From Traditional Culture to the TCM Zang-Xiang System (2012-08-12)
From Traditional Culture to the TCM Zang-Xiang System
Li Zhizhong
August 12, 2012
Over the past hundred years — since the Xinhai Revolution — within China the phenomenon of doing practice while abandoning theory, using instead of learning, acting instead of learning has run heavily. If a mature discipline drifts from its foundational theory, its development will surely suffer. So when Minister Cui Yueli became Minister of Health in 1982, his first act was to convene the Hengyang Meeting, which raised the topic Preserve and Develop the Distinctive Character of Chinese Medicine and Pharmacy. Where is Chinese medicine's distinctive character? That requires us to answer two questions at once: first, how did Chinese medicine come to be; second, who am I as Chinese medicine. Bearing this historical hard question, I began work on TCM's soft-science and science-studies in the 1980s. Soft science is the science of management science. Science-studies is the science of how science develops. Today we propose carry on Chinese culture, lift the Way of Chinese medicine — the same mission as thirty years ago. The topic is old, but the question stays new: because the two core academic questions are still not answered clearly.
A Mainland press recently published two of my books at once; one is Yi Yi (Treating the Physician). The title is extended from Wu Jutong's Qing-dynasty Book on Treating the Physician's Illness. The first yi is a verb — to treat; the second is a noun, referring to TCM. The point of publishing these two is, first, to break — break TCM's westernization — and second, to build: to set up Chinese medicine's true core, its principles, and its most valuable content in this age, and re-forge the soul of Chinese medicine.
1. Traditional culture is the foundation of Chinese medicine
The meaning of culture and its basic features
Culture is one of the most frequently used words in contemporary China. But how should culture be defined? I have not yet seen a really reasonable and apt version. There are some 146 explanations of culture at home and abroad; most describe its outer reach, not define its inner content. I hold: in essence, culture is the product of rational thought.
We know that what distinguishes the human from other animals is rational thought; only the human can seek knowledge. Aristotle, at the opening of his Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight." So the first meaning of culture is knowledge. This knowledge includes humanity's understanding and summing-up of society, of nature, and of human thought itself.
In the transmission of culture, the written word matters. Even before writing there was thought, and knowledge existed. But with writing the mode of transmission and existence of knowledge changes. From this angle, culture is the writing-down of human knowledge.
Writing and knowledge are two sides of one body. One body — both are created by humans, both are products of rational thought; two sides — culture needs writing for transmission; with writing, the birth, transmission, and spread of culture race ahead; and culture in its evolution drives the enrichment of writing.
The values, thought, philosophy, and science we often speak of are the cream of culture, of which values is the most important. Thought is the cream of human thinking; philosophy is the science that studies science; science is research on a specific question. These four reach beyond national borders and beyond space-and-time. Our past attitude toward culture — especially traditional culture — has not been rational enough. Human lives last only decades; against the five or six thousand years of Chinese civilization, we are passing visitors. So we often see history too narrowly. In truth, culture has no old-vs-new; whatever is useful, of value, whose relative truth has not been broken and which can advance further toward absolute truth, is always new. The standard is one: use.
In the history of world culture, two cultural peaks have appeared, each about a thousand years long. The first was in China's Spring-Autumn–Qin-Han period; the second, the European Renaissance. The first peak's achievement was philosophy; under philosophy's drive arose many philosophy-grounded sciences — sociology, economics, etc. The second's achievement was modern natural science represented by physics and chemistry; under their drive, with mathematics and other disciplines, humankind entered an unprecedented material civilization.
These two peaks are in different directions. The first turned toward the metaphysical: when observing a phenomenon, three questions arose — how did it come to be? how does it change? where will it go? These are the questions everyday people raise when meeting things. Chinese medicine: the human arises from the qi of Heaven and Earth and forms by the law of the four seasons. Heaven and Earth are the true parents of humankind; so the study of human change, birth, departure cannot leave Heaven and Earth.
