I wondered how he had managed to become so well off, and subsequently I discovered that he and some others had been betting on how much soy sauce they could drink, and that he would always win. You can only drink so much soy sauce, and if you drink more than that, people say you will die. But soon after drinking quantities of soy sauce, this fellow would scurry off to the public baths, get in and ask the attendant to heat the water up. As a result, nothing untoward happened to him. But the people he was betting with thought he must have some trick that enabled him to drink so much soy sauce, and one day, after a soy sauce drinking session, they chased after him, and since he didnt want to give his secret away, he didnt go to the baths. The result was that he 66 had a heart attack and died. I told the owner of the baths and the people he had been betting with that I had told him the secret of getting into a bath and then warming it up. The owner said, No wonder hed cheerfully tell me to keep heating the bath when he came. But his betting companions said sorrowfully, Then were murderers, arent we? Thus, the way

you take a bath can reduce even a risk to your life, as this case shows. There is an old antidote used when someone has been poisoned as a result of eating blowfish: you bury him up to his neck in earth and wait for the poison to be absorbed by the earth. But its much better to boil yourself alive. Gradually make the water as hot as hell! But when theres nothing wrong with you, it is not a good idea to have a bath in this way. When you have a cold, especially, having a bath in this way immediately makes it more difficult to pass through the cold, and the process, takes longer. So you should be careful about getting into a bath that is still being heated up. Instead, heat the water up first and prepare a bucket of cold water. If the bath water is too hot for you to get into, empty the cold water into 67 the center of the bath and then get in yourself. Around your body it will be slightly cooler. Once you feel that the water around you is very hot, immediately get out. This is the best way of having a bath when you have a cold. To cure a cold, the water should be from 0.5 to 1 degree (Centigrade) higher than you feel is comfortable. The water will feel very hot, and so you should reduce the time you stay in the bath by about a half. In fact, you wont be able to stay in for long, and you will want to get out quickly. And if you put the leg that hasnt got red back in the water again, you will pass through your cold easily. If you can easily heat up the bath, a better way is to get in for a while, get out and then heat up the water by 1 degree and get in again. An even better way is not to get out of the bath, but to stand up and dry your body well: in this way, you can warm your legs further. It is best to check your legs to see which is paler, and then, when you stand up, leave only that leg in the water; still, there is no harm in leaving both legs in the water. While standing, dry your body well, and then sit down again in the water for a bit before getting out. Having a quick 68 bath helps you recover from a cold. When you finally get out o the bath, drink a glass of cold water, and you have done all you need to do. I think that a cold is something to be cured by having a bath, and I have dealt with the colds I catch in this way for a number
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of years. I tend to assume that when people ask me about having a bath after catching a cold. they are asking me how they should have one, but this generally turns out not to be the case: they are asking whether they should have a bath or not. Its an absurd question! If you have a bath in a skillful way, a cold quickly disappears. 69

Chapter Five Passing Through a Cold If you pass through a cold well, your food will taste better and your complexion will be refreshed and look as though it were translucent. If, however, your body remains bent forwards after you think you have recovered from a cold, you have not in fact recovered. Once something within the body picks up and the body looks refreshed, the cold is over. This happens to everybody after passing through a cold. It is a good thing to cut down a little on your food when you catch a cold, and to eat things like soup and dishes that are piquant. People think you should cut down on piquant dishes when you are ill, but when you have a cold it does you good to eat some very piquant food. Anything is all right be it made with ginger, chilli pepper or ordinary pepper. Just thrust it down you 70 until your stomach breaks out in a cold sweat! That way you will pass through a cold more quickly. More important than all this, however, is to observe the fifth thoracic vertebra. Get the person you are treating to sit, and then check the positions of the vertebrae. To tell whether or not someone is catching a cold, roughly check whether the positions of some vertebrae are abnormal and whether there is a dull pain in some vertebrae when they are pressed. But when you are checking the mobility of the spine, the person you are checking should not be in a sitting position; you have to get him to lie down on his front. When he is lying down, the highest point on his back will be the fifth thoracic vertebra. Put your thumbs on this vertebra, bring a little weight to bear on it and push and release it a few times. If it moves, only slightly, there is no abnormality, but if it springs back, the bone is thrust out, and if it sinks down and doesnt return when released, there is also an abnormality. When it sinks down in this, way, it hurts, and we feel that it is over-sensitive. If the vertebra is thrust out, a dull pain will be felt when you press it moderately strongly. In other 71 cases, there will be no pain. As you press this vertebra, you can ask the person you are treating whether it hurts or not. Next, press the vertebra from the right side, and then from the left. In
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short, you press it from three directions, and then you check it by pressing on the top and bottom of it. You can tell whether someone has a cold from the degree of movement of this vertebra: if it moves readily, an acute pain will be felt in it; if with difficulty, a dull pain will be felt. In either case, the person in question has a cold. The way to check the first lumbar vertebra is the same. Once you are used to dealing with people who have colds, you can recognize when they have recovered by doing yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra and occasionally checking the first lumbar vertebra. Once these vertebrae regain their resilience, the person you are treating has recovered. Thus, until you are experienced, you should begin by observing the fifth thoracic, and then the first lumbar vertebra. But with someone whose body is habitually twisted, you should check the fifth and tenth thoracic vertebrae. With people who be 72 long to the lateral type, you check the fifth thoracic and second lumbar vertebrae. People whose most important bodily characteristic is that their pelvic bones move belong to what we call the open-closed type; with these people, you should check the fifth thoracic and first lumbar vertebrae. These bones are thrust out by which I mean naturally, not abnormally so that you can easily recognize them. Once the fifth thoracic vertebra begins to move and then the first lumbar vertebra begins to move, a person with a cold is on the road to recovery. When you have checked people in this way on two or three occasions, you will have come to understand the essentials of helping someone pass through a cold. A cold is something that usually gets better of itself. It is itself an activity that restores order to the body, so that there is no need to do much. Nevertheless, one has to be careful when a cold is accompanied with fever and sweating. It sometimes happens that a fever climbs quite high. With some people, it may climb to 38 degrees (100.4F), with others to 39 degrees (102.2F), and occasionally it climbs above 40 degrees (104F). But it is ridiculous to 73 hastily attempt to bring the temperature down. Instead, you should warm the base of the skull for forty minutes with a warm flannel that has been folded small, renewing the heat every so often by dipping it in hot water and wringing it out. If this is done the person with the cold will sweat, and the cold will

disappear as the temperature comes down. As it comes down, it will fall below the normal temperature, which is between 36.5 and 37 degrees (97.7F and 98.6F). It will fall to, say, between 35 and 36 degrees for a short period. So there is a period during which the temperature is below normal. After that, it will return to normal. The normal temperature differs from person to person. It is usually somewhere between 36.5 and 37 degrees, but there are people whose normal temperature is 37.5 or 35.5. One person I know has a normal temperature of 34.8 just like a lizard! And he behaves like one, too. In the winter he rolls himself up in his eiderdown virtually for the duration. I laughed when I heard this and told him, The only difference between you and a lizard is that a lizard crawls under a natural eiderdown whereas 74 you crawl under an artificial one. When this man finally creeps out from under his eiderdown, the temperature has risen a bit, and his own temperature has risen to around 35 degrees. In winter it falls to 34 point something; by the spring equinox it has risen to around 35 degrees, and when this happens, he emerges. Since there are various normal temperatures, we cannot speak in terms of some general norm. Nevertheless, people do, and they find it a bit difficult to take seriously someone whose normal temperature is 35 degrees when he says, as though he were seriously ill, Ive got a temperature of 37 degrees. Because each persons normal temperature differs, it is a bit of a problem to check whether someones temperature has dropped below normal, and that is why I generally rely on the pulse. The normal pulse rate is between 78 and 80 pulses a minute. If it is lower than 78, you may assume that a persons temperature is below normal; if above 80, that his temperature is higher than normal. A childs pulse rate is, generally a little higher than an adults. So you can roughly determine whether someones temperature 75 is normal or not by checking the pulse, since it is easier than checking temperature. Incidentally, there is a relationship between ones breathing and pulse rate: the normal ratio between pulse rate and taking in and exhaling one breath is four beats of the pulse to one breath.
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Even a small abnormality will upset this ratio. In the case of a cold, however, this ratio will not change much. Especially when someone is at the point of recovering from a cold, this ratio is almost perfect, and so I take this as the standard. Nevertheless, I once knew a young woman whose pulse rate was as low as 18 which is the pulse rate of someone who is about to die. When I was told of this, I rushed over to see her, but her face didnt seem unusual in any way. I thought the mother must have made a mistake, but when I checked the young womans pulse, it really was only 18. After she had recovered from a bout of rheumatism, it rose to 34, and subsequently, while I was giving her sh, it rose to 52 still not up to the norm. There are cases like this, when the pulse rate is as low as 18, so perhaps it doesnt do to depend too much on the pulse rate. But 76 with the usual run of people, you will not be mistaken if you check temperature by means of the pulse rate. After someone has had a cold you will be less liable to make a mistake if you check the pulse rate rather than the temperature. You can judge when someones temperature is below normal for him or her by checking either the pulse rate or the temperature. The period during which the temperature is below normal is a crucial one in passing through a cold. If during this period one moves around too much and allows the body to become cooled, a secondary disorder will result. Particularly in the case of mumps which we regard as a kind of cold if a child hops and skips about a bit during the period when the temperature is below normal, it will lead to a secondary complication in an unexpected place. A girl may start wetting her bed or develop ovaritis; a boy may have an abdominal hernia or develop testitis. This is true not only in the case of mumps: if, during a period when the temperature is below normal, a child moves about, a secondary illness will develop, and this failure to pass through an illness properly may contribute to a less than full 77 development in adulthood, or to, say, menstrual disorders in women; so one needs to be careful in these periods. In the case of the adult, too, if the body gets cooled in a period when the temperature is below normal, the result may be a secondary complication: it may suddenly become difficult to pass water, diarrhea may suddenly develop and never stop, or the body may begin aching here and there.

While one has a cold and ones temperature is above normal, there is absolutely no harm in moving about, and no harm in having a bath in fact, as I have said, it is good to have a bath. And over-eating or whatever doesnt matter either. Once, however, the temperature has risen and then fallen below normal, it is necessary to rest quietly until it has returned to normal. Children want to racket about during this period, but parents would be wise to be cautious. I cant stop him from jumping around, some mothers say, and they get just as excited as the child they are trying to calm down. But what I do in such a case is put a mosquito net over the childs bed. It doesnt matter whether its summer or winter: just put up a mosquito net and throw 78 your child inside. Once the period during which the temperature is below normal has ended, you can take away the mosquito net. Inside the net, the child can go on only a small rampage at most. This is the method I use, but I think it would be a good thing if parents used their wisdom to think up a variety of methods. If you find a good one, please let me know. It is in this period alone that complete quiet is of the greatest importance; if this period is safely passed through, the temperature returns to normal, and you neednt worry about doing anything. Before the temperature returns to normal after being below normal, it will rise briefly a little above normal. Once it does this, you neednt take any special care any longer. You can move about, and there is no need to stay in bed any more. Get up on the first occasion when your temperature has risen to normal. After you get up, your temperature will rise once again a little above normal and then come down again. After that, it will become normal. At this time, it doesnt matter whether you rest or move about. In any event, the first period in which the temperature is below normal is 79 crucial; it is very important that you should not fail to pass through this period properly. One often comes across people the bones of whose necks are twisted. If these people fail to pass through a cold properly, an abnormality develops in the ears, eyes or nose. With people who bend forwards, it often happens that they develop sinusitis or tympanitis. In this way, colds linger on in the form of a variety of troublesome disorders. But if you pass through this period
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well, there will not be any lingering effects and the body will be refreshed; so the way you pass through this period is of the greatest importance in recovering from a cold. It is during this period that doing yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra and some other places is most effective. Before this time, one simply corrects that tendency which has led to the bodys catching cold. If the cold itself is really to have an effect, and if it is to be passed through in such a way that the value of having caught it manifests itself in the body, what is necessary is to do yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra during the period when the temperature is below normal. While someone is feverish, theres no need to be overly concerned. Its all right to be 80 perfectly nonchalant about the whole thing and to say, for example, Well, a bath might be a good thing, if you want one. Then, when the person is about to recover, you can at last show a little more solicitousness. As soon as his temperature goes down and he wants to be up and about, hold him down and tell him, You must stay quietly in bed, and you mustnt get up, and do yuki to him well. If you do that, hell feel refreshed after passing through the cold. It all sounds rather unkind, but if you unnecessarily give treatment to someone while the cold is still bad, you will contrary to what you intend disorder his body. Hitherto, everyone has supposed that you are ill when you have a fever, and people busily try all sorts of treatments at this time, and once the fever disappears, they immediately start moving about. So it is only natural that your body should not get better even though you have gone to the trouble of catching a cold. In order to pass through a cold in such a way that your body becomes sound, being relaxed in body and mind and having yuki done are important in the period during which your temperature is below normal. If you simply do yuki to 81 the fifth thoracic vertebra and to other vertebrae that are twisted or thrust out, and stop doing yuki once these places regain their resilience, there will be no secondary complications, and the body will be renewed. Another benefit of a cold is that it provides a person who already has some kind of disorder with the opportunity to recover completely from this disorder. If you pass through a cold well, an old disorder will naturally get better. Years ago, I used to work my fingers to the bone to cure somebodys asthma

by treating the vagus nerves and by doing various things, but nowadays I simply wait for a cold to come along, and once the person has caught a cold, I give him sh. In the case of asthma in children, the crucial time is when a child is either eight or twelve years old; if one gives sh when a child has a cold at either of these ages, the disorder will soon be completely cured. After I had learnt to cure asthma without doing very much, this disorder was no longer a problem for me. In fact, a cold provides the opportunity to cure a number of disorders. Rheumatism, too, can be cured if only a cold is 82 caught. So a cold is a useful thing. Consequently, rather than thinking in terms of curing a cold, one needs to think in terms of how to change the body by making use of a cold. I should like you to remember the way to do yuki and the way to treat the first lumbar vertebra of someone who is lying prone, and so I shall tell you about these things. In the case of doing yuki to the fifth thoracic vertebra, you should place the heel of the hand on it, or place the palm of the hand on the back so that the tip of the middle finger is on this vertebra, and keep doing yuki. As the person you are treating breathes in, you should lightly press on the bone two or three times and after that keep doing yuki. Then, as he breathes out, press lightly down, and as he breathes in, remove the pressure. You should see that the pressure you apply each time is the same. As you do this, the body of the person you are treating will abruptly relax, and you will feel your hand suddenly sink down. The moment he relaxes, just lift your hand from his body: this is the way to expedite recovery at a stroke. When you lift your hands off in this way, his whole body begins tightening up 83 and then recovering. This is an extremely difficult skill, but it may be more interesting than just doing yuki. If you have the chance, try taking your hand off in this way. But it is not that the person wont recover if you dont do this: it is only that if you do it, things go smoothly. Even if you dont know where the fifth thoracic vertebra is, doing yuki in the general area will be effective. If you place your hand on the vertebra that lies at the point where the distance between the shoulder blades is least, you wont be far wrong.

