What does 明白 mean in Mandarin?

明白 (míngbai) is the word for clarity in spoken Mandarin, and it doesn't mean bright the way a single character may suggest to an anglophone. It means to understand, to see a thing plainly, the moment insight comes to an otherwise occluded mind. 明 (míng) on its own describes light, sun and moon set side by side, the notion of solar and lunar illumination. 明白 takes that light and turns it into comprehension, adds 白 (bái), plain, clear, laid bare, and the two together describe light landing being received. The reception of light denotes relationality, clarity comes through an animated interplay between two or more parties.

This is the word I grew up hearing and speaking.

Spiritual bypassing, a term introduced by psychologist John Welwood in 1984, describes the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep unresolved emotional wounds, personal accountability, and the demands of being in relationships.

Spiritual bankruptcy is what happens when bypassing becomes the perspective of an entire self-concept, a system so complete it no longer needs to avoid the work because it has learned to perform the work instead, to the degree that it often does not recognize it in itself.

Spiritual practice in any serious tradition makes the demand that we become more truthful as a fruit of committed practice. The sacred is meant to implicate us, arouse accountability in our perspectives, behaviour and relationships, and dissolve the performed self rather than decorate it with more trophies.

Severance is a loss of felt obligation to something outside the individual self, re-animation understands spirit as relational rather than personal, and treats community as the intersection where accountability, and by extension repair and healing, gets to happen. Mimi Young discusses how the loss of animacy relates to the loss of intuition, and what to do to regain relationship.