Modern science studies the physical-below. Sound, light, electricity, magnetism — these are not whole things; or study of material structure: open the thing and look at the cells, look at the molecules that compose it — dissect it step by step. Encounter a mountain, a flower, a bird, an insect — open them up. Physics is not enough; chemistry must reduce them further.
Moderns dare not affirm Chinese traditional culture, often forgetting the most basic fact. A Taiwanese scholar said: from the Han to the end of the Republic, for 1,700 years, China's gross domestic product was first in the world. At its lowest, in the late Republic, it was a third of the world's; at its highest, it reached 50%. The current US GDP is only 32% of the world's. Is there really no connection with our traditional culture?
On the other hand, culture is not civilization, and philosophy is not philosophical pronouncement. Similarly, science is not truth. We must clear away the so-called culture, so-called science, so-called philosophy fabricated under those banners. This is a strong sense we must hold in cultural transmission. The decade of Revolution in the name of culture was later defined by the Center as the ten-year calamity: it destroyed the true-good-beautiful of culture, destroyed Chinese moral sense and the principles of personhood.
Traditional culture and national learning
In that mad decade everything traditional was called outdated, backward, reactionary, feudal — which was utterly unreasonable, utterly unscientific. Traditional culture is not a pejorative; it does not mean culture in the past tense — it means the thought and practice handed down historically. That it has come down through the ages means it has a sound inner core, especially in core values, thought, philosophy, and science; this cannot be casually denied. Feudal has been misused in China for a hundred years. The well-field society — Spring-and-Autumn and Warring States — is China's true feudal period; that is precisely the most flourishing stage of Chinese culture, not its destruction. Qin Shi Huang unified the seven states, abolished the well-field, opened the field-paths, and built the new system — whose core is autocracy, not feudalism. For a hundred years we have confused feudalism with autocracy.
National learning generally means the academic heritage of one's country. But what should belong to it? Peking opera? Crosstalk? Folklore? Zhang Taiyan proposed: classics, history, philosophers, and collections. That range is perhaps too broad. In the Republic, Ma Yinchu held that the six arts — the Six Classics — should be the core: Book of Songs, Book of Documents, Yili, Book of Changes, Spring and Autumn Annals, Book of Music. In 1923, Tsinghua Weekly asked Liang Qichao and Hu Shi to compile entry-reading lists. The books fall into five classes: first, books on cultivation, application, and thought-history; second, political and philological; third, rhyme-books; fourth, philology and grammar (today's Chinese language and literature); fifth, to be read as occasion permits. Liang listed 137 in all — and 39 in the cultivation/thought-history class alone. He added a line worth chewing on: "If one reads in the listed five classes according to method, the foundations of national learning are roughly laid — basis for future attainment." That is: read these well, and one may become a person of great use to the country. Liang also gave a shorter minimum required reading list of 25. We cannot be cultural duckweed, knowing only the West, not where our own roots are; that is dangerous.
The point of reading national learning is to shape the scholar's cultural thinking. Liang stressed three: (1) cultivate virtue, perfect personhood. "The Way of learning — what is hardest is to stand." Stand in the upright place. "If the scholar does not seek the learning of principle and righteousness as his root, then though he read every book past and present, he only adds to the equipment of a petty man." If personhood is already not to be asked about, what learning is there to talk of? So the core, cream of national learning must be read well. (2) First master the foundation of national learning, then read Western learning. Liang lived at the dawn of East-West cultural meeting and saw this. In the hundred years since Xinhai, the Chinese have not completed the integration and reconstruction of East-West culture; now we read only foreign books, not national learning. Liang's idea still has great use. He also stressed: "Become a top-class American scholar — body and spirit fully fit — and Chinese culture will probably be untouched. If we only learn the West, bring in a hundred-plus blue-eyed American doctors — what need of you all?" (3) Strengthen memory, sharpen thought, lift one's level. Only with much grasped, then analyzed with developed thinking, do we have the power of observation and reflection — and the cultural level rises.
2. How did Chinese medicine come to be?
(Source text truncates here mid-sentence; the published Web version of this essay continues into a fuller treatment of the zàng-xiàng system. The full essay continues in cuiyueli.com's original.)