Give Me Back My Original True Face
Editor's note
Elder Gan Zuwang, eighty-eight, is a famous physician, specialist, and professor — also an old man, an oddity, an eccentric. "I am the wild man of Chu, in wind-song laughing at Confucius"; "my neck is steel, my heart a mirror; my mouth is the crow's, my pen a knife"; "often feeling inferior, I become useless; not envied — that's the mark of mediocrity." He often recites such lines — proof of his madness. Below is one of his mad essays; the writing is bold but holds feeling and reason. One-school view, of course, may have its insufficiencies; readers' contributions are welcome.
Opening
"When Xi Shi is unclean, all hold their nose passing her." I have not seen this; I read it only in the Mencius.
"Dung on the Buddha's head" — I have not seen this either; only Wang Anshi in history once said "How can one watch dung being smeared on the Buddha's head?"
But dung on Chinese medicine's head, the whole body unclean — that I have seen with my own eyes, and as a Chinese-medicine practitioner I am in the middle of it. In the general eye, the image of Chinese medicine is ugly beyond words: living on superstition (Yijing, qi-fortunes); cheating patients with magic (qigong); making money with garbage (every odd, jumbled treatment). The grand "miracle doctors" are all great cheats (Zhang Xiangyu, Zhang Xiaoping, Hu Wanlin, Li Hongzhi) — and so on. The image of Chinese medicine has become something unhuman.
In the funhouse mirror Chinese medicine is twisted out of shape. The blame is not in our own body — it is the outside filth poured on you, the gold leaf stuck on you, all the mists put up to obscure you — so you cannot see Mount Lu's true face, and a wholly distorted mask is hung up for all to see. As a TCM, what can you say?
The Wrong in Apricot Grove — a play
The Peking opera Wrong in Flower Field has a strange winding plot true to life. Liu Yueying tells her maid Chunlai to find her sweetheart Bian Ji at the bookstall by Du-xian Bridge. Chunlai brings instead the petty bully Zhou Tong. Did Chunlai err? No — she went exactly to the place, the seat, the age of the young man her mistress described. Not an error? Why bring the bully instead of the scholar? Simple: Chunlai did not know Bian Ji's true face; whoever sat in his seat became Bian Ji.
On the small stage that shrinks the world, it is a fine play. On the large stage that is the world, it is a great tragedy. The tragedy in TCM is Wrong in Apricot Grove. The male lead is Bian Ji; the female lead is Chunlai. Bian Ji is unlucky; Chunlai is duped. TCM is Bian Ji; the public is Chunlai.
Speaking of Peking opera, take Picking Up the Gold, popular among late-Qing and early-Republic actors. The plot is simple: the poor Fan Tao picks up a piece of gold in the long street, leaps for joy, throws his begging bowl, his straw bedding, his dog-beating stick into the river — to greet the new and good. Only at the pawn-shop door does he find the gold is false. He empties his joy, and his belongings besides. He differs from Chunlai utterly, but in failing to lift appearance and see essence shares her fate — wrong view leads to loss.
Why do scoundrels and frauds in medicine not pose as Western doctors and instead fix on TCM? Because Western medicine's true face is uncovered, seen by all. TCM is not so; no one knows it. Exploiting that, anyone can do as he pleases.
Whether wrong from misperception or right by exploitation, the key is that TCM's true face has not been shown. Why hard? Dung on the head, gold leaf on the face, fog all around — pollution from every side. As TCM, how do you go on?
The first pollution — mud and dirty water
Fake TCM
The fatal black-tiger-steals-heart punch. "When false is taken for true, the true is also false; when true mixed with false makes false true." It is a tumor on the bone.
In the 80s, a common stage actor Zhang Xiangyu — overnight in the qigong craze became the daughter of the Jade Emperor and treated patients as a TCM in Xining. Since Sun Wukong wrecked the Heavenly Palace, there is no Western medicine there — she had to be TCM. Until prison stripped her sign.
In the 90s, with the Yijing fever, somehow TCM got pulled in. Zhang Xiaoping of Jilin became the 57th-generation successor of the Buddhist all-laws-return-to-one school and practiced medicine. Since 57 generations ago there was no Western medicine, again TCM. He killed six patients and went to jail.
At century's turn, the supreme miracle doctor Hu Wanlin — now in prison — was again called TCM. His following was vast, the influence shook the country and abroad. An eight-magnitude quake in TCM, still in aftershock as I write. Ke Yunlu discovered for him a new Huangdi Neijing no learned senior TCM had ever heard of. By that trick, he could not but be miraculous-on-miraculous.
The fugitive Li Hongzhi practiced Falun Gong to strengthen and heal. Foreign places have no what-gong; again, another TCM.
The duped and the TCM-despising have not seen TCM's true face. If Li Gui had not run into Li Kui in Water Margin, in a place "where some fifty trees grew thick, autumn's leaves just red," he would forever have been Black-Whirlwind.
