In New Delhi this month, the BRICS summit dedicated a full paragraph of its closing declaration to traditional medicine, welcoming a formal expert working group on complementary and integrative practice. Research cooperation. Regulatory harmonisation.

Not a word, anywhere in the document, about the oldest prescription in the Chinese pharmacopoeia: do nothing.

Not rest. Not recover. Nothing. Let the mind idle, like an engine turning over with nowhere to go. The Chinese term is jing xin (静心), calming the heart mind, and it rests on a premise that the summit’s delegates might have found unsettling: that a mind which will not stop grasping makes the whole body sick.

It is an odd place from which to find a path to Judaism. But the path is there, and it is older than either tradition suspects.

In Chinese medical thought, the heart is not merely a pump. It is the residence of Shen (神), the spirit or consciousness that governs clarity, sleep and emotional balance. When the mind races, Shen scatters. Insomnia follows. Anxiety follows. The digestive system, governed by what Chinese medicine calls the Spleen, buckles under the weight of excessive rumination. The classical texts are specific: overthinking knots the qi, the body’s vital energy, in the middle burner. The prescription is not medication but subtraction. Remove the noise, and the body remembers what to do.

The Daoist principle beneath this is wu wei........

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