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The blood you send to your hands, your stomach and your buttocks all derives from what you take in at your mouth, doesnt it? You dont eat with your stomach. What you put in your mouth all goes to the places it should go to, and yuki is just the same. Theres no need to be strict about the place you do it to. Nevertheless, if you arent, strict, you wont be able to predict the course of a cold even though you know recovery will result from your doing yuki. As you do yuki, you will have to ask the person you are treating whether he has recovered or not. If, however, you press the right place in the proper way and do yuki, 84 and remove your hand just as the fifth thoracic vertebra, which will have been thrust out, sinks into place, you will be able to say that he -has recovered without asking him. There is very little difference between these two methods in terms of results, but being able to recognize that a cold has been cured gives you a firmer basis. That is why I tell you that the fifth thoracic vertebra should be treated, but people who have not been taught how to do this should simply do yuki to the area between the shoulder blades. Particularly in the case of children, you wont make a mistake if you lay your palm between the shoulder blades and do yuki. To treat the first lumbar vertebra, place the center of the heel of the hand precisely upon it. If you are not precise in your positioning, you wont feel it when the vertebra suddenly sinks into place. Exert a little pressure with your hand, and as soon as the place relaxes, remove your hand. By this means, people who habitually bend forwards and people whose bodies are habitually twisted usually get better. In the case of a person whose body is habitually twisted, you should check the 85 resilience of the fifth and tenth thoracic vertebrae. When the tenth thoracic vertebra begins to relax, press it, and then immediately give sh to the third lumbar vertebra. Before you do this, one or other of these two thoracic vertebrae will be stiff, but when you give sh in this way, the conditions of the two vertebrae will be reversed. The time when recovery takes place is when this change occurs. So press these vertebrae in the right way with the center of the heel of your hand. If you press properly, afterwards you need only wait. You may, with the idea of effecting a quick cure, try to give sh very concentratedly,

but this will only complicate things. After putting your hand on one of someones vertebrae and bringing to bear a certain amount of pressure, you should wait until you feel your hand suddenly sink down it is a very slight thing. If it doesnt sink down, the person you are treating hasnt recovered; if it does sink down, his temperature will have returned to normal. Making great and positive efforts to cure someone it sounds all very well, but all you need do is wait without tensing yourself in expectation. Simply approach the matter in terms of recoverys 86 having taken place just as your hand sinks down. Colds are always around, and so is the opportunity of making use of them. Some people develop skin abnormalities when they have a cold. With these people, in addition to the treatment I have described, you should first do yuki, while exerting a constant slight pressure, to the point on the top of the pubis where a sharp pain is felt when it is pressed. You should do this before the other kinds of treatment not after and then recovery will be rapid. If you do this at such a time, you will heighten the functioning of the skin and various skin disorders will be cured. So women can do this instead of using makeup Some years ago, a woman enthusiastically used this method to rid herself of skin blemishes. I felt that you can do this sort of thing only if you have a consuming interest in it, and though she asked me to give her sh on a number of occasions, I always refused because I thought it would be a lot of trouble for nothing. I didnt believe that this kind of thing could be cured. But after three months even the large blemishes on her skin had completely disappeared. I 87 thought it was very strange that even the large blemishes had disappeared, but she said, Its not strange at all. Theyve gone, as you can see. She is still living in Kanasugi and ever since she got rid of her own blemishes she has been giving this kind of sh to people. It seems that she herself thought that what had happened was miraculous, and as a result of this experience of having removed her own blemishes, she set to work using the method on other people. Since one cannot treat other people with quite the same enthusiasm as one treats oneself, I suspect that the results are not quite so good. But certainly in her case the blemishes disappeared I saw it myself.

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I also know someone whose moles disappeared after she had concentrated on doing this to herself. But I am not sure that we can do this kind of thing. Doing yuki concentratedly at a crucial stage in life is satisfying, but I find it difficult to get excited about the disappearance or appearance of patches of discolored skin. If, however, you show that yuki is also effective for this kind of thing which I have no interest in treating I shall be very grateful; so if you 88 have the opportunity to treat this kind of thing, please go ahead. Especially when someone is catching a cold, there are many changes that affect the skin. So when someone is passing through a cold, you may, in addition to treating them in the ways I have described, try treating the pubis, too. Things like skin discoloration, though, are not going to be cured with only one cold. Nevertheless, if you take the opportunity provided by a cold, disorders like athletes foot, ringworm of the scalp or groin and abscesses on the skin will definitely get better very quickly as a result of using the sh for skin disorders that I have described. To return to the subject: if the fifth thoracic vertebra lacks resilience, there wont be much sweating, even though the person in question has a fever. And if the ninth thoracic vertebra lacks resilience, the person will feel chilly. When you do yuki to these vertebrae putting the heel of your hand on the ninth thoracic vertebra and the fingertips on the fifth thoracic vertebra the feeling of chilliness disappears, and sweating, is induced. If, after doing this, only the temperature climbs and there is no sweating, you should warm the back of the 89 head in the way I described earlier. Then, if you do yuki to the sub-clavian artery and the fourth lumbar vertebra, the process will go smoothly. When the throat hurts, do sh to the foot; while you are doing this, the pain will die down. Let me tell you how to do it. A person whose throat hurts will feel the kind of sharp pain associated with over-sensitivity when you touch the muscle on the underside of the foot that runs alongside the first metatarsal bone. After getting the person you are treating to lie on his back, kneel down by his feet and lay both thumbs, so that they are overlapping, on the muscle of the foot. Then stimulate the muscle by pressing it as though you were rubbing it against the bone. This will be extremely painful, and in order to bear the

pain, the person you are treating will eventually turn his head to the same side of the body that you are treating. Once he does this, you have stimulated this muscle to the limit. You should have done the action I have just described about five or six times before this limit is reached. It is a good idea to raise the temperature of the sickroom, but you should be careful 90 not to raise it too much. Once sweating begins, the sick person should be provided with water to drink. And if the air in the room is dry, put a bowl of water near the stove. When someone sweats, his body should not be cooled, and the perspiration should be wiped away. While the perspiration is still sticky as it will be at first clothes should not be changed. Wipe the sweat away with a towel. If even one part of the body becomes chilled, the whole body will stop perspiring and the perspiration will be retained in the body; and so you should not use a cold, wet towel: you should use a warm, dry one. For the same reason, you should be careful about draughts. Getting chilled as a result of a draught sometimes leads to a cough that is rather like the kind of cough associated with diphtheria. If this happens, it is important to do yuki to the base of the fingernails of the first fingers. When perspiration is stopped and sweat is retained in the body as a result of a draught, the breathing suddenly becomes rapid and labored. It is a very good thing to put up a mosquito net and put the sick person inside it. You sometimes get draughts coming up through the 91 floorboards, and when someone has measles you must take special care in this respect. In addition, since the temperature of the air drops between five and six in the morning, it is necessary to start warming the room at about three a.m. Many people warm the sickroom until two or three a.m. and then turn the heating off; this is the worst possible thing to do. An unresponsive child tends not to catch colds, but once his head begins to work, he catches them more easily. The same is true in the case of adults, but once a cold has been caught, one should rest ones head. For this reason, a room that gets too much sunlight is not a suitable sickroom. You should draw the curtains if necessary.
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Nevertheless, in the case of an adults cold, if you simply relax your body you may do it even while you are working and stay relaxed for about twenty minutes, and if you then arch yourself backwards as far as you can go, thereby tightening your body up, this alone will in most cases be sufficient for you to pass through a cold even one that is accompanied with a fever. But it is very important to wipe your sweat away. It is also important not to allow 92 feelings of discontent, dissatisfaction or resentment to become mixed up with your cold. If the body becomes cooled as a result of perspirations not being wiped away, and perspiration is retained in the body, it often happens that pneumonia develops, or the urinary system is affected in some way. In the case of a very young child, you must take great care in this respect. COMPLETING THE PROCESS THAT IS A COLD 1) Relax the body: Even though you try to relax those parts of the body that suffer from biased fatigue, you cannot relax them. You cannot relax them merely by lying down for a time. The best thing is to go to sleep after having done the form of seitai exercise that suits your taiheki. If you do this, those parts of the body that suffer from biased fatigue will relax. If people who regularly do katsugen und adopt a posture that is comfortable for the body, these parts of the body will naturally relax. 2) Avoid cooling the body: Particularly when you are perspiring or have a fever, you should not expose your body to draughts, etc. Even when you do not have a fever you should see that your body does not become cooled. 3) Warming the body: If you want to warm the body up positively, I recommend warming the back of the head for 40 minutes with a flannel that has been folded small (the smaller the better), dipped into hot water and wrung out; the warmth of the flannel should be renewed at intervals. In the case of a cold in the throat, have a foot-bath: put your feet in hot water that comes to just above the ankles for 4 to 6

minutes. Having dried both feet well, put the paler foot back in the water for 2 minutes. The temperature of the water, incidentally, should be about 2 degrees Centigrade higher than the bath temperature suitable for you. Having warmed yourself, it is most important that you do not allow your body to be chilled. When a fever hasnt developed properly, warming your body will lead to your temperatures going up and then coming down. 94 4) Dont stop yourself from perspiring: Wipe away perspiration with a warm, dry towel. While the perspiration is still viscous, dont change your clothes, but change them after it becomes watery. When you change your clothes, be careful not to cool your body so that the perspiration stops. 5) The most crucial points in the process of passing through a cold: While your temperature is below normal, rest quietly. As soon as it returns to normal, get up. (Theres no need to be unduly cautious.) These are the two crucial points in making use of a cold. 6) You should drink more liquids than usual. 95

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Chapter Six More about Baths The other day I was talking about the way to take a bath when one has a cold, and since then there have been a number of complaints. One husband got into the bath and told his wife that it was tepid. His wife came and, without a word, stuck a thermometer in the water, showed it to him, said, Its 42 degrees, and immediately went back into the living room without heating up the water. The husband subsequently grumbled to her about this, and she told him that she had heard from me that 42 degrees was the normal temperature for a healthy person and that it was therefore the right temperature. Perhaps she thought it couldnt be that her own beloved husband was insensitive! This sort of thing poses a bit of a problem. What I actually said was that 42 degrees is 96 the borderline between lukewarm and hot, and that for a body whose sensitivity is, normal, 42 degrees is a suitable temperature. Getting into water that feels lukewarm out of a desire to pretend that ones body is not dull is not good for you. And then there was the contrary case: one mother put a sensitive child into water whose temperature was 42 degrees, and when he said it was too hot and cried, she told him that if he couldnt get into it, he wasnt normal; and she forced him to get in. Again, I said that if you heat up the bath when you are in it, it will take longer for you to recover from a cold. So one person got into a tepid bath and exclaimed, Oh dear, Ive made a mistake! But he thought one shouldnt heat up the bath whi le one is in it, so he just sat there gritting his teeth. It is this sort of thing that always makes me reluctant to talk about taking a bath. Very simply, it is a question of what is felt by different peoples bodies: each persons body differs. Nevertheless, in this talk I shall take as a standard the usual sensitivity. If a temperature below 42 degrees feels comfortably hot, you are sensitive; a

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97 normal adult generally finds a temperature of between 42 and 45 degrees comfortably hot. If you do not find the water comfortable unless it is over 45 degrees, bodily fatigue has accumulated to such an extent as to be beyond your physiological capacity to get rid of in the ordinary course of things, or you have toxins in your body, or various parts of the body have become stiff; so you have to consider that your body has become dulled. Again, there are of course people who find a temperature of 39 or 40 degrees hot enough. A young person, a person with a sensitive body or a child feels that a temperature of only 39 or 40 degrees is hot. When a baby cries on being given its first bath, it is because it has been surprised by being put into water whose temperature is suitable for an adult. The temperature inside the womb is between 37 and 37.5 degrees, so first put the baby in water that is around that temperature and then gradually heat it up; if you do that, it wont cry even though it is having its first bath. It is a mistake to suppose that a babys crying on having its first bath is a sign of health. Quite honestly, it is no good to surprise a baby when it has its first bath. So the first bath 98 should begin at a temperature of 37 degrees, and then the water should be gradually heated up to 39 degrees; the temperature of the bath should remain within this range. At a temperature of 39 degrees, the vernix caseosa on the skin dissolves, so that it is not difficult to clean the body. There are also many sensitive adults who find a temperature of around 39 degrees comfortable. Somebody who is under40 and finds this temperature comfortable is not over-sensitive. But someone who cant get into the bath unless it is 37 or 38 degrees has a body that is over-sensitive; in that case, one must consider that there may be a weakness in the urinary or respiratory system. Thus, if a person in his thirties finds a temperature of between 39 and 42 degrees comfortable, it is perfectly all right. So, since you now understand that the temperature that is comfortable varies, I think it would be a very good idea for you all to find the temperature that is comfortable for you, measure it and use it as a yardstick for judging the state of your health. If, having heard that sensitive people find lukewarm water comfortable, you think you would like to join the ranks of the

