Learning to Be Human, or a Waste of Time?
Today’s post comes to you courtesy of my dear friend Michael Max, host of the Qiological podcast, who invited me to record a session for his “Shop Talk” podcast. As he put it, “it is just a matter of producing a 10-15 minute bit of practical and engaging content on how knowing classical Chinese makes you more attractive to members of the opposite sex, raises your IQ, and makes you boring at cocktail parties.”
While I am too old to care about my attractiveness to members of the opposite sex, of course I can’t let Michael’s challenge go unanswered. So I have been sitting here for two days stewing on this topic. Not coincidentally, this is a question that I have been asking my classical Chinese students for decades and have been noodling around a lot these past few weeks (including in THIS ARTICLE TITLED “WHY LEARN CLASSICAL CHINESE”), especially during this time of year, as I am forming the new cohort for my 2-year-long Triple Crown program. Beginning on September 14 with the Foundations course, followed by the Diamond Core course in February and the Medical Medley in the fall of 2024, this intensive program teaches busy practitioners from the ground up how to read historical Chinese medicine literature in the original language.
After teaching classical Chinese medical language and literature for decades at this point, I know what a challenge it is, especially for people with no or minimal background in modern Chinese. I will never forget the response of head shaking and polite laughter that I got from my audience of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese medical historians and practitioners of what they call “Traditional East Asian Medicine” at a conference on medical history in South Korea about ten years ago, when I told them that I was teaching classical Chinese to Chinese medicine students in the US. From their perspective as native readers of Chinese characters who were deeply familiar with the rich legacy of traditional East Asian literature and culture, what my colleagues and I were aiming to do with the Classical Texts series as the core of the newly created doctoral program at the College of Classical Chinese Medicine at the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, was complete folly. How could you possibly teach a bunch of Western students, who were already stretched to their academic limit from having to learn the clinical foundations of the medicine, a completely foreign language in a couple of years??!!??
While that particular audience in Korea shook their heads at the audacity of that project, at least they didn’t question the importance of the goal: to transmit Chinese medicine more authentically by connecting students to the roots of their chosen medicine through the historical literature. And if anything, that goal has only become clearer as the heart of my professional work as a teacher and writer since my university teaching days.
Because I tend to get so hung up on the HOW of this project while in the midst of teaching, the pivotal time between the end of one cohort and the beginning of a new on in my biannual Triple Crown training program is always a perfect opportunity to step back and ask about the WHY. In my current life, I no longer teach young students who are just starting out with Chinese medicine, but generally attract older, more experienced practitioners. I hugely respect the clinical work these wonderful, highly capable and effective people do in alleviating the suffering of their patients, and the potential role they can play in guiding the next generation. So the last thing I want to do is to interfere with their healing and teaching activities, especially when some of them, like myself, are advancing in age to the point of having to accept that our time and energy in our current bodies is limited. If my offerings are not nurturing, inspiring, educational, entertaining, and clinically and personally meaningful and supportive, I would much rather go paddle-boarding or play polkas on my accordion and not distract you by adding to the noise. Whether I am teaching a weekend seminar in doctoral programs, deliver an hour-long speech at a conference, write a short blog, or create a 500-page book or 2-year-long intensive training program, I need to ask myself critically not just HOW to teach busy practitioners the art of reading the Chinese medicine classics but, more importantly:
WHY SHOULD WE ALL SPEND OUR TIME READING THE CHINESE MEDICINE CLASSICS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
I can’t answer this question for you personally, and it never gets old to get my students’ answers (which you can read about in this TESTIMONIALS page on my website on translating Chinese medicine). Here are some of MY possible answers:
I do what I do because I passionately believe that the ability to read even a bit of classical Chinese provides the following benefits:
