Image-Number Theory and Chinese Medicine (2012-07-22)
Image-Number Theory and Chinese Medicine
Fan Zhenglun
22 July 2012
In Chinese culture, every principle lives in daily life. Whether Laozi or Confucius, the learning they speak of is learning for use. The culture of Chinese medicine likewise comes from our daily life and guides daily life.
Time and space
Everything is inseparable from space-time — the basic coordinates of existence — and the human body is no exception. Western culture inclines toward space; Eastern toward time. Two different entry points.
Time is changing every moment. Not only nature: every human, from birth to passing, is at every moment changing — the change cannot stop for an instant. From child to adult, adult to elder, the body's form changes — that is spatial change, but completed in the change of time. Infinitely many spatial states together compose the full time-line. Western reductionist culture is more attentive to space; it analyzes spatial change. To study so brief a spatial slice, it must first cut yesterday and tomorrow off the thing. Eastern culture enters from time, studying the regular development of the thing in its unbroken process. From this comes the East's unique image-number theory.
Image (xiang) is what the thing presents naturally and undivided through its continual motion and change — simply put, phenomenon. The phenomenon, viewed from time, is the thing's unbroken change. Because xiang is forever changing, the process cannot be cut. Cutting it violates the whole law of development and risks taking the part for the whole, the partial for the universal. Cannot cut, yet must study: the way is to merge oneself into the change.
Chinese culture is monistic. Monistic: you-in-me, me-in-you. Heaven-and-the-human-as-one is exactly this way of knowing — merging oneself into the changing thing to feel it and know it; grasping the law of its arising and changing from within the process.
Modern science also speaks of phenomenon, and of abstraction. There, the thing is over there and the I is over here — dualistic. I am the knowing subject, the thing the object. From my subjective senses I observe the surface, then abstract from it the underlying commonalities: outside is phenomenon, inside is essence; outside is phenomenon, inside is abstraction. So its theory is an abstract theory. I am I; you are you. Whether materialism or idealism — materialism holds that the thing determines my knowing, idealism that I determine the thing's existence.
Western philosophers can stand alone; Eastern thinkers cannot. Laozi's Way begets one, one begets two, two begets three, three begets the ten thousand things; Confucius's Analects — these are learning for use — laws drawn out in long observation of moving and changing things. Such laws are both abstracted from the things and dwell within them.
Image and number
In summer everyone wants to buy a good watermelon — subjective wish. To pick a good one without letting the seller cut it open with his dirty knife — how? First ask the seller: when did it come? how long ago? Look at it: round and smooth, or off-shaped? More careful, lift it and feel the weight. Smarter still, pick it up and tap, listen for the sound. This is what TCM calls look, listen, ask, palpate. From outside to inside, surface to depth — like a doctor at the bedside.
The same melon: if an experienced old melon-farmer is sitting there, he need not tap or listen — at a glance he can tell which is unripe, which over-ripe, which just right. Why? Because his long observation of melons in many states lets him infer ripeness from outer signs.
The melon's outer presentation is xiang — image. Shu — number — is the degree of ripeness; behind the image hides the number. The old farmer, through long contact, has merged his knowing with the melon's growth — so one who knows by looking is called divine. This is the dialectical relation of image and number that arises in knowing the melon.
(Source text continues in the original on cuiyueli.com.)