99 sensitive and say to yourself Its hot enough when the temperature of the bath is only 42 degrees, and then get in, you sometimes catch a cold. People who grit their teeth and sit in a bath that feels tepid find, when they get out, that their bodies havent become red. A suitable temperature is not one that you work out in your head, but is one that feels comfortable to your body. If you get into a bath that is comfortably hot for your body, your skin will become redder. The more fatigue toxins there are in your body, the higher the temperature that feels comfortable. If a very over-sensitive person endures a bath that he finds hot, his skin very quickly becomes red. A person who gets red in a bath whose temperature is below 42 degrees is sensitive. In the case of a person who doesnt get red unless the temperature is around 45 degrees, either a lot of fatigue toxins have accumulated in the body, or the bodys sensitivity has become dulled, so that he feels that a temperature slightly higher than normal is suitable. Thus, the right thing to do is to use the reddening of your skin as a basis for judging whether the temperature is suitable. 100 When some part of the body is disordered, you may think that the temperature is comfortably hot or just right, but the part of the body that is disordered will not admit that the temperature is suitable; in other words, this part will not become red. For example, if you have a cold, one of your legs will not become red; or if something is wrong with your digestive organs, the legs below the knee will not become red; or if you have foodpoisoning, only the central part of your back will not become red; that is, only those places where sensitivity is dulled or where fatigue toxins have accumulated will not become red even though the rest of the body does. It is because the activity of those parts of the body that are related to the places which do not become red has become dulled. In the case of people who always have stomach troubles, the left-hand side of the spine, from the sixth to the tenth thoracic vertebra, does not become red. With people who have something wrong with the liver, the right-hand side of the fourth, eighth and ninth thoracic vertebrae does not become red. When, however, the body is in an over-sensitive condition such that 101
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it may succumb to an acute illness the body may not feel that the water is hot, so the whole will not get red, though certain parts will. We regard this as a sign of oversensitivity. One usually determines whether a certain part is over-sensitive or not by seeing whether the person in question has a strange sensation when this part is wiped with alcohol or when a needle is drawn lightly across it. But when, after getting out of the bath, certain parts are especially red, it is a sign that the body is about to fall ill in some way. It is very convenient, in managing your body, that the fact that a certain part of your body is dulled or over-sensitive is manifested by the skin, and that, having got out of a bath whose temperature suits you, you can ascertain whether the whole of your body has become red or not, and, in addition, whether a certain place is especially red or not red at all. If you press a place that is especially red, you will feel the kind of sharp pain that accompanies over-sensitivity. If you press a place that has not become red for a certain time, you will gradually begin to feel a dull pain. Having first experienced this with your own body, you will 102 have no difficulty when it comes to observing your childrens bodies. When you have food-poisoning, your legs below the knees do not get red at all. In this case, having got out of the bath, it is a good idea to put your legs up to the knees in hot water again: we call this a leg-bath. If you have a cold in the throat, one of your feet, up to the ankle, will not get red; again, you should put that foot and ankle back in the hot water for a while: this we call a foot-bath. Basically, a foot-bath or leg-bath consists in putting those parts of the body that are paler back into the water after having got out of the bath and inspected the body. There are, however, many people who, when they are told to take a leg-bath or footbath, assume that they should not have a proper bath and just bathe their legs or feet. But they are wrong: a leg-bath or footbath is a way of completing a bath. If you take one in this way, a cold or diarrhea will soon get better. As I said before, there are some mothers who think that the proper temperature even for children is 45 degrees and force their children to get into water that is too hot for 103

them, and there are wives who think that 42 degrees is the proper temperature and who, having stuck a thermometer in the bath, slip back into the living room without heating up the water any more, so it seems that having a bath is a very difficult thing. If one gives a rough explanation, one tends to be easily misunderstood, so the reason why I passed over some aspects was that it is safer to tell you only to put a certain part of your body in hot water. But, to put the matter fully, it should be done after having a bath. Having a bath stimulates the body and heightens its workings, and it encourages the body to excrete toxins. Therefore, having a bath is more necessary when the body is disordered than when it is not. In fact, having a bath when your body is not disordered is superfluous. Nevertheless, a bath is a good exercise for the body, and in the case of a child it compensates for the childs not having done enough exercise. Adults seem to think of a bath as a way of cleaning themselves, but the more you clean the body, the weaker become the skins excretory functions. As you know, the skin gets rid of bodily waste this we call its excretory function; 104 and it also breathes this we call its respiratory function. There are many kinds of creatures that have no lungs and breathe through the skin. The respiratory function of the skin is also extremely important in man. If two-thirds of the bodys surface is burned, a person will die; this is because the respiratory function of the skin can no longer work. So the skin is not a kind of leathery bag that contains the body, but it has the living functions of excretion and respiration. As is shown by the fact that when a dancers body is completely covered with gold leaf she faints, the respiration of the skin is extremely important. So stimulating the skin encourages it to breathe. The reason why applying a poultice to the skin when someone has pneumonia is effective is that it is a way of encouraging the skin to breathe. If you leave the poultice on, however, the skin will be unable to breathe. The point is that by stimulating the skin and increasing its respiratory capacities, you reduce the burden on the lungs. So our way of thinking that one cures a cold by means of a bath does not go against common sense. It is eminently reasonable. But most people think that a 105
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bath is something like a washing machine, and when they catch a cold they stop having; baths. When you catch a cold, however, it is a very good thing to chafe certain parts of the body. Since one restores a balance by stimulating those parts of the body which feel the heat of the bath less, it is a very good idea to rub these parts with a flannel while you are in the bath. Washing yourself with soap is rather like taking an enema when you are going to the lavatory regularly every day. If you take an enema, everything comes out all right, but you realize dont you? that if you make a regular practice of it, your body will become unable to excrete waste unless you take an enema. In the same way, if you always wash your body with soap as if it were a shirt, the skins excretory functions will become completely dulled and very weak. The body will become unable to cleanse itself and will easily become dirty. At the same time, the skins respiratory, functions will become dull. So getting into the bath, getting out of it, scrubbing yourself with soap and then getting in again is the way to create a body that readily succumbs to colds. Since, like an enema, it 106 is a way of dulling the body, having a bath like this is not something I can look on with any favor. I imagine that there are many women who use soap to remove the lotions and powder that they have plastered all over their faces. And there are women who not only use soap to remove make-up, but who busily wash even those places that arent dirty as if they were washing clothes. I dont think very much of this sort of thing. This is even more true in the case of a baby. A baby may excrete an excessive amount of oils, but it doesnt plaster skin cream all over itself; so if you use too much soap on it, it will develop the kind of body that readily succumbs to colds. Doing this is not the way to encourage the living functions of the skin; on the contrary, you are proceeding in the direction of making them dull. For this reason, I tell people that they shouldnt use soap to wash their bodies, and that it is important to foster your babys body in such a way that the body is cleansed by means of the skin itself. Particularly in the case of a cold, the strength or weakness of the skins functioning has a great effect. Incidentally, after recommending to 107 various people that soap shouldnt be used with babies, I received a complaint from the president of a soapmanufacturing company. It may be that my recommendation

constitutes obstructing someones business, but it is not so much a matter of the use of soap being wrong; it is the way of using it that is the problem. In my case, since I rarely use soap, any oil or ink on my hands disappears if I simply stir them about in hot water. I havent used soap to wash my body or face even once in the last forty years. People often tell you that you should use water to wash your face, but I always give it a lick with a damp flannel and thats that. And I seldom wash my hair, either. There was a man who talked a lot in favor of washing ones hair, but he shut up after I said, It looks as though washing the hair makes one bald, doesnt it? In fact, it is true that washing ones hair too much encourages such a tendency, because in order to wash it one uses all sorts of unnecessary things. In short, one should live as far as possible by means of the bodys own natural powers. By means of the heightening of these natural powers, the body becomes 108 strong. You may think in terms of using props to make yourself healthy, and, for example, ensuring that you go to the lavatory every day by means of an enema, but this has nothing to do with true health, which consists in the bodys becoming strong through its own natural powers. It is proper to think of a person as being healthy only if his health derives from his own powers. I dont think we can regard the condition that results from protecting yourself, defending yourself, and relying on props as though you were a scarecrow that is kept upright somehow or other in the same light. 109

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Chapter Seven Psychic Factors Years ago, I thought that artificial and unnecessary things, such as putting on more clothes when it was cold, or wearing less when it was warm, or switching on a fan should be kept to the minimum, so before the war I used to keep the windows and doors at the place where I taught open even in winter. Of course, I didnt use a stove either, and I wore summer clothing all the year round. Everybody who came used to conceal some kind of pocket warmer on them. But many of these people started to catch colds only because they drew near to a stove in other places. It was because their bodies had become sensitive, but it was also the result of auto-suggestion. I thought to myself that these people had caught colds because they believed they would, and that it was wrong for me to have created in them 110 this state of mind; and I thought that I should lead them towards maintaining their health while living in the usual way. And after that, I shut the windows, put on a stove, and created the conditions of a usual way of life. People who have got it into their heads that they catch cold because the weather is cold do catch cold when the weather gets cold; and people who believe that if they warm themselves at a stove they will catch cold actually catch cold when they do this. I have found that when it comes to catching colds, these psychic aspects play a great part. In the past, I often told people that you dont catch cold because the weather is cold and gave all sorts of explanations, and then people started catching colds because they had gone out with too many clothes on. People who think you catch cold because the weather is chilly catch cold because their socks have got wet or because they have forgotten their muffler. But while they are thinking in this way, they think nothing of baring their bottoms when they go to the lavatory. So it is not a matter of catching a cold because it is chilly; this way of thinking just slips into your mind when your mind is 111 empty, and at this time you catch a cold. Similarly, the idea that you catch a cold when you get warmed up slips in when your body is relaxed, and you catch a cold.

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Thus, when it comes to catching colds, it often happens that one lays hold of a cold by means of the mind. In English, they use the expression catch cold, and this way of catching cold as it were, seizing coldness is very common. And because the newspapers make a lot of fuss about a colds going round, colds become popular. There are, of course, illnesses that mimic diseases like cholera, typhoid fever and encephalitis paracholera, paratyphoid, etc. Psychic factors, whereby people believe something and it then becomes true, play an important part in this sort of thing. Nevertheless, despite their holding this kind of belief, there are many people who dont catch colds. Why is this? It is because their belief is a conscious one. When someone holds this kind of belief consciously, his condition is such that he doesnt catch a cold. A cold comes about when the idea of catching a cold enters deep into the recesses of the mind or the subconscious. Even though you consciously believe it when you 112 say, Ill catch a cold if the idea wont enter deeply unless there is a gap in the defenses of your subconscious. If, when you sneeze, you immediately think, Oh Lord, Ive got a cold, the idea just sinks into your mind. Once that happens, you catch a cold. From the physiological point of view, when you sneeze the cold is coming out. You are right if, when you sneeze, you think, Ah, the colds coming out. But if, when you sneeze, the idea Ah, Ive caught a cold! slips into the mind, this, physiological function of recovery that belongs to a cold itself becomes the cause of another cold. It is the same with diarrhea; it gives the body a spring-cleaning, but if the idea This is dreadful theres something wrong with my stomach and Ive fallen ill becomes involved, you really will fall ill. In this way, many colds, in addition to being caused by physiological factors, are produced as a result of your own mental processes. Still, it doesnt matter very much if you catch a cold when you sneeze or when the idea crosses your mind that you catch cold when the weather is chilly or when you get too hot; but if someone thinks She doesnt pay attention to me if I fall ill, she may be 113 more sympathetic, a demand to fall ill arises. If something crosses the mind that makes you turn the corners of your mouth down and sulk, or narrow your eyes in anger, a

corresponding change will occur somewhere in the body and your body will come to want to catch a cold. When a cold springs from this kind of mental attitude, it is no wonder that you also get people thinking I caught a cold, but she didnt sympathize at all, or Now that things are like this, recoverys not worth it. A week or so ago, a man named Aoki had an apopleptic fit. It wasnt serious, and when I visited him the day before yesterday, I told him that he could get up after two more days in bed and that his illness was over. Oh, dear, he replied. When I asked him why, he said, I havent been ill for a long time. When I fell ill this time, everybody gathered round they were all very concerned and treated me very kindly. I hadnt realized before I fell ill how kind my family was. Even his wife, of whom he had always been rather scared, took good care of him. So he confessed: I wanted to be ill rather longer, and now you say Ive recovered and can get up. I want to be ill a little 114 longer. Then it would have been better for you not to have called me, I said. If you dont call me, you can remain half-paralyzed for as long as you like for the whole of your life if thats what you want. Your wife will take on the role of your better half, and she will have to accept this role whether she likes it or not. You wont be able to go to the lavatory without being carried there. If you really want to spend the whole of your life like that, then dont call me. But I want to be ill like now, replied Mr. Aoki, without having to worry about the illness at all. In fact, you find this kind of feeling in everyones heart; it was simply that Mr. Aoki was very frank about it. If you say to someone who has toothache It must hurt, she may well put on a very courageous front and say Its nothing. But if you ask her to give you a cup of tea or water, shell say, But my tooths hurting like anything. Or when you ask someone to do something that is only slightly inconvenient, hell say, Ive got a cold, you know, and absolutely refuse to do what you request as though he had gained the right to refuse. And if you 115

