On the Combined-Image View of Herbal Nature and Flavor (20121020)
On the Combined-Image View of Herbal Nature and Flavor
Guan Qingwei
2012.10.20
The combined-image view of herbal nature and flavor is something I have thought through in recent years on my own. I have never spoken of it in public; only orally with a few private friends; nor have I published any article on it. But I feel this direction is very close to reality and can address real problems.
"What is above form is called the Way"
The combined-image view of herbal nature and flavor — in the whole — is "He who does not plan the whole cannot plan a single region; he who does not plan the long-range cannot plan the present moment."
Since contemporary medicine arose, we have always held that every phenomenon can be recognized by finding some matter. Through nearly two centuries of dissection and the microscopic, we still have not found life, do not even know what life is. The Chinese nation's ancestors recognized things from a human-centered angle — a medical model with the human life as coordinate system. Western science turned this into a thing-centered coordinate system, holding life can be expressed by matter, by chemical or mathematical equation. Yet to this day no chemical equation expresses life; our recognition of life is zero. But because energy has a conservation law, people accept that energy exists; life has no formula, so people think life has not yet been found. Yet can we say life does not exist? We are all sitting here. We can only say the human recognition system is very limited; recognition of the human itself is still low. Today's medical model has come to see the need to grasp life as a whole to solve health problems. But modern medicine has not yet found the entry to recognizing whole life; its frontier is striving toward TCM's whole-theory, information-theory, holographic-theory.
TCM recognizes the state of human life from the form-above angle. "What is above form is called the Way; what is below form is called the vessel." The vessel belongs to the material plane. TCM studies the laws behind the vessel. For instance, why do the moon and Earth turn as they do? There must be a balancing force behind, so they turn around the sun, around Earth. TCM's angle of studying life-phenomena is mostly at the form-above plane. Recognizing and practicing with two strata of substance is what is most distinctive to TCM and to Chinese people — and what world scientists most recognize: it is said the Chinese recognize things by eye and by soul, while the Greek recognizes by eye, and other peoples are basically blind.
The cosmos has two strata of substance. The protein-built body is at the vessel plane. Our spirit, qi-and-blood, even the energy we produce, is another matter. Look at our body through infrared glasses or microwave glasses — it glows; every acupoint flashes with different colors. Science already recognizes this. Our eyes see only the 300–700-hertz microwave band; outside, we see nothing. So our world is incomplete — nature has set our limits. Hearing and sight have their range. Were we to have Wukong's thousand-mile eyes and wind-pursuing ears, the world we see would wholly change. So the world we see is its projection upon our eyes — the combined-image of nature with our life — not the true objective world.
So we return to the matter: a herb's nature is also a combined-image. That is, only with a living functional life-system present can the herb's nature appear. Ginger is only then warm; shengma has its raising action; raw huangqi its qi-tonifying action. Without these form-above functions, the herb's nature does not appear; it cannot be recognized. So the herb-nature theory of TCM is a combined-image of natural animals, plants, and minerals with our life — especially when the zheng (pattern) is present: qi-deficient, the herb's qi-tonifying action appears; stomach-cold, ginger's warming appears; surface-cold, the dispersing action appears. These actions are all combined-images with our life.
Why do I raise this? Because since science entered TCM research, today's TCM research mode has left the human-life function system. The test-tube, culture medium, and animal lab carry no human function. The human becomes observer, not participant. Animal sensation to a drug cannot be told to the human. So Chinese medicine's four qi and five flavors, rising-falling-floating-sinking, channel-entry, cold-hot-warm-cool — these cannot be studied through animals. If these cannot be recognized, is what is studied still Chinese medicine? This is TCM's most fundamental theoretical system. Every Chinese medicine has been screened through life by our ancestors — Shennong tasted the hundred herbs. Combined again, the herbs' side-effects in the body are greatly reduced — because they are natural wholes.
When natural whole substances enter our body, the body's functional selectivity comes out — its autonomy, self-supply, self-generation; it is a super-automated system, far more accurate than our brain's deduction. Our brain's deduction is no more than the knowledge accumulated from the past one or two hundred years of science. But the body is the Way's own deduction, the Way's own recognition — far more comprehensive than the brain's, embracing the form-above and the form-below, biology, chemistry, physics, information, energy — all integrated.
(Source text continues in the original on cuiyueli.com.)