TCM with such characteristic
Every living thing has a born-with self-protective function. Flowers and trees secrete sticky fluid to mend their bark. Chickens curl one foot in ice-and-snow for warmth. Cats and dogs lick wounds with saliva. Monkeys, smarter, find leaves of tiannanxing and the like to apply on hornet stings. Humans, spirit of the ten thousand things — even in antiquity used leaves on wounds, hot or cold water for toothache, kneaded for pain, struck for joint ache, jogged a few steps for cramps. None are within medicine; at most embryonic medicine and pharmacy. Mature medical learning — at scale — has no relation to this. But many people, on seeing such tiny things, just because they are Chinese, lift them into a characteristic. That is insult to TCM.
Using plasters as a TCM characteristic
Such-and-such Daily: "X TCM Hospital, with its unique character, uses small plasters…" You should first know what small plasters are. They cover wounds. Among folk people they are also used to fix small things — paper boxes, little mirrors, brush pots — same as modern adhesive cloth. TCM uses them generally, no special character. If you must call it character, then modern TCM surgery long ago replaced plasters with adhesive bandages — then do you deny TCM?
Tisha (skin-lifting) and Guasha (skin-scraping)
These have no entry in the authoritative Chinese Medical Encyclopedia, proof TCM has no such treatment. You may say it is a pre-Liberation work and private — then look at the post-Liberation Encyclopedia of China: Traditional Chinese Medicine. Of 1.8 million characters and 794 pages, with every method recorded, every formula listed, only these — tisha and guasha — are not in. A non-TCM thing — another basin of mud over our head.
**Sticking and stabbing called acupuncture**
A real TCM acupuncturist masters TCM theory, finds meridians, points, has technique. Beyond pattern-discernment-needling: rotating, lifting-and-thrusting, flicking, scraping, hammering, rubbing, flying, pounding — many techniques. Without classics and without master, can you? Random pricks fool people. To call such fakes real TCM — that is fish-eye for pearl. And the real pearl becomes fish-eye. How can TCM not look ugly?
TCM cosmetics
Another basin of mud. Sun Simiao in the Tang's Qianjin Yaofang set out facial medicines, women's facial medicines, body-fragrance, hair-growth-and-darkening — laying the base of TCM cosmetic care. The Empress Dowager Cixi sustained youth with these and was famous for it. But to claim TCM credentials, you must learn the real learning. TCM cosmetics rest on internal medicine — what shows outside must come from within. Did you know? Cixi relied on Juhua-Yan-Ling Gao, Fu-Yuan-He-Zhong Gao, ginseng (3 g/day), pearl powder (1.5 g/day) — practicing dietary beautification. TCM cosmetics has only living-cosmetics, no medical-cosmetics. Did you know?
For a TCM cosmetician, minimum three:
1. Trained in TCM specialty; must know the classics — at least their outline;
2. Strengthen internal treatment;
3. External Chinese herbs at least half.
If none — take down the TCM sign, lest one more basin of filth be thrown.
**Folk danfang, single-herb, yanfang**
These — single formulas, simple herbs, proven recipes — appeared somewhere, around the Han or before. Liu An's Huainanzi (Han): qianshi (foxnut) for swollen lymph nodes; Dongfang Shuo's Shenyi Jing: tizhu for leprosy. But from Zhang Zhongjing onward — has any real TCM minded them? The orthodox TCM literature, vast as an ox-cart, has never mentioned them — they are kept outside the door. Even Li Shizhen's herb-focused Bencao Gangmu does not include them in the main entries; only in small-font notes — because it is a pharmaceutical book.
Read the danfang representative work, the Qing's New Bao-Shi Yanfang: "For the poor, with no bread, the most convenient is the herbal-formula track… No doctor needed." This says danfang eats the leftovers of orthodox medicine. "No doctor needed" clearly draws a line. The folk saying "one danfang — even the master physicians die of rage" says: if danfang were part of orthodox medicine, the master physicians of the same gate would rejoice when it cured — not be enraged. So whoever places danfang and orthodox TCM in one body has not 14-billion brain neurons but 250 grams of unlicensed tofu.
Family secret formulas
Danfang + deception = family secret formula. Danfang already shed its glamour. Deception may not have been seen yet. Think: an effective danfang is passed grandfather-to-father-to-son-to-grandson, continuous. Yet the formula you discover or unearth generations later has a break. That break itself proves non-effective (one). Ancient diagnosis was vague; was the disease the same? (two). Ancient disease was simple, now complex — same disease? (three). Even formulas to cure cancer (cancer's recognition is under a hundred years; how did your ancestors cure a disease they never met?) (four). TCM is pattern-discernment-treatment; even anti-cancer herbs divide by upper-middle-lower body. To use one without distinction is preposterous (five). Five questions — perhaps the fog clears.
Imperial-court secret formulas
These — at least real TCM, by senior imperial court physicians or proven formulas of every age. But warn: do not think because it came from the imperial court, by the imperial physicians, it must be miraculous; if it does not work for you, you will end up cursing them as incompetent.
The Son of Heaven is honored beyond all. To treat his disease, only success allowed — no error. Treatment is like war — risk. The wise imperial physicians knew well: would you stake your head — that money cannot buy back and falls cannot replace — on this bet? The only way: use peaceful herbs that do no harm in over-use or wrong use. Could those cure? So emperors, empresses, and their dowagers, when seriously ill, had to post the imperial notice and call physicians from across the land. The court held no real curing formulas.
(Source text continues here in the original article.)