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think that the vehemence of his refusal shows that he has a lot of vitality and press him further, his temperature will suddenly climb and he will show you that he definitely has got a cold. Just as in the case of catching a cold, psychic factors play a great part in passing through and recovering from a cold. If you dont root these out, it becomes very difficult to cure a cold in the early stages by treating only the fifth thoracic vertebra and first lumbar vertebra. Even an adult feels a certain satisfaction on falling ill. The same is true in the case of a child, and it often happens that, as a result of some little thing said, his cold either lingers on or quickly gets better. If a child is scolded unreasonably, a sense of resistance is suddenly aroused within him. This resistance usually manifests itself in the condition of the skin. Just as embarrassment makes a person blush, so when someone has a sense of resistance, the skin contracts. If a child catches a cold after the skin has contracted, there is a tendency for him to develop hives or some kind of rash. In the case of an adult, a skin disease may result. The skin is readily affected by psychic factors, and just as a 116 trivial thing will make you blush or turn pale, so the degree to which the skin breathes rapidly changes, and this may be the cause of a colds being caught. Rashes, various skin diseases, colds especially colds that have some connection with the condition of the skin are closely related to the movements of the psyche. If, immediately after someone catches a cold, you treat the fifth thoracic vertebra, he soon recovers. But if you say to him, If I do this, youll recover, it may well happen that a demand not to recover or sense of resistance to what you have said arises in the person, and instead of recovering he begins to create a cold within himself. If a subconscious resistance is worked up, a person will catch colds as a result of all sorts of things as a result of being made to wear too many clothes, say, or as a result of being made to wear too few. In some situations even a curative stimulus may lead to a persons not recovering. Especially when a parent coerces a child by saying, If you do this, youll definitely get better, so youve got to do it, the childs cold will suddenly get worse. Instead of doing this, it often happens that talking gently to a child 117

and giving him something nice to eat proves effective. It is a simplistic way of thinking to suppose that because such and such a method is the way of dealing with a cold, a cold will get better if you merely follow that method. A slight scolding may lead to a childs forgetting his cold, and telling him to do some trivial job may bring on a cold. If, when its chilly, you unheedingly ask a child to run an errand for you, he may immediately catch a cold. You may suppose that he has caught a cold because it is chilly, but he could have gone out and flown a kite without any ill effects, so the weather has nothing to do with it. The spirit seizes on a cold as a result of some quite fortuitous thing. Thus, in giving sh to someone, it is first of all important that you should not raise up any subconscious resistance. When someone is about to recover from an illness, it often happens that he falls ill again because a demand to be ill for a little longer arises. I have coined the term condition of attachment to describe this phenomenon. In cases where some dissatisfaction has been suppressed, if you say, You are recovering, a person will think, I want it to get worse. You often come 118 across a child who has been bandaged up in a complicated way for what is a very small injury, dont you? A great length of bandage has been wound round him, and he sits about not moving a finger; but when you remove the bandage to have a look at whats wrong, the injury often turns out to be very minor indeed. Everyone has this kind of feeling, and it is this that creates a condition of attachment. With a child who has once had the experience of rapidly recovering from a cold after receiving sh from me, it often happens, when he catches cold again, that merely because his parents tell him that they will take him to my place, he suddenly develops a high fever and they cannot take him out. He probably thinks that if he is brought to my place his cold will be over in a jiffy, whereas he will be able to stay at home if he has a fever; and so he plays for a little more time three days, say. Unless you know how to get rid of the psychic factors that constitute this condition of attachment, a cold will not be passed through. In addition to laying my hands on someones body, I use a technique to remove those psychic factors or unwanted feelings that
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119 have persisted until the person receives sh, and if a person who is about to fall into a condition of attachment, or a child whose cold has suddenly become worse after it looked as though he was about to recover, is brought to my place, these feelings are discontinued. In fact, one can deal with these psychic factors very easily, so, wherever they may manifest themselves in the body, they dont pose much of a problem. If you treat people without knowing about these things, some peoples colds will suddenly get better but you will come across cases of people whose colds do not get better or of people whose colds get worse when you concentratedly do yuki to them. In spite of your doing yuki, you make the process of recovery longer than it would be in the case of natural recovery. So you need to give some thought to dealing with this kind of psychic problem as well. If the thought Its chilly suddenly crosses your mind, you will catch cold, but if you brace your abdomen, this alone will result in your not catching cold. If you are shocked when you injure your hand, it will bleed a lot, but if you arent shocked, it 120 wont bleed. And if you burn yourself, a blister will form if you are shocked, but if you brace your stomach, you wont get a blister. Some people say that if a burn is extensive, blisters will form, but this isnt necessarily so. If someone were to remain in a faint, blisters would not develop even though burns covered over half of his body. And they develop even less if the person is dead! The more cautious a person is in his daily life, the more blisters he will get when he burns himself. So blisters are in fact a psychic phenomenon, and you can regard them as a manifestation of a mind that is easily shocked and overly protective. If you consciously brace your abdomen, you wont develop blisters even though you lay hold of a pair of red-hot tongs. When giving lectures, I used to explain that you dont bleed if you arent shocked, but however many times I said this, people didnt believe me. So I would prepare a large sacking, needle and ask someone who was sitting near the front, Give me your hand for a moment. Then I would do what in Japanese we call kiai, that is to say, I would concentrate ki in my abdomen and let out a yell, and as I did so, I would rapidly 121

thrust the needle into the persons hand. Then I would get him to repeat, It doesnt hurt, it doesnt hurt, and, saying the same thing, I would remove the needle; there would be no bleeding. Or I would suddenly thrust a pair of red-hot tongs in front of someone and ask him to give me his hand. I would get him to brace his stomach and grip the tongs. Even though the skin was burnt, there were no blisters. But gradually, as I did this sort of thing, the people in the front started getting further and further away from we, and eventually nobody would come to the front at all. There was nothing to be done, so I stopped doing this and I havent done it for twenty years now. I wonder if I might not start doing it again! After all, there are plenty of barbecue spits around nowadays! So if anyone would like to try, I shall be glad to do it for him. At first I thought it was because of the power of the ki concentrated in my abdomen that there was no bleeding or pain. But when I considered the matter more carefully, I realized that if there was no shock, there was no bleeding, and that if the attention was drawn to something else, there was no pain. As a result of my doing kiai, the 122 others attention was drawn to something else, and even though he was stabbed with a needle, he felt no pain; so pain is a psychic phenomenon. I thought that it must be the same with bleeding, so I stopped doing kiai and tried drawing the others attention to some other thing; and I found that it worked. Since then, I have stopped doing kiai. Before that, I was called the master of kiai. I would cure toothache, too, by touching the spot and doing kiai. This was, what I was best at, and when I thrust a needle into someones hand without making a sound and there was no bleeding, I was disagreeably surprised. I wondered to myself, What on earth? Is what I do no more than drawing someones attention away by ringing a bell or something? and I stopped doing kiai. But, as I said, it often happens, in the case of colds, that a cold is caught as a result of somethings suddenly striking the mind. So when someone is startled like this, its a good idea to deal with him in such a way that strength is summoned up in his abdomen. If, when someone is touched on a painful spot, he doesnt tense himself, it wont hurt, 123
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but people become tense despite themselves and it hurts all the more. In the same way, if you determine not to be startled when you catch a cold, your symptoms will, contrary to what you hope, become worse. Once having caught a cold, however much you brace your lower abdomen and fight against the cold, a certain resistance will arise deep in the mind, and, contrary to your intentions, the cold will get worse. Many people think that a disease is cured by fighting it, and that one remains alive by fighting diseases; but the more they think in this way, the more serious are their illnesses. The reason for this is what I have just been talking about. Few people would summon up their fighting spirit to this extent in the case of a cold, but in the case of tuberculosis, people used to speak in terms of the spirit of fighting disease, methods of fighting disease, and conquering disease. I thought that nowadays this attitude had disappeared at least with respect to tuberculosis but it has been transferred to cancer, and people are thinking in terms of lets cure cancer and discovering cancer in the early stages. But when someone is told he has cancer, he is shocked and 124 determines to fight the disease, all the negative activities of his spirit are brought into play, and as a result of these functions of resistance, he himself weakens the activities of his body. It is as a result of this that there are so many cases of illnesses becoming worse. If at the stage just before an illness develops you brace yourself, you can prevent any illness, but if you tense yourself after falling ill, the effect will be completely opposite. The difficulty of discussing the psychic factors, involved in maintaining health derives from this sort of thing. If when you suddenly feel chilly, you immediately put your strength into the lower abdomen, you will not catch a cold, but if, having caught a cold, you say to yourself, Oh, its only a cold, and press on regardless, the cold will get worse. It is a fact that cancer may get better if you have a cold, and that even hardened arteries may grow supple, so the right thing to do is to think of how to catch and pass through colds skillfully. The worst possible way of dealing with a cold is to grit your teeth and say, I shant be beaten! Many colds are encouraged to grow worse as a result of doing this. And diseases like 125

cancer and tuberculosis are not cured if you deliberately set out to cure them; more than that, they have a tendency to grow worse as a result of your trying to stand up to them. People whose cancer suddenly grows worse after they learn that they have the disease are generally the kind of people who try to battle with the illness and who rouse their fighting spirit even more than usual. So you can think of people who stand up to illness as encouraging their illnesses to grow. Before you fall ill it is important to brace yourself so that you dont fall ill, but it is not good to stand up to an illness once you have one because it is by means of ones mental resistance that ones body is driven towards breakdown. Consequently, if you attempt only to cure the body or an illness without taking into account a persons subconscious resistance, it is difficult. Perhaps I should explain what sort of thing works its way into the recesses of the psyche and how it does so. For example, however many times you may tell yourself, Im really tough, you feel frightened in a pitch-black place, dont you? Indeed, the more you tell yourself that a dark place is not frightening, the more you feel a chill in 126 your backbone. Just as your mouth waters when you see something good to eat, or your body abruptly stiffens when you are surprised by the noise of something breaking, so the movements of the deep subconscious are not felt consciously, but manifest themselves in the bodys workings and actions. You may think that when you have a bath, 42 degrees, is the proper temperature and that your body will be warmed up if the water is at this temperature, but when you get out, your body may not have become red. And there is the opposite case: you suppose that the water is exactly right while you are in it, but your body is like a beetroot when you get out. If you get in the bath without thinking very much about such matters, certain parts, of your body will be over-sensitive to the heat and will become red, whereas other places will not feel anything at all. It is the skin that determines how you feel the heat. This happens quite independently of anything you may think. Just as there are things other than what you consciously feel, which you feel physically, or your body feels without your consciously being aware of it, so the way you feel in your 127
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subconscious is not consciously felt, but is manifested in the body. It sometimes happens that someone who consciously tells himself that he is not frightened, and who others suppose cannot be frightened, trembles like a leaf, and if he is sitting down, all the strength may drain from his legs so that he cannot move. 128

Chapter Eight Leading the Imagination Some time ago, a group of people I knew were drinking together when a number of thugs entered and tried to intimidate them. Everyone shot up and ran away, except for a man named Eguchi, who remained seated and did not move. All the others praised him and said, Thats what being unmoved means! Hes really got guts! And since the ruffians had left, they started drinking again to restore the convivial atmosphere. But when they thought they would return home, Mr. Eguchi still remained seated. When the others asked what was wrong, he said he had been so surprised that all the strength had drained from his legs and he hadnt been able to move. Thereupon they all bestowed on him the title of Eguchi the Great Unmoved, and because he couldnt move, they telephoned me. When I came, 129 I just snapped a bone in his lower back into place, and he was able to walk. When someones strength drains from his legs like this, a rapid recovery makes him feel uncomfortable and even more so when, as in this case, he had sat unmoved before a lot of other people. So if you do not deal with this kind of case very tactfully, the person in question will start feeling pain, will be unable to move, and he wont be cured unless he is carried out on a stretcher this often happens even though the bone that was displaced has been restored to its proper position. So as I treated Mr. Eguchi, I said, The more courage someone has, the more sensitively his lumbar vertebrae move, and yours moved a little too much. And then I said, In this sort of case, a person who isnt brave wont be able to stand up. I wonder if you can do it? And in an instant he was standing up. He didnt want it to be thought that the strength had drained from his legs because he lacked courage. In this way, I made him imagine himself as a brave man, and if someone imagines something it comes true. One cannot, by means of the will, influence the behavior of ones body at all, 130

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but if an idea is before the mind, things will transpire in accordance with this idea. If you make an effort to blush, you wont be able to, but if you imagine something that embarrassed you before, you will blush even though you are alone. And if you bring something that once frightened you before your mind, your face will turn pale and you will feel chilly even though you are warming your hands at a stove. Bringing something before the mind in this way has a more direct influence on the body than does the will, making an effort or squaring up to something. So Mr. Eguchis back was soon cured when I treated him while bringing him to have an image of himself as a stalwart fellow. Nonetheless, if I had led his imagination in this way but had not actually corrected the bone that was displaced, Mr. Eguchi would not have been able to stand. And in cases where only the bone is corrected, it sometimes happens that, despite what has been done, the persons condition gets worse. But if you both direct the persons imagination and correct his condition, it is always the case that his condition is naturally cured and remains cured. 131 In the case of colds, there are various ways of dealing with these psychic factors, but since they involve many difficult problems there is little point in your trying to remember them; so I should simply like you to remember how to direct someones imagination. This is the most important skill, and the most effective way is to combine this skill with yuki. But if you fail to lead someones imagination in the right direction, the effects of your yuki may not be clear, even though you do it well. This is not limited to yuki. In the case of seitai guidance, too, if you are not skillful at leading a persons imagination, the more intensively you treat someone, the worse he will get. Even though he thinks you will make him better and even though you intend to cure him, you will, as a result of treating him so intensively, make him think, I must be in a bad way if he is doing all this to me, and he will end by believing this, and it will be so. It is the same with bed-wetting. If you intensively give seitai guidance in order to stop someone from wetting the bed, you will fix in his mind the idea I am a bed-wetter. If you do not mention curing a person of bed-wetting, there is no problem. If you 132

do mention it, he will despite the fact that hitherto he has merely thought Sometimes I wet the bed come to think I am a bedwetter, and he will say to himself, Wetting the bed I must have a screw loose somewhere. It is at just such an unguarded moment that an idea like this lodges itself in the mind. We speak of something imagined lodging itself in the mind, but in fact it is a matter of the direction of the imagination being determined. When a child fails to do something well, there is nothing wrong in saying, You failed to do it, didnt you? But people say instead, What a fool you are! And the child comes to believe what they say. Parents will say, You failed the examination because youre not very bright. Youve got to get down to work. But to force a child to make an effort of the will by telling him to study very hard, having already directed his imagination in such a way that he thinks he is stupid, displays an incomprehension of the structure of the human sensibility. If the imagination has come to determine even a very small thing, a person cannot by means of his will correct this. If 133 you make a child feel he is stupid and then tell him to study, he will covertly amuse himself under his parents eyes, his marks at school will get worse, and he will doze at his desk all the time; he will have come to dislike study. Parents say, Youre a fool, with the intention of spurring their child on to greater efforts, but as a result of being told he is stupid, ideas like the following slip into his mind: So Im stupid. My head doesnt work properly. Whichever way you look at it, my fathers not very bright and theres no reason why I should be bright. And my mothers dull so theres no reason why I should be any different. And in this way he confirms to himself what his parents have told him. Once this has happened, he may try to study hard, but the more effort he makes, the more he is unable to study. The same kind of thing is true when a child has a cold. While he is being given yuki, he may think that unless he recovers quickly, he will disappoint his mother, and he will say to himself, Ive got to say Ive recovered soon. But the result will be the opposite of what he intends. So it is important to do yuki without making any fuss about it. If you think of yuki as being 134

