Editor's Guide
Rooted in traditional Chinese culture, TCM is not only a medical technology, but also contains profound cultural heritage, and penetrates into all aspects of Chinese life. We have just finished the Eighth Festival of Lapa and are about to enter the Little Cold Festival, in fact, such a change of seasons has a great relationship with Chinese medicine. Today, Xiaobian will lead everyone to start from the "season" and carry out a journey of TCM culture with an artistic vision.
There are many words in Chinese that have cultural implications. Because "language" is decisive for people's way of thinking, these words express cultural appeal to people's minds and at the same time contain a lot of scientific significance, thus giving people a broad and deep imagination space. Compared with English, this may be the unique function and charm of Chinese.
To show this function and charm of the Chinese language, we can cite the word "festival", which implies cultural and scientific meanings that are often endlessly amusing.
The word "knot" may have originated from the ancient people's observation of the change in the shape between the branches during the growth of bamboo and other grasses, so the Shuowen said that "knot" was "bamboo covenant". "Wu Dufu" also says "bud shoots plucking". From this point of view, in the thinking of ancient Chinese, "knots" are the manifestation of an internal law of the change of all things, and naturally it is also something that people must know and respect. Therefore, the Jinshu Du Pre-Biography describes the "festival" as follows: "For example, breaking bamboo, after a few sections, all of them are solved." The Preface also says "verses": "Things cannot be departed, so they are subject to knots." Even the I Ching uses the symbol of "lower to upper kan" to encode the "knot" into a gua xiang that deduces the change of things "limited and stopped", "Ze rises in the water, its tolerance is limited, so it is a festival."
"Festival" stems from the ancients' observation of natural phenomena and their laws of change, while "order" stems from the ancients' worship of power. In the oracle bones, the "order" is from the collection of people, kneeling to obey orders, so the "Shuowen" says: "Order, the trumpet also." Therefore, in the semantics of "order", there is a kind of information and power that makes a person or thing undergo some kind of change.
From the semantics of "festival" and "order", it can be seen that "festival" expresses the inherent causes, dynamics, processes and phenomena of such an internal change as the change of all things, "cannot be finally separated" and "received from the knot", which is issued by the knot and ordered by the order, which has universal significance. Here, regardless of its universality, we note that in the history of ancient Chinese science and technology, seasons have been used more to describe changes in celestial meteorology and have been widely used in agriculture and medicine.
In the time and space in which we live, due to the rotation of the earth around the axis and the rotational movement of the sun, there are periodic changes in the sun, month, season and year, based on the idea of "corresponding to heaven and man" and "corresponding to heaven and earth", the ancients divided the year into twenty-four knots, and each section had different phenological changes due to the order, as Wu Hongdao of the Yuan Dynasty sang in the suite "Fighting Quail": "Cold comes and goes, rabbits go and fly, and the seasons are urged." ”
The twenty-four festivals begin with the beginning of the spring, change every fifteen days, pass the twenty-three qi, and then to the beginning of the spring, the cycle begins again and again, and the cycle repeats, drawing a vivid picture of the changes in the fate of heaven.
Image source: Art of Chinese Medicine
In addition to animals and plants, the changes in human life activities are also "inseparable" from the movement of celestial bodies, "received from them" and should be carried out according to seasons. In the history of science and technology in China and even the world, systematic research on this can be regarded as traditional Chinese medicine.
As early as thousands of years ago, the classic work of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic, laid down the theoretical framework for human life activities to be carried out seasonally, and expounded the principles of yin and yang, six Tibetan elephants, and four-hour god, which have been continuously developed by generations of physicians based on clinical practice. In modern times, in this field, Chinese medicine has not only established a complete theoretical system, but also successfully applied it to the health of life and the clinical practice of disease diagnosis and treatment, and even created a set of "five luck and six qi" coding system for deducing the operation and change state of the human body in response to the heavenly fortune seasons.
As far as diseases should change according to seasons, in the view of Traditional Chinese Medicine, although people can often have diseases, there are few miscellaneous diseases in the first year of age, and there are many diseases at times. Although it is difficult to win in the world, it is nothing more than the way of medicine. "Even worse, the difficulty of the medical path is also." The difficulty of the medical path is especially greater than the argument of knowing the time, "There is a difference between warmth, heat, coolness, and cold when covering, there are differences between appearance, inside, new, and old, there are differences between yin, yang, strong, and weak, and the law has the difference of complement, scattering, attacking, and harmony." Therefore, the Qing Dynasty physician Lei Feng adhered to the theory of the "Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic", went through the books of various families, extended the touch categories, put forward the theory of the disease of the times, and wrote the "Theory of the Disease of the Times", which is for the time to know the times, to treat the times and the diseases, to treat the diseases of the times, to prevent the changes of the diseases from time to time, and to solve the problems when they are solved, so that the practitioners of medicine can find it difficult and not see the difficulty.
The theory of time diseases and the method of clinical diagnosis and treatment is a creation of Traditional Chinese medicine. Today's scientists realize that time is an important factor in life activities, and propose the study of chronobiology or chronology, but it is still far from reaching the realm of the theory of time and disease in Traditional Chinese medicine, and still has the depth and breadth of further research, and its significance can be clearly seen in the vision of the future.
Because I wanted to talk about seasonality, I browsed some studies on the origin of seasonality in China and its related studies, so I had the above experience. After many years, I am often amazed by the delicacy of the ancients' observations of the phenological and human changes in the seasons, the vivid images of the descriptions, the coincidence with the reality, and the cleverness of their application! I think this should probably be regarded as one of the most remarkable scientific and technological achievements that ancient and Chinese can influence ancient and modern times!
Chinese medicine not only understands the method of life with art and science, but also the language of expression is also art and science. Chinese medicine is a science rich in cultural elements, and the traditional Chinese cultural genes not only express the scholarship of life in Chinese medicine, but also express the art of life, and perfectly integrate the two into one.
Art of Chinese Medicine
From an artistic point of view, the author of this book expounds on the theory, law, prescription, medicine of Traditional Chinese medicine, and a certain issue in the relationship with modern science, thus circumstantially demonstrating the scientific nature of the theory of Traditional Chinese medicine. I hope that these words can guide people who are new to Chinese medicine or want to study medicine in depth to interpret and feel the "rainbow" of Chinese medicine, which has both scientific truth and artistic beauty, from some new perspectives, and discover and create something different from traditional Chinese medicine and different from the existing modern biomedical knowledge! (For details of the purchase, please click "Learn More")
Copyright Notice
Part of the content of this article is selected from "Art of Traditional Chinese Medicine" (published by China Traditional Chinese Medicine Publishing House, by Feng Qianjin and Liu Runlan), and the final interpretation rights belong to the original author. Without authorization, please do not reprint!