Opening the Soul

Originally published August 31, 2021.

The Utility of Studying Chinese Language Texts in the Pursuit of Chinese Medicine

What follows is a guest blog by my brilliant colleague Dr. Brenda Hood. If you have been following my work for a while, you will know how much I respect Brenda’s clinical and philosophical insights into Chinese medicine and Daoism, which she has gained over several decades of studying and living and practicing at the intersection of medicine and Daoism in China. She is also a frequent guest in my Tea Time Talks and tends to make these deep comments that make the rest of us work extra hard just to try and keep up. When she and I were colleagues at the National University of Natural Medicine, we spent several precious years in committee meetings, dinners, office chats, mushroom hunting expeditions, and goat kid petting sessions, discussing the potential challenges and benefits of teaching already overburdened students of Chinese medicine how to start reading the medical classics in Chinese to complement their education. I hope you benefit from her thoughts here! I also hope that it might convince a couple of readers to jump into my training program aimed at teaching Chinese medicine practitioners how to read the Chinese medicine classics. My two-year-long Triple Crown Training program starts up on Thursday, September 14, 2023, with the level 1 Foundations course! If you are at all interested, why don’t you read more on it here and FILL OUT THE ADMISSIONS SURVEY? I’ll get in touch and then we can explore together whether you are a good fit for my program.

Here is Dr. Hood’s article:

“When people describe written Chinese, they often point to the idea that it is a language of symbols, of ideas condensed into pictures or components of meaning expressing more complex ideas. Sometimes, though, I get the sense that some people think that “reducing” ideas and concepts to symbols simplifies them and thus make it easier to trivialize them. This is even more apparent to me when I read translated Chinese texts. Part of the problem is that written Chinese and English (my native tongue) reflect understandings of phenomena from completely different worldviews and not only parse them in ways foreign to each other but in ways not truly translatable by the other language. Let me give you an example: scholars have given up trying to find equivalent English words for the characters 陰陽 yin yang and we are forcing into accepting the pinyin romanization of the characters. This term is then inserted onto the background context of modern western culture, Greco-European ontology and epistemology and finally carried to our attention via the grammar of the English language. What this means is that we commonly talk about yin and yang and then use the verb “to be”; simultaneously separating a whole and drawing equivalency between a “thing” and either yin or yang This makes sense in a worldview that divides into discrete fixed “things” replicating an atomistic ontology into the very grammar used to describe the world around us. It is a worldview that is ultimately exclusionary and fragmenting. While a powerful way of parsing the world, it is not the only way and there are issues Within this worldview, there is no clear mechanism enabling the reintegration of parts into coherent wholeness (which is a better representation of the totality of experience or even the totality of an experience); to do so, one must step beyond the realm of analytics and deconstruction and back into a world of abstraction, inclusion and understanding of the liminal spaces between. This understanding of the world is exquisitely and succinctly captured by the taiji symbol and hinted at by the juxtaposition pointed to within the term yin yang in Chinese writing. Note that here I do not pluralize “term”. You can, it is not completely wrong, and it is common in English but to do so would once again take a concept and focus on division rather than the implicit wholeness it also points to. Once this happens, the apprehension of comprehensive wholeness in anything becomes nigh on impossible. Herein lies some of the major issues of translation from Chinese to English – 1. The philosophical bases of the cultures and languages are very different and 2. Chinese terms are much more inclusive than English and can easily change meaning depending on context in a greater work. With regard to the first, I have a lot of training in Daoist philosophy so I will use that as my example.

The philosophies of Daoism form one of the major supporting pillars of ancient Chinese thought including Chinese medicine. Daoism traces its formal origins back to a legendary 4th-century BCE Chinese sage known as Laozi. According to legend, he compiled his teachings into the classic text known as the Dao De Jing (Classic of the Way and its Virtue) just before he rode off into the west leaving the world of ordinary man behind. Laozi taught that all things come from the same source and eventually return to the source. He referred to this source as the “Dao” (usually translated into English as “The Way”), and to the process of its manifestation as "De" with more specific reference to mankind. With regard to this Dao, Laozi himself said:

“There is substance, in the form of chaos, silent and vast, before the creation of Heaven and Earth. Standing alone and unchanging, revolving without rest, it is the mother of Heaven and Earth. I do not know its name; if I must call it something, I call it Dao.” (Chapter 25).

Pair this with the statement:

“Dao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two give birth to Three, Three give birth to the 10,000 things.” (Chapter 42)

Taken together, these two statements form a coherent ontology. Let me expand the second quote a bit so the meaning becomes clearer. One way of understanding the progression from Dao to all phenomena (and back) is to think of the Dao as The Source which gives birth to chaos (the one, or presence) which then organizes itself and divides into apparent polar opposites (the two, separation enabling discrimination and “space” within which movement, interaction, change and transformation are possible); the interaction between these two is the three and it is this interaction occurring in the liminal spaces between that enables the appearance of all phenomena (the 10,000 things). Using this as a background, let us get back to the term 陰陽 yin yang. This term contains within it both the inclusionary concept of the Dao (unity) as well as its division into components. It contains both the idea of oneness and source as well as separation, being both and neither at the same time. How is it possible then to wordsmith this complexity into English? Epistemologically, it works in Chinese because there is no inherent contradiction in holding these two ideas in the same space. Chinese is rarely :either/or” but is more commonly “both” or “all” and it depends on context to know which aspect is to be more emphasized.

We use language to direct attention, to point, as well as we can, to a presumed shared experience packaged by culture and pre-existing ideas. The noises we call words are already distant representations of a personal experience; compounded over multiple iterations and levels, they become language. Further condensed into writing, it becomes a tool that enables the expression of even more complex and abstract ideas. This is particularly true when, in addition to sound (or a representation of sound as in phonetics), a visual meaning component is added in. Using this method of passing along ideas works the brain in a very different way and enables one to move more easily into the realm of abstract thought and meaning. It can be the start of learning to comprehend via pictures. In English, the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” points to the immediacy and higher level of comprehension provided by the images. The immediate apprehension of meaning from such takes one to a place of totality in experience where all aspects are automatically integral to the overall experience/meaning and inseparable from each other. The visual aspect of a written language based on symbols creates space, a container for the integration of concepts beyond words and the inclusion of personal subjective experience. The closest experiences I have found with a phonetically written language are the word pictures created in poetry. Another important difference between phonetic and symbolic writing is that the latter better enables one to focus on relationship and the liminal. There are “things” but the verb “to be” is, more often than not, implied in word order juxtaposition rather than explicitly. This allows for greater fluidity of meaning and, indeed, on qualities and their relationship to each other. This is the tool used to express the underlying ideas of Chinese medicine.

Moving beyond one worldview into another is difficult and requires effort. It is possible to learn to think in ways closer to the ancient sages of China or the writers of the classical Chinese medicine texts we so admire without learning to read Chinese, but if we can learn to use their tools, the ones they used to learn and to express concepts so different from our own, perhaps we too can enter into the same mind/heart space that enabled its creation and continuation.”