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something extraordinary and make a great show of laying your hands on the child, you will arouse fears in him; in other words, the child will unconsciously be pushed in the direction of fear. After this happens, your best efforts will be unavailing. It is because the body is following what has come into the mind. If someone thinks to himself, We must be having roast beef today; how good it smells! his stomach starts secreting gastric juices. It is because the previous times he has eaten roast beef rise up in his mind. But if he thinks, Oh, its cod and chips again, his stomach stops secreting gastric juices. Thus the body follows what is imagined. So keep firmly in mind that this kind of thing happens, and dont make a great show when you do yuki. So, everyone, please take into consideration the way you can determine the direction of others imaginations, and, whatever the situation, dont drag others along with you by an effort of the will, but guide them by directing their imaginations along desirable lines. So dont say, Pull yourself together! If you say that, the child will be disheartened. And if you say, You must 135 study more, the child will begin thinking of playing. It would take years to explain how to direct the imagination in each situation, so I have just touched on the essential points. Nevertheless, I think you can understand that, for the reasons I have spoken of, it is no good if in the case of a cold you suppose that it is a simple thing and can soon be cured, and just stick your hands on the others body. And I think you can understand that it is also no good if you regard a cold as a serious illness and become overzealous when you do yuki. There are very clear individual differences with respect to this problem of the imaginations being directed towards this or that. For certain people, certain words will be very shocking. If someone says to them, You stupid idiot, they will feel that they are being looked down on, whereas other people will criticize the person who says this sort of thing as a vulgarian. Thus, there are individual differences in the way people feel, and when you direct peoples imaginations there are consequently all kinds of different approaches. Still, the thing I should like you to 136

remember is that once the imagination has become directed towards something, this cannot be overcome whatever conscious efforts are made. In the end, the body moves in the way the imagination is directed. The more a mother believes that you catch cold when it is chilly and piles clothes on her children, the more likely it is that her children will catch cold when it gets chilly. And the more a mother believes that a cold is the result of inadequate nutrition, the more likely it is that her children will catch cold when they dont eat well enough. And as for people who constantly worry and think that they will catch a cold if they toss and turn in bed, stay in a room that is too hot or get into lukewarm bath they catch colds for these very reasons. Nevertheless, if, like us, you regard a cold as an opportunity to order the body and think to pass through colds skillfully so that you dont develop the kind of dull body that succumbs to cancer, you will find that colds tease you by refusing to be caught. If you determine that you will catch colds, you will discover afterwards that you cant catch them easily. You cant catch a cold by willing yourself to catch one, can you? In fact, 137 you catch colds all the less because somewhere you feel that you cant catch them easily, and because you yourself have directed your imagination in this way. Once you think in terms of making use of colds, you dont catch them. I have been telling you all that you should make use of colds, but what in fact I have been talking about is my grand strategy for preventing colds. The reason I have said all that I have said is that I dont want people or at least those people who have come today to catch colds. I want you to understand that a cold is not, considered in itself, due to germs, and that therefore the kind of passivity that is represented by having preventive injections in order to avoid a cold is, on the contrary, likely to invite one. There are still many problems, though, considered from the side of the body alone, it is sufficient to treat the fifth thoracic vertebra and the first lumbar vertebra. But before the time for this comes, a number of factors may influence the course of the illness; this is particularly so in the case of a cold. Even in the case of someone whose bodily condition is such that you expect him to

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138 recover as a matter of course, his cold may suddenly get worse if you dont take it seriously and say to him, Oh, its nothing; he may resent being cured quickly. Now that he is enjoying the rights of a sick person as a result of having caught a cold, he feels he has to justify himself when he is told that his illness isnt serious, and the only thing he can do is become feverish again. A person who has confidence in his ability to do yuki tends to be dismissive of other people and tell them that their colds are nothing to worry about. I imagine that there are few people who would say to a woman, Thats a cheap-looking handbag! Was it on sale or something? But this is no different from telling someone that his cold is nothing to worry about. When I am asked by someone with a cold whether it is a good idea for him to have a bath, before assuring him that it is all right, I consider carefully whether he really understands the things I say. When I reply, You had better be careful, it is because I think that he has no understanding of what I talk about, or that he will not understand no matter what I say. And when I say something like, When you catch a cold, you shouldnt have a bath,, You 139 shouldnt eat x, y or z, You really must be careful, or It could get worse, so you must take great care for the time being, I am making the other persons illness look more important than it really is, so that he or she feels very satisfied. If you are asked whether something you picked up in a sale for only 30 yen cost 150 yen or 500 yen, it makes you feel good, doesnt it? For much the same reason, unless you have read someones degree of understanding very well, you cannot say things like, Oh, youll be all right even if you do nothing about it, Well, youre in this sort of state today, so youll be better in the morning, Theres no harm in your having a bath, or You can do anything you like. If you carelessly say to someone, Oh, youll be all right even though you do nothing, his cold will promptly begin to look worse. But you can use words like Take care as a kind of compliment without feeling any concern. To avoid embarrassment you need nothing more than the two phrases Dont leave things too late and Take care. To put the matter more clearly, it is better to dwell on the bad side of things. Unless you are extremely 140

skillful, you cannot put someone at his ease by saying, Just do nothing and youll be all right. I should like to ask laymen who have become good at doing yuki and who have come to want to say things like This sort of colds no problem, to hold themselves back. I am not warning anyone against overconfidence, but a cold is something that gets better even if you do not have much confidence in your abilities to treat a cold. Nevertheless, depending on the way a person feels, the process, of passing through a cold may not go smoothly, and I want you to know that in this kind of case the person himself is creating his cold. I think it is a good thing if you think about suitable methods of treatment after understanding that in reality a cold is largely created by means of psychic factors. Measles is a serious kind of cold, and a little time ago Miss Saito, who studies seitai here, cured both her little brothers of this illness. It is easy to cure measles when there is only one person who has it, but it is difficult when there are two. Having treated one child, who gets better as a result, you suppose that the second child will get well in 141 the same way. But if the second childs recovery is anticipated, he begins to feel like hugging his illness to him. So unless you care for the second child as if his measles were more serious, you will fail. But you have become familiar with measles in consequence of the first case, and you suppose that there is nothing to worry about; since the child who had measles first is living in the same house, you lightly suppose that the second child will recover quickly. It is simply because of this situation that dealing with the second childs illness is extremely difficult; curing two children who live in the same house is a different matter from curing two or three children who live in different places. I spoke earlier of holding yourself back. If you dont know how to do this and if you dont know that you have to take into consideration what is in the others psyche, you will have to face a situation in which an illness is brought to the point of recovery a number of times but then gets worse. So Miss Saito deserves to be praised for curing her two brothers, since it is different from curing two children separately. Anyone can cure a single child with measles: it is a matter of doing yuki to the hard node that 142
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forms in the body when someone has measles. Mrs. Honiden also cured her two children of measles. When someone has become a mother like her, with a mothers authority, she can influence her children, but it is quite difficult for someone to cure their brothers and sisters illnesses as Miss Saito did. Still, when I went to see Miss Saitos brothers, I found that she had greater authority than most mothers do, so I think it was natural that the boys should have recovered. In any event, having two people with colds is in many respects different from having one person with a cold. Nevertheless, since most people believe that measles is a serious illness, measles is not difficult in comparison with a cold, even in the case of two people. After all, there is nobody who will lightly say My cancer will be cured because someone elses cancer has been cured. People will not treat an illness that everyone thinks is serious lightly, and even when a second person succumbs to this illness, it will not be difficult to deal with. In the case of a second person or a second incidence of the same illness, the simpler an illness is thought to 143 be, the more difficult it is to deal with. It is by means of the psyches functioning in this way that colds become the source of all sorts of illnesses. Since a cold often develops suddenly into a serious illness, you have to take into consideration the way the psyche functions if you want a cold to end as a cold. A cold is a light illness. It is precisely because it is a light illness that a second incidence is difficult to deal with. It is because it is a light illness that it is the source of all sorts of illnesses. It is because it is a light illness that there is the great possibility of its being pushed into becoming a serious illness. I should like you to learn how to do yuki, and to use it so that a cold ends as a cold that is why I have spoken of the psychic problems involved. I leave it up to you how you make use of what I have said Which reminds me: when some sense of dissatisfaction or resistance has been translated into a cold, it is not the case that unless this sense has been removed the cold will not get better. It is not necessary to attune yourself to the sick persons dissatisfaction, or the cast of sensibility that has led to his catching a cold, in order to remove this dissatisfaction. For example, if he is using a 144

cold as an excuse for something, there is no need to create a situation in which he stops excusing himself in this way. And there is no need to indulge him if his cold is the result of a desire to be indulged. Nor is it necessary to remove a feeling of jealousy if it is this that has caused a cold. If you think you should sympathize, things will become very difficult. There was a man who, in the belief that his childs cold was caused by a certain dissatisfaction, bought the boy a wristwatch with the idea of removing this dissatisfaction. But this kind of approach is totally ineffective. If one dissatisfaction is removed, another will take its place; and if that, too, is removed, yet another will rise up. So you should not think in terms of the idea that unless dissatisfactions are removed, colds will not get better. Rather, it is by means of a cold that dissatisfactions disappear; even a dispiritedness that a person has brought on himself will come to disappear as a result of a cold. So it is important to lead others imaginations in this kind of way. 145

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Chapter Nine Directing the Bodys Traffic Earlier, I described how to order the backbone, using as an example the case of a cold, and I hope that you understood. A couple of days ago, someone who I suppose had heard what I said telephoned me and said, Ive got a cold. What should I do? What splendid timing! I replied. You should experiment with your own body and really grasp the central point of seitai. But I cant reach my backbone by myself, the man said. I imagine he believed that the way to pass through a cold was to have your backbone treated. But though I told you to make use of the opportunity provided by a cold to put the backbone in order, I did not mean to suggest that you cannot pass through a cold unless your backbone is treated. Observing the backbone is like carefully 146 watching traffic lights and acting in accordance with what they tell you. When they turn green, you move off. When they turn red, you stop. This is all that is involved when it comes to the backbone. It is not touching the body with the hands, but the cold that orders the body. If you act in accordance with what the signals say, the backbone naturally orders itself. Therefore, watching these signs carefully and using the body accordingly is the way to attain seitai by passing through a cold. I imagine that the man who phoned me thought that one passes through a cold because ones backbone has been corrected. My words must have gone in one ear and out of the other. Talking about directing traffic: the day before yesterday, it took me about an hour to get here from home, whereas it usually takes about fifteen minutes. For some reason the road was crowded, and there was a traffic jam that extended as far as the bridge over the Tama river. Once having got into the line of cars, we were able to move only a meter at a time. I couldnt understand why the road was so packed it was as though we were in the middle of 147 the city. For every one meter we moved, we had to wait five minutes. At last, we reached the fork at Seijo, and there I
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discovered the reason for the traffic jam. Before there had never been anyone directing traffic at this fork, but today there were two policemen energetically directing everything in sight. It is normally very easy to turn there, but because of the way the policemen were directing the traffic, it was impossible. In fact, they were directing the traffic so clumsily that I had a look at their faces. They had the faces of country bumpkins, and I was led to wonder whether they had ever seen a car before in their lives. They combined their efforts, the sweat poured down their faces, but all they managed to do was make matters worse. They were in such a state that I felt sorry for them, but they had created a traffic jam from Tokyo to Kanagawa Prefecture. The only place where there was any space was at the fork. If you go to the Hibiya crossroads in the center of Tokyo, you will find the same kind of traffic direction done very well indeed. There are so many cars there that traffic lights alone are not enough to keep things in 148 order. But merely by blowing their whistles and raising and lowering their hands, the policemen there deal smoothly with the huge number of cars. The cars do not keep having to stop, but they keep flowing. Directing traffic always involves the same actions, but if someone who is skillful does it, he doesnt hinder the flow of traffic. It was because the policemen at the Seijo fork were so unskillful that they stopped the flow of traffic. Even though an action may be the same, it makes all the difference whether it is done skillfully or unskillfully. You may give an unskillful policeman another whistle, but he will still obstruct the flow of traffic. It is not a question of the sound that a whistle makes. A skillful person and an unskillful person may use the same device, but the results will be different. And it is not the fault of the device. Ordering the backbone is much the same as directing traffic with a whistle. It is important to combine the methods you use with a knowledge of when to correct which vertebra; that is to say, you determine the timing by means of the abnormal sensitivity of particular vertebrae, and then apply the methods I have told you about. 149 Merely fiddling about with someones backbone is not ordering it. The policemen at Seijo were blowing on their whistles far more than do the policemen in the center of the city, but they still hindered the flow of the traffic. It is the same in the case of

ordering the backbone: it is not corrected because someone fiddles about with it a lot. Those of you who have grasped how to order the backbone will have understood that passing through a cold may be rapid or delayed and that a person may emerge from a cold healthy or enfeebled according as he is treated skillfully or not, and that, in passing through a cold, there are all sorts of possibilities. If you learn how to order your body, why dont you when you have a cold apply the methods you have learnt to your own body so that it becomes ordered? It is because one doesnt know how another persons body feels that one examines his backbone in order to understand the condition of his body. But there is no need to go as far as that where your own body is concerned. With someone else, you have to trace changes in sensitivity, but in the case of yourself you should be able to find a way if 150 you move your back about some places may be stiff or may move with difficulty, you may not be able to bend your lower back or to stretch your arms properly, etc. and consider the state of your cold in the light of the condition of your body. There is no better opportunity to really grasp the essential points of ordering the body than when you have a cold. When you catch a cold, you should say to yourself Ah! and carefully confirm at what kind of time different parts of the body change, and in what way; and you should observe how you pass through the cold. If you are lazy about doing this for yourself and only use the techniques you have heard about without taking into consideration the condition of your body, you will be unable to understand the significance of ordering the backbone. If you attempt to apply to another persons body the way of ordering the body that you have learnt by means, of your own body, you will realize that other peoples bodies do not follow the same processes, as yours. So that you will understand that other peoples bodies are different, and that people have all sorts of different bodies. Having understood that, you will come to 151 realize that the way the backbone is ordered is peculiar to each person. Instead of at once leaping on the idea of taiheki as a result of what I say, you should, when ordering other peoples bodies, carefully observe how peoples bodies work differently
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even though they belong to the same human species. By doing so, you will realize that the best way is to find out for yourself about taiheki. If when a cold is going about, you make careful observations, I think that you will be able to grasp all sorts of ways of directing the traffic. Similarly, if you make the most of the opportunity provided by a cold, your catching a cold will not have been worthless. Some people think only of passing through a cold as quickly as possible, but if you rush things after catching a cold, You will waste the opportunity it provides. If you determine not to waste the opportunity and to make good use of a cold, you will find that you will pass through the cold smoothly. If you rush things, the process of passing through a cold will be obstructed, but if you take a positive attitude, the process will go smoothly. It is because a person thinks that 152 a cold is cured as a result of pressing the backbone that he says, when he has a cold, that he cannot reach his own backbone. A cold is not something to be cured, it is something to be passed through, and it is for this latter purpose that we direct the body. I should like you to really take this in, without misunderstanding it. When you catch a cold, you should release the tension in every part of your body and relax the body. If you relax, you will perspire and you will rapidly pass through the cold. But there is a problem: even though you may mean to relax yourself, certain parts of the body may remain tense. You should brace these parts and then relax them. If you try only to relax them, they will not relax, but if you once brace them and then relax them, they will relax. You should do this with the tense parts of the body one at a time. Even so, if you do this randomly, the tense parts will not relax since there is a certain order that should be followed if they are to relax. This order differs according to the individuals body. It is those parts of the body that have been over-used that will not relax. The order I have just spoken of is determined by the degree of biased fatigue 153 in these parts, so you should not strain to relax places that do not relax; instead, you should follow the bodys order when you brace and relax these parts.

If you do not follow this order, and say to yourself that your shoulder is stiff so you have to get rid of the stiffness there, or that your lower back hurts so you must relax it, you are predetermining things, and acting no differently from the traffic policeman who makes ever greater efforts because he cannot cope: he can see only what is immediately in front of him; he cannot see the long line of cars behind. You have a bad cough, so you want to make it lighter; you have a fever, so you want to make it come down; your leg hurts, so you want to reduce the pain: if in these ways you focus your attention solely on what at present appears to be wrong, or on the place where something feels wrong, you will not be able to put yourself in order. Or, let us say, that passing a restaurant makes you feel worried because you realize you have no appetite. Or that your feeling languid on returning home worries you. If you get something done for each thing that worries you, then the process of passing through a bodily change will 154 be disturbed. You are not grasping or seeing the flow of passing through a cold in its entirety. Unless you think of the signals at the next crossroads and direct things accordingly, you cannot possibly order anything. However hard you blow your whistle and however much noise you make, it is useless unless you have grasped the flow of things in its entirety and the timing of your directions. A useless thing is an unnecessary thing. If you do something that is unnecessary, the process will be disturbed. If, however, you do nothing special and simply relax the body, you will pass through a cold more smoothly. But in the case of relaxation, if you do not follow the order that the body demands, you will in fact make yourself tense as the result of the way you try to relax yourself. If you do something that is unnecessary, your body will become more full of tension. When the body properly relaxes and begins sweating, the cold has been passed through. If the body is overly tense, it will become feverish. This is how the body naturally facilitates its passing through a cold. If the shoulders are tense, you will 155 develop a cough; if the nose is blocked, you will sneeze. These are stages in the order that leads up to relaxation and sweating. If your lower back hurts, this tells you that part of your body is

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not yet relaxed. You should simply watch how your body passes through a cold without making a fuss, and relax yourself. After your body has relaxed and passed through a cold, you must rest it. When, after having a high fever, your temperature drops to below normal, remain quiet. Again, while you are having diarrhea, there is no harm in eating something; but when the diarrhea stops, refrain from eating for a while. If you rest the places that worked to enable you to pass through a cold, you will become sound afterwards. Your face will look refreshed and shine; it will no longer look lackluster. Unless your body feels refreshed like a snake that has sloughed its skin you havent passed through a cold skillfully. If, despite your having passed through a cold, your body feels heavy or you have no appetite, it is because you didnt rest your body properly after passing through the cold. In essence, a cold is something that launders the body, and is a 156 natural way of removing biased fatigue. If you do not regard a cold as an illness and carefully observe your body after it has passed through a cold, you will understand what I mean. Cold epidemics are affecting wider areas, and in addition more people are taking longer to pass through colds. Some people say that colds have become more serious, but one might rather say that more people with dull bodies are catching colds. Before, people with sensitive bodies used to catch colds, so the symptoms of a cold would appear even when the cold was light. But people with dulled bodies do not feel a light cold. As a result, they store up colds and only when they have filled their bodies with colds do the symptoms of a cold appear; and their bodies dullness makes a cold more severe. Still, those people who have caught colds this month are not so dulled. The bodies of people who will not catch a cold until around the time of the spring equinox are really dulled. And the body of someone who will not catch a cold even after the spring equinox is so dulled that he cannot catch a cold. A person like this develops changes that suit him 157 splendidly cancer, apoplexy, cirrhosis of the liver, etc. So people who catch colds even though they may catch them late are not so dulled. So long as someone can catch a cold, he is not in so bad a state. Problems like neuralgia and rheumatism will get better if you catch a cold. And cancer and arteriosclerosis will also get better if you catch a cold.

Therefore, so long as a person catches colds, his body is not in such a dilapidated state. Even though someones temperature exceeds 39 or 40 degrees, his muscles hurt, and he constantly feels like vomiting for some people develop symptoms like those of influenza; even though the symptoms of a cold become very severe, cases like these do not fall outside what I have been talking about. It is simply because the body is dulled that you catch a cold later than others do and that the symptoms all appear together; the order of directing the traffic does not change one iota. When the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae draw closer to one another, you will find a hard node in the infraclavicular fossa. If yuki is done to this node, you will pass through a cold as a matter of course. Even 158 though you may have serious diarrhea or a splitting headache, if the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae draw together and the infraclavicular fossa becomes stiffened, a hard node forming there, it is sufficient to do yuki to this node. If you are trapped by what is immediately in front of you and do not follow the sequence of ordering that the body demands, you will disorder the body. When you do yuki to the infraclavicular fossa and some sympathetic effect comes to be felt in the arm, there is no need to do anything more even in cases when the gums become ulcerated or there is suppuration in the ears. In the case of the same symptoms, if the fifth thoracic vertebra is thrust out, yuki should be done to the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae; if the tenth thoracic vertebra is thrust out, to the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. When the tenth thoracic vertebra is twisted, this shows that the cold has been trapped inside the body; this happens before an abnormality manifests itself in the urinary tract. If you do yuki to the tenth thoracic vertebra or to the underside of the arch of the foot, the process of passing through a cold will be encouraged. 159 Though symptoms may be severe, the fact that it is a cold you have does not change; it is simply that the degree of biased fatigue in a dulled body is great. It is sufficient to apply as it is the way of directing the body in the case of a cold. On the other hand, though a cold may be light, you should not be negligent about resting the body at the time when I said you should rest it. Those parts of the body that are blocked are, even in the
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case of a light cold, nevertheless blocked, and they should not be overlooked. You may think that you have recovered from a cold, but so long as a certain part is blocked, you have not yet passed through it. You may have stopped coughing, but if the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae are still close together or the tenth thoracic vertebra is till twisted, you have not passed through the cold. A blocked place remains, and your body cannot become refreshed as it should after a cold. If, after a cold, something is wrong with the kidneys, a cough remains, something is wrong with the respiratory organs, or a person has neuralgia, it is because insufficient care was taken in directing the body. If, however, a person already has one of 160 these disorders, the opportunity provided by a cold can be used to direct the body so that the disorder disappears. After a person passes through a cold smoothly, his face has a luster. Whether or not there is a lot of traffic on a road whether or not traffic is heavy or light the crucial point in directing it and the way of directing it remain the same. There are crossroads where the traffic lights change from red to green and back again even at midnight and this is a good thing. If you cannot be bothered with the lights and turn them off, there will be an accident that would not have happened during the day. It is the same with the body: one shouldnt be lazy, and even though a cold is light, one should keep checking at every stage of the cold. One must realize that if there is some kind of block, abnormalities will linger on even though the person in question supposes that he has got better. If a person passes through a cold well, the body comes to be revitalized. But even though a persons appearance becomes more vital, you must take care if you feel that the flow is hindered. A cold may be heavy, but if you direct things well at the 161 place where the flow is hindered and facilitate the flow, the person will naturally pass through the cold. When we use our skills, it is very easy for us to fall into the illusion that a persons body moves towards recovery because of our ability. And it may be that a policeman believes that it is his own hands that make cars move, because when he blows his whistle, cars stop, and when he raises his hands, they move. He may believe this while he is unskillful, but he can direct traffic only because there are drivers who obey his whistling. You do not direct traffic merely because you have a whistle. The policemen at the Seijo fork and those at the Hibiya crossroads blow the same kind of whistle,

but the effects are different. In one case, the flow of traffic is hindered, in the other, it moves smoothly. It is not because of the whistle itself that traffic is hindered. Some people ask, Should I do sh to the legs after doing it to the thorax? or What should I order when I have ordered the tenth thoracic vertebra? But if you havent grasped the flow as a whole, it makes no difference which part you treat. Whatever the exercise you get someone to do, and whichever kind of sh you 162 practice, it is meaningless. The important thing is to grasp the flow as a whole and to direct things so that the flow can move smoothly in the direction it wants to take. It is important not to use techniques too much, and to be led by the natural process of passing through a cold. Once someone has really become skillful, he simply follows this natural process and there is no room for the introduction of techniques as well. Once you have really understood what ordering the body is, you realize that this is not a question that pertains only to colds. Whatever the bodily change that is involved, it makes no difference at all. I took colds as a theme because colds are widespread at present, and I simply thought that colds would therefore be a convenient illness for you all to practice with. Nevertheless, this kind of approach is not something that is necessary only when a bodily change is taking place; it is also needed with respect to how the body is used when no change is taking place. To return to what I was saying before, if the bodys activity is blocked in some way, an abnormality will manifest itself in the part of the spine that is related to this 163 block. There will be an abnormality in connection with the sensitivity and position of certain vertebrae. For example, if someone has overeaten, he will feel a dull pain in the spinous processes of the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae when they are touched; if he has eaten something bad, he will feel a sharp pain in the eighth and ninth thoracic vertebrae. If there is some disorder in the stomach that lasts for a considerable time, the mobility of the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae will be reduced. In the case of gastric ulcers, what is called the Boas tenderness point may be found at the tenth thoracic vertebra; in the case of people with whom food easily becomes stuck in the esophagus, the fourth thoracic vertebra is over-sensitive; people
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with poor digestion will feel a dull pain in the first and second lumbar vertebrae. However much you say, I definitely do not eat too much, your body tells the truth of the matter. If you carefully read what is written in the body, you realize that it does not tell lies. If you take an interest in asking questions of the backbone and you take heed of what it tells you, any one of you can understand this matter it is not difficult. 164 Nevertheless, it is wrong to suppose that you can remove such blocks by pressing the abnormal vertebrae and modifying their position. Since the spine is only the place where internal disorders manifest themselves, pressing or pulling apart the affected vertebrae is just like wiping a mirror because the face looking out at you is dirty. Rather than thinking in terms of correcting some abnormality by, so to speak, adding strength from the outside, you should think in terms of restoring the balance of the whole body so that it corrects itself. Even so, it is also mistaken to suppose that the body can be corrected by following the method of restoring the balance of the whole body. There is a time when what has been obstructed will start again to flow. The art of seitai lies in using this moment so that the body is put in order. You will upset the body if you rush in headlong with the idea of forcibly correcting it and make extraordinary efforts. I understand the desire to make someone better quickly, but the activity of the human body is such that it can be disrupted in an instant. When it comes to revitalizing and correcting the body, you should recognize 165 that the body changes step by step and little by little. After all, rice wont grow any faster if you start pulling at it with your hands because you think it is growing too slowly; in fact, if you pull at it too hard, you will pull it up roots and all. In the case of the traffic jam that stretched from the bridge over the Tama river to the fork at Seijo the day before yesterday, you couldnt have pulled one car out of the line even if you had wanted to. Life has its own time, and, however much you fuss, a dog becomes adult in two years and a human being doesnt. The first art is to grasp the periodic pattern of a persons body and the timing for correcting his body. If you master this and make use of what I have spoken of, which is the heart of sh, you should be able, even in the case of your own cold, to find a way of leading the body so that it recovers of itself by means of

the way it is used. To suppose that of course you cant correct your own body because your hands will not reach your backbone is to forget that whatever part of the body you move, your spine is involved in the movement, and that you can influence any part of your body by means of your spine. I think it is a good 166 idea, when you catch a cold, for you at least to move your body about in various ways, to check the connections between those parts that are difficult to move, or whose sensitivity has changed, and the process of passing through a cold and the times when the body is in a transitional state, and to find out ways of correcting your body; you should understand clearly the natural transitions that occur within the process of passing through a cold, as well as the condition of your body. There is not much opportunity for people who want to master the skills of seitai to study effectively except when they have a cold. You shouldnt miss the opportunity provided by a cold. If you grasp the time when you should relax the body and when you should brace it, as well as the places that do not relax and those that do not become braced, and observe the processes your body undergoes with the intention of understanding the characteristics, of these changes, passing through a cold will be a pleasurable experience. If you take an interest in the process of passing through a cold, the process will not be disturbed as it is when you impatiently wait to get better. Someone may say to herself, We were 167 going to go out tomorrow, but Ive caught a cold what a bore! and then take out her disappointment on her husband. In this kind of case, it cannot be helped if passing through a cold takes longer than it should. I imagine there are people like this among those who are absent today. Mrs. Honjo, Mrs. Tomi, Mrs. Iiyama there are about ten people absent today. So ask them afterwards what frame of mind they were in while they were passing through their colds. If they were in the frame of mind I have just described, they didnt take what I said as a means of directing traffic, but rather seized on it as if it were a sword and thought in terms of driving their colds off by flourishing the weapon of sh. But it really isnt a matter of taking up a sword and finishing something off at a stroke. Even in the case of neuralgic pains, people try to stop them at a stroke by means of all sorts of drugs. The other week somebody in Kyoto took too
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much of the drug known as lrgapyrine and died. Of course his pains disappeared as well, but it was going a bit far, wasnt it? Trying to solve a problem at a stroke is all very well if you want to kill something, 168 but it is not appropriate if you want to revive something. Dulling the body is the only way you can end pain at a stroke. If, however, you take the way of revitalizing the body, then the body quickly becomes extremely sensitive, and for a time the pain will be greater. Before this happens, the body relaxes, and so it feels languid. First the body feels languid, then pains increase, as do bodily discharges, and gradually the pain disappears. When you kneel for some time, your legs get pins and needles, and when you stand up, the sensation gets worse; after that the legs gradually recover. Living activity has its own order, and there is a natural way of passing through things. An instantaneous cure always has something of a deception about it. Many of the people who provide such cures and the people who receive them do not realize it, but some stiffness or distortion remains in the body. When a person who doesnt feel that his legs are numb abruptly gets up and starts walking, he fails down. The other day someone broke her leg. When I asked her how she broke it, she replied, I was at a tea ceremony and, as you know, at a tea ceremony you have to keep kneeling for a 169 very long time. She had been kneeling for too long, and when she stood up she fell down from the verandah of the tea ceremony hut into the garden. She must have been insensitive to the numbness in her legs. In many cases, to deal with something with the intention of solving it in a breath or at one stroke, is to push it in the direction opposite to that of revival. It is not a matter of fighting and conquering an illness. It is a matter of directing the traffic of the body so that the bodys own vitality flows smoothly. You judge the timing of when things should be made to flow and when they should be made to stop, and you proceed in this way. By relaxing and loosening the body, and bracing and tightening it up, you order things so that the bodys traffic flows. A rapid recovery is not necessarily a good thing. The best thing is when the flow is natural and when the bodys vitality is manifested without hindrance. The activity of the human body derives from demands, so that if you try to adjust the body only from the outside there is pain,

so you try to stop it, something is lacking, so you try to compensate for this, 170 something is wrong, so you try to help you only dull the demand for recovery that is within the body. It very often happens, that a person weakens himself by taking excessive care of himself, and that the excessive use of methods designed to bring about a cure dulls the activity that leads to recovery. If something that doesnt agree with someone is introduced into his stomach, he may vomit; this is an activity that harmonizes his body. But when someone vomits at the spectacle of a fly floating in his soup, it is as a result of the workings of his imagination; these workings disrupt his physiological harmony. If vomiting is the result of a bodily demand, you feel a sense of relief afterwards, whereas if it is your head that has made you vomit, an unpleasant sensation remains; this latter kind of vomiting dulls the body. To go into the matter in more detail: when someone vomits for physiological reasons, the right side of his sixth thoracic vertebra is stiff, and vomiting relaxes this place. In the case of someone who vomits because of what he imagines, a stiffness, which was not there before, manifests itself on the right side of the sixth thoracic vertebra. In the case of 171 stiffness in the neck and shoulders, too, it is more serious if it results from psychic factors, than if it results from physiological factors. You all probably suppose that the body is not much affected if someone falls ill as a result of his having something on his mind, but if you carefully study the bodys changes, you will find that a disorder in which psychological factors are involved has more serious effects on the body. Disturbing the body by trying to hasten the natural process of passing through an illness is not the right way to go about things. Making efforts for a rapid recovery often leads to results opposite to those intended. This kind of phenomenon is not confined to illness. In the case of giving a public performance, making a fair copy in calligraphy or taking an easy examination, making an effort often fosters a force that works against what you intend. The idea itself of curing an illness at a stroke disturbs the condition of the body. Forcing this approach on the body disorders it. And one cannot pretend that stopping pain quickly does not put the alarm system of the body out of action.
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It is scarcely odd that some other part of the body should become 172 affected more seriously if pain is stopped. You have to grasp the flow as a whole, consider how to deal with matters, and act, accordingly. In the case of passing through a cold, too, rather than trying various ways to bring about a cure, it is better to observe the process of passing through the cold in order to direct the flow of the whole body. There is no need to be impatient to cure a cold, and if you dont disturb the body, but order it instead, the body will pass through the cold of itself. You should grasp the essential points of passing through a cold and ascertain the sequence that the bodys activity as a whole follows. For example, the hypersensitivity of the spinous process, of the fifth thoracic vertebra shows that a person has a cold; if the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae have drawn together, the throat will hurt, and when a fever develops, it will, after abating, become heightened once again. Then, if there is a dull pain in the tenth thoracic vertebra when it is pressed, a cold will be protracted; if there is no such pain, a cold will be over after the fever has climbed twice. If, however, it is the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae that have 173 drawn together, the cold will be over after one bout of fever. If there is a dull pain in the tenth thoracic vertebra when it is touched, a cough will remain. And if the third and fourth cervical vertebrae are hypersensitive, the nose will continue to be affected. If the second points on the head are not slack, passing through a cold will be rapid. If, when these points are slack, you direct them, the person in question will begin perspiring as you do so. In the case of shivering, if you place your hand on the eighth and ninth thoracic vertebrae, it will soon disappear. If you stimulate the fifth thoracic vertebra, you will induce perspiration. Once perspiration begins, the body will rapidly pass through the cold. If, however, you encourage too much sweating, the ninth thoracic vertebra will become stiff. Thus, there are two ways of passing through the present cold. But it may also happen that the skin of the head is slack, the fifth and tenth thoracic vertebrae become stiff, and the first lumbar vertebra becomes thrust out. So there are three kinds of colds; if you have grasped this, it is easy to see how a persons cold will proceed. The last kind

174 you might call para-influenza and it is, caused by psychic factors, just like para-cholera and what one might call paracancer. This, is the kind of cold that is caught by people who complain that they have been infected in consequence of contact with someone who has, a cold. Since everybody has this kind of psychological tendency, it is, perhaps not a good idea to summarily dismiss someones cold as being a mimic one. Underlying such a psychological tendency is the demand to dissipate excess energy. It is natural for this excess, energy to be translated into sexual energy, but it sometimes happens, that it is translated into other kinds of energy. In this latter case, it is often sublimated into emotional or mental activity. When a person bursts into laughter at the sight of someone falling down or tears come to his eyes at the spectacle of blossoms falling, this is clearly a case of energy being sublimated into emotional activity. When imaginings and delusions keep bubbling up, or when the brain runs on by itself without its workings leading to action in reality, the energy is being sublimated into mental activity. When, however, 175 excess energy is transformed into physical activity, a person overdoes things, goes too far, or says too much. And it may happen that this excess energy works to produce those psychological tendencies that lead to your catching a cold. These tendencies are a kind of demand for the venting out of energy. If you very carefully observe the body and its changes, you will sense a thin, hardened line running just alongside the spine. This line may run from above to below, or from below to above. When it runs from below to above, this shows a tendency to sublimation. If it runs from the third lumbar vertebra to the sixth thoracic vertebra, energy is being sublimated into emotional activity; if it goes only so far as the eighth thoracic vertebra, sexual energy is being transformed into an appetite for food; if it runs as far as the third thoracic vertebra, the person in question has a cold that has been caused by sublimation; if it stops at the fourth thoracic vertebra, the person has palpitations of the heart; if it runs as far as the neck, energy is being sublimated into mental activity, into imaginings, delusions and argumentativeness. By tracing this line, 176
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you can get an idea of the condition someone is in. When such a line runs from the second points or third point on the head as far as the third thoracic vertebra, the person in question has a cold that results from psychic repression: he has caught a cold as a result of suppressing a fit of anger, a complaint, some action that he wants to take, or some other thing. All these cases should be regarded as phenomena whereby the bodys energy is balanced, and for this reason it is necessary to make observations of the body before jumping to the conclusion that a cold is an illness. 177

Chapter Ten Different Kinds of Colds COLDS OF THE LOCOMOTIVE SYSTEM When the limbs or lower back hurt, are stiff, or feel as though they, have been affected by rheumatism, you would be wise to suppose that you have a cold. Rheumatism, too, is a kind of cold, but it is a modified form of a cold of the throat, in other words of the urinary system. There are, however, colds that resemble a cold of the urinary system; but when they have been passed through, no changes will have taken place in the heart. This kind of cold corrects fatigue in the locomotive system, and is easily passed through simply as a result of perspiring. You may have what we call a leg-bath, drink hot drinks, or eat piquant foods whichever method you follow, all you need do is carefully wipe 178 away your perspiration. Afterwards, you should drink a lot of liquids. If, when you perspire, you do not wipe the perspiration away and you expose your body to cold air, you will catch a cold of the locomotive system. Many people catch this kind of cold in the autumn, when temperatures are still high but there is a cold breeze. People who belong to taiheki types 4 and 6 should be careful, since this kind of cold easily turns into pneumonia. You should pass through a cold without being frightened but without treating it lightly, by dealing with it carefully but not unduly timidly. If you take excessive care, the process of passing through a cold will be prolonged. The most important thing if you are to pass through a cold rapidly is to relax tension in the muscles. COLDS OF THE DIGESTIVE ORGANS Last year, many people caught a cold of the digestive organs. Almost nobody who belonged to taiheki types 3 and 4 caught it, whereas a great many people who do not belong to these types but whose bodies are nevertheless biased to the right or left did 179 catch it. The cold ended with diarrhea. Some nervous people, instead of feeling relief that the cold was over when they had diarrhea, were upset because they thought they had developed this in addition to a cold. Because of the way their minds
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worked, the diarrhea persisted in some cases. So long as there is no abnormality in the fourth lumbar vertebra, the diarrhea you get is not of a serious nature. If you have diarrhea, of whatever kind, there is always some abnormality in the second lumbar vertebra. But, so long as there is no abnormality in the fourth lumbar vertebra, you need not worry about diarrhea. Instead, you should regard it as a spring-cleaning for the body. Passing through this kind of cold proved to be simple. Most people passed through it easily as a result of sleeping with their legs crossed. Those children who had many relapses in the course of passing through last years cold had mothers who corrected their postures as they slept. And among these children were some whose colds were protracted because their mothers reduced the amount of food given to them. It makes you feel sorry for these children when you think about it, doesnt it? 180 COLDS OF THE RESPIRATORY ORGANS A kind of cold that is gradually becoming more widespread is one that affects people who have abnormalities in the seventh cervical vertebra and the first and third thoracic vertebrae. This kind of cold lingers in the windpipe and the person keeps getting a cough. When a person looks listless, his cold gets neither better nor worse, and he gives out wretched little coughs, you are probably right in supposing that he has this kind of cold. Even though the person perspires, the cold does not get better; nor does his temperature climb very high. With this kind of person, there will be an abnormality on one side of the first thoracic vertebra, and the occipital bone of the skull on the same side will have dropped slightly downwards. If you correct the first thoracic vertebra, the occipital bone and then the first lumbar vertebra, the cold will be passed through easily. Many people have pain in the lumbar region because of the abnormal condition of the first lumbar vertebra; if you treat the wrist, this pain will readily disappear. 181 Few people who belong to taiheki types 1 and 5 catch this kind of cold, and with those who do, it is not so serious. But in the case of people with abnormalities in the fourth cervical or third thoracic vertebra, their passing through this kind of cold will be protracted, and it is a good idea to give sh to the fifth point of the head. COLDS OF THE URINARY SYSTEM

We can regard the cold that is now going about as, in most cases, a cold of the urinary system. This kind of cold begins in the throat, goes on to affect the nose and ears, and then affects the urinary system. As a result of this, one feels fatigued, ones shoulders feel stiff, there is singing in ones ears, one does not pass water as one normally does, one has constipation as well, and ones head does not seem to work properly. The second and third lumbar vertebrae have become twisted, and two fingerbreadths away from one or the other side of these vertebrae, you will find a hard node. It often happens that such a person also has neuralgia, and that the muscles of the neck, chest or back are constricted. If 182 you correct the vertebrae that are related to these muscles, by treating those points two fingerbreadths away from these vertebrae on the same side as the affected muscles, the condition will soon disappear. In this kind of case, the vertebrae that are mostly involved are the first and fourth cervical vertebrae, and the third, fourth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. But if, instead of treating these places, you deal directly with the twisting of the second and third lumbar vertebrae and correct this, the cold itself will soon disappear, and so will all the symptoms. This phenomenon occurs when the body is becoming adjusted in the case of a person who belongs to any taiheki other than type 7 or 8 and whose body has become twisted. In the case of this kind of cold, many people have had something wrong with their ankles. Warming the back of the head in the way described earlier is especially effective when you have a fever. And before you develop a fever, a foot-bath is especially effective. But an even better thing to do is this: after getting into bed, cross your legs and raise your buttocks from the bed two or three times before you go to sleep. 183 SPRING COLDS When someone says April, most people think of the cherry blossoms, but I think of the colds that result from a twisted body, and the diarrhea that people develop when the condition of the body comes to resemble that of the vertical type of taiheki. When the body of a person who does not belong to the twisted type of taiheki becomes temporarily twisted, his throat hurts and he becomes feverish. If you twist the body so that pressure is brought to bear on the tenth thoracic vertebra, you
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will find it more difficult to twist the body to one side than to the other. Twist your body several times to the more difficult side only, and the cold will disappear overnight. People who belong to the twisted type of taiheki do not catch this kind of cold. If the weather is windy, more people catch this kind of cold. Can you guess why? With regard to the diarrhea I mentioned, people who do not belong to the vertical type of taiheki have no pain in the stomach and no feeling of abnormality, but suddenly they develop diarrhea. People who actually 184 belong to the vertical type, however, feel pain in the stomach and become constipated. In both cases the same exercise may be done: the diarrhea will stop in one case, the person will go to the lavatory in the other. In both cases, hard nodes form in the first finger and at one of the second points of the head, which lie along the coronal suture. If yuki is done to these places and then the person in question does one of the exercises we have devised for people who belong to type 3, this is all that need be done in either case. It is interesting, isnt it? People who have pains here and there, which feel like rheumatic ones, will recover if they have this kind of diarrhea. So you could think of this kind of cold or this kind of diarrhea as a sort of springcleaning. HOW TO USE THE BODY IN THE RAINY SEASON It is very humid in the rainy season. In June of the year before last, three of my amplifiers stopped working as a result of the humidity, and sound would no longer come out of two of my tape recorders. Unlike the human body, a machine cannot regulate 185 itself by itself, and so it is affected by humidity. A machine cannot help this; and if it is adversely affected it is because the people who look after it have been lazy. Human beings should be able to order their bodies by themselves, but there are people who disrupt their bodies by not using them in a way that suits their structure. They say that one should protect oneself against humidity, but this is not so. One should think rather in terms of making the bodys autonomous functions of adjustment work fully. If you adopt a passive attitude, you cannot make your innate capacities work. In the case of human beings, one shouldnt blame humidity for a disordered body, but should rather admit that it results from its owners laziness; it is not a

problem of someone elses supervision, and one should regard the owner of the body as being responsible for it. What kind of body is most easily disordered when the rainy season comes? When the skin is wrapped in humidity, the parts of the body that are most affected are the urinary and respiratory systems. When the humidity is too great, even people whose condition is normal feel hot and sticky and 186 breathless. But if you use your body in a positive way, you will not feel so hot and sticky; and when you feel half-suffocated deep breaths will make you feel better, and five or six bold strides will remove the feeling of listlessness. The listlessness is caused by the stiffening of the muscles around the sciatic nerve, and a feeling of breathlessness is the result. If you try to walk in such a way that these muscles are stretched, you will learn the truth of this from your own body. If we look at things in terms of the constitution of taiheki, the effects of humidity are particularly great on people who belong to taiheki types 8 and 6. Especially in the case of people who belong to type 8, their bodies will feel listless and heavy even though they walk with big strides and take deep breaths. These people should boldly twist their bodies in the direction that their bodies are twisted in, hold their breath and then suddenly breathe out as, they return to a normal position; if they do this, two, or three times, the feelings, of listlessness and heaviness will disappear. In the case of people who belong to taiheki type 6, if they move the shoulder blades about so that the 187 third and fourth thoracic vertebrae and the area around them are exercised, they will feel better; if, however, such people have come to feel depressed as a result of humidity, it is difficult to get rid of this depression in this way. In their case, doing katsugen und is a good idea. You all know that iron gets rusty when the weather is humid, and you might suppose that, among the materials that make up the human body, there is also iron that gets rusty because of humidity; you should move your body about positively so that it does not become completely congested. When the humidity is high, it is difficult to get katsugen und started, but once it starts, you will move a great deal. Speaking
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for myself, every year at a certain time I move so actively while doing katsugen und that I think this really is katsugen und, and I feel so refreshed afterwards that I think this really must be how it feels to have a body that is seitai; and when I think about it, this always happens in June. The kind of cold that is caught in the rainy season is one that affects people whose bodies have become twisted, and is 188 the result of perspirations having been retained. As is not the case in April, many people who have a twisted taiheki catch colds in this season. Perspiration is retained because of exposure to movements of the air, especially draughts. Many people are careful about this sort of thing when the weather is cold, but in the rainy season they scarcely consider the problem. So, people who have children who are of the twisted type should put mosquito nets round their childrens beds earlier than usual, not so much to protect them against mosquitoes as to protect their bodies against being cooled by draughts, or by the low early-morning temperatures. But it is only necessary to take precautions while children are sleeping; when they are intent on study or play, there is no need for precautions. SUMMER COLDS When July comes round, it may seem reasonable to suppose that you should think about what to do when you perspire, but so long as it is hot enough that you perspire, there is no need to think very much about dealing with perspiration. When you 189 perspire, your fatigue disappears. That is why you can work hard in the summer. Towards the end of September, it is still hot enough to make you perspire, but the wind is cool and it suddenly becomes important to be careful when you perspire, because otherwise your perspiration will be taken back into your body. If it is taken back, your skin will become dulled, your muscles stiff. All sorts of effects result from what one might call a retrocessive attack caused by perspirations being retained in the body. A summer cold is one of these effects, and another is a feeling of lassitude and heaviness. But there is no need to worry in a season when you readily perspire, even though you may be exposed to the wind. Nowadays, however, air conditioners are widely used and used to excess, so that one has to begin taking, as early as July, the kind of care one would normally only take when autumn comes.

You should not expose your back to cool air for a long time. Nor should you use a fan to dry yourself off when you are perspiring after a bath. And in particular you should never put a baby who has been perspiring to bed in a breezy or draughty place. The 190 worst possible place to be is directly in front of an air conditioner. It is particularly important not to expose the body directly to the wind from an air conditioner. Wiping away perspiration is the most important thing. Even so, while the bodys vital powers are at their full, there is no need to worry. Again, in the case of cool air, there is no need to protect yourself so long as you are facing into it; but when your back is exposed to it, it is important to wipe away perspiration. This kind of preventive care is needed in the case of infants and adults over the age of sixty. Perhaps it is because summer illnesses are caused by not taking sufficient care with respect to movements of the air when one is perspiring that, in the case of most acute summer illnesses, perspiration will rapidly come and ones symptoms will disappear all at once if one warms the back of the head with a warm flannel for forty minutes. If you act so that perspiration is checked or retained, you will develop diarrhea, a cold or neuralgia. Diarrhea or a stomach-ache is not always related to the food you eat; and beri-beri and palpitations of the heart are also connected with perspiration. 191 For these reasons, there is nothing wrong with sleeping with the windows open in the winter, but in the summer it is not a good idea. It is good to be cool, but one should expose ones bare skin to the wind only when one is up and about; after you go to bed, you should not do so. The way to be healthy in summer lies in what I have just suggested: moving about, and perspiring. People who belong to taiheki type 6, who have weak respiratory and urinary systems, have to take care. And people who belong to taiheki type 8 should realize that there is a direct connection between cerebral apoplexy and sitting in front of a fan after having a hot bath. When perspiration is retained, the best thing to do is to do katsugen und. If you deal properly with the retention of perspiration, then any kind of symptom will disappear of itself. Every year, when the season comes in which it is warm in the evenings and cold at dawn, more people get summer colds, neuralgia, muscular pains that resemble
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rheumatism, a heaviness in the legs, pain in the eyes, stomachache, back-ache, pains in the chest, headaches, or they feel like vomiting, etc., etc. In cases like these, if, after getting 192 up, you put your legs in hot water for three minutes that is to say, have what we call a leg-bath and then rub them well as you dry them, these symptoms will all disappear. The same applies when you have been in a room where an air conditioner is going full blast for too long; you may think of these symptoms as resulting from your legs having been cooled. When you are in this kind of condition, the area between the third and fourth metatarsal bones has become constricted, and when this area is pressed you will feel a sharp pain. If you have a leg-bath after doing yuki to this spot, the bath will be even more effective. After the autumnal equinox, the incidence of such symptoms suddenly grows less, and I suspect that this is because it has grown cooler and people no longer stick their legs outside their bedclothes. THE BODY IN AUTUMN Summer perspiration is very effective in getting rid of salt from the body, and it plays an important role in complementing the activity of the urinary system. This kind of perspiration becomes less as the temperature 193 drops, and by mid-autumn perspiration functions very much less as a way of ridding the body of salt and as a complement to the urinary system. Because the urinary system has to work harder as a result, and because less salt is being removed from the blood, there is a greater possibility of the blood vessels becoming hardened, the blood pressure going up, or some problem developing with urination. Even though you may not have these problems, your head may feel heavy or your shoulders may feel stiff that is to say, your body does not feel refreshed, as it should in autumn. Some people think, Ill make myself sweat by having a bath; but it is better to use this opportunity to correct the fifth and tenth thoracic vertebrae. These symptoms are caused by the twisting of these vertebrae, so that if this twisting only disappears, the body will adapt itself to the season. If you take all sorts of unnecessary measures, this adaptation will be delayed.

In the case of the twisting of the fifth thoracic vertebra, it is a good thing to do yuki to the back of the head, which will have become overly relaxed, so that it tightens 194 up; in the case of the twisting of the tenth thoracic vertebra, you should do some exercise that involves bending forwards and twisting the body. Practicing golf-swings without a ball is the most suitable kind of exercise. I do not recommend practicing with a ball, since the posture adopted in that case will, on the contrary, twist the tenth thoracic vertebra even more. As autumn deepens, the air becomes drier and this encourages perspiration. As a result, the symptoms I have been describing naturally cease from appearing. What I have been saying applies to the period from September to early November. WINTER COLDS When you use a heater, the air becomes drier than it would otherwise be. There are people who dry wet clothes, in front of a heater, but it is not only clothes that are dried in this way. The human body, too, becomes dried. It is in the nature of objects that when they become dry they become completely dry, and you readily recognize when something is dry; but the human body regulates its degree of dryness by 195 mobilizing the liquids within it so that it does not become like a piece of dried codfish. Thus, it does not become dry in the way that a thing does. On the contrary, the bodys functions of secretion become heightened, and the mucous membranes along the nasal passages through which dry air passes secrete more liquid than usual, so that your nose starts running. Some people mistake this for a cold, and when they mistakenly believe they have a cold in this way, it often happens that they really do catch a cold as a result of their belief. Therefore, rather than thinking of this phenomenon as a cold, we should think of it as resulting from the bodys adjusting itself to dryness. When the body is dry, one should drink water. But if you gulp water down when the body is dry, it merely runs straight through you, and is not absorbed. First of all, take a sip, hold it in your mouth for a while, and then spit it out; after that, drink the water little by little. When you have a cold, the cold will disappear if you drink water in this way.
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In this connection, some people put a bowl of water on the stove so that it gives off steam and reduces the dryness of the air 196 inside the house. High humidity prevents the body from dissipating heat, so that if the temperature of the room is raised even slightly, the body feels that it is warm; consequently, putting a bowl of water on the stove is an economical way of going about things. But when one thinks, in terms, of maintaining the body in good condition, high humidity makes the body stagnant, and slack. Too much humidity is not good for the health, as people who have experienced the rainy season know. You should be careful that humidity does not exceed sixty five percent. Around sixty percent give or take two or three percent either way is the most suitable for human beings. Low humidity is better than high humidity, and when it is dry, drinking water is a useful way of becoming healthier. WHEN THE LEGS ARE CHILLED When it gets cold, some people feel a chill in the legs, or lower back. But in the case of other people, a chill in the legs will affect other parts of the body: they will feel that there is something wrong in their abdomen, or that their shoulders are stiff; or 197 they have toothache, the head feels heavy, they feel depressed, their lower back hurts, or they have stomach-ache. Diarrhea, constipation or piles is often the result of the legs having been chilled. People often suppose that they have a cold in this kind of case. If you have a leg-bath or a foot-bath, you will soon recover from these symptoms, and you will realize that they were due to your legs having been chilled. If the outer sides of the legs immediately below the knee hurt when you press them, you should have a leg-bath; if the arch of the foot hurts, you should have a foot-bath. I shall explain how to do this in greater detail than before. LEG-BATH 1) Before having a leg-bath, you should drink a glass of cold water. 2) The temperature of the leg-bath should be two degrees higher than the bath temperature you find comfortable (say between 42 and 45C; you should put your legs in so that the

water comes to just above the knee, and leave them in for six minutes. So that the temperature of the bath does not drop, you should keep adding hot water; if 198 possible, it is best to keep heating the water while your legs are in it. 3) Wipe your legs well with a dry towel, and if one leg is paler than the other, put it back in the water for two minutes. 4) After drying your legs well, go to bed. FOOT-BATH 1) Before having a foot-bath, drink a glass of cold water. 2) The temperature of the foot-bath should be between 2.5 and 3 degrees Centigrade higher than the bath-temperature you find suitable, and the water should come to just above your ankles; leave your feet in the water for six minutes, adding hot water so that the temperature does not drop. 3) Wipe your feet well with a dry towel, and if one foot is paler than the other, put it back in the water for two minutes. 4) After drying your feet well, go to bed. You should have a leg-bath or foot-bath before going to bed. If you perspire, wipe the perspiration away with a dry towel. 19

ISBN 4-915417-01-8

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