• Enable a more direct and hence authentic transmission: This facilitates an authentic practice of Chinese medicine that is true to its traditional paradigm and theoretical foundations. In turn, this allows practitioners to avoid the common pitfall of the deceptively called “integrative” variety of Chinese medicine, which tends to be rooted in a dominant biomedical paradigm, with Chinese medicine therapies merely used as replacements for Western treatments but without challenging the underlying premises of biomedicine. Of course you can, for example, just equate the Chinese term 霍亂 huòluàn with the biomedical condition of cholera, as modern TCM textbooks do. But shouldn’t you strive to truly practice Chinese medicine to its fullest potential, to gain the maximum amount of clarity in your diagnosis, and match diagnostic findings to treatment choices, whether acupuncture or medicinals, with the greatest possible precision and efficacy? This leads me to the second benefit:
• Enrich your medical vocabulary: How might your clinical practice benefit when you expand or shift from biomedical disease categories, for example, to an understanding of illness through the lens of traditional Chinese medicine categories? To use the previous example, the Chinese huòluàn, which literally translated means something like “thunderclap chaos,” is described in classical sources as a disorder marked by the following characteristics: vomiting above and diarrhea below due to reversal Qì moving upward; constraint of spleen-stomach Qì; a rapid onset; a disharmony between cold and hot, ascending and descending, Yīn and Yáng, clear and turbid; and a condition of the intestines and stomach. Later sources expand the concept by referring to the Middle Jiāo (Burner) and a disturbance of the Qì dynamic, or see it in relation to contagious diseases and warm pathogens. How much you are willing to equate the traditional Chinese category of huòluàn with biomedical cholera depends on your training in both paradigms, your clinical reality and treatment options, and your intended audience. As is usually the case in Chinese medicine or language in general, whether we talk about the 命門 mìngmén “Gate of Life” or 精 jīng Essence or disease categories or pulse qualities or philosophical terms like 理 lǐ (“pattern, structure, principle, wood grain), it is a rare exception and wishful thinking that a single English word can adequately cover the range and complexity and depth of meanings of a Chinese character. Just learning terminology can blow your mind!
• Expand your tool chest: Advanced Western practitioners with specializations in fields like gynecology, pediatrics, or dermatology sooner or later run into dead ends in their search for continuing education because the vast majority of Chinese medicine literature has yet to be translated into Western languages. It may surprise you to hear this from me, but formula literature is not that hard to read and extract information from once you have mastered the key technical terminology in your chosen field of practice. I have witnessed an incredible sense of empowerment when my students are finally able to consult a specialized text on some rare condition on their own in Chinese and walk away with a new formula or some new herbs or points or etiological concepts to explore, which they would have never come across in a modern mainstream TCM textbook or courses. Even just looking at a table of contents might give you a different intuitive sense of the various potential factors involved, suggested treatment approaches, a range of signs to look for in possible manifestations, or etiological insights. Digging through ancient texts for information that is not available in translation is the equivalent of archaeologists finding thousand-year-old treasures in the jungle. Definitely not for everybody, but if you love adventure or treasures of a certain kind, this is a fairly safe and affordable way to get a huge thrill.
• Find inspiration for your life path and personal cultivation: This last benefit is really hard, if not impossible, to put into words. The easy way out is to say that those who have experienced it will just recognize it. For the others, it may combine a sense of joy, a feeling of awe and beauty, a “mind-meld” or “cosmic consciousness,” peace, a stillness beyond all words, that somehow magically opens up at certain moments when we intuitively connect with the ancient wisdom expressed in the classics. Yes, the texts are just fingers pointing at the moon or square pegs for perfect circles, the frog on a rock at the bottom of the well proudly croaking about his superior position of insight compared to the tadpoles surrounding him. And yet, reading classical Chinese literature allows me, for that moment, to inhabit such a different world, beyond time and space, removed from global warming and unpaid mortgage bills and compounding intergenerational trauma of a society built on extraction, dominance, and disconnection from the non-human parts of life. You can poopoo my practice of contemplating harmony between Heaven and Earth and Yin and Yang as escapist or frivolous, a luxury we cannot afford in these dire times. But based on my experience during this pandemic that we all just lived through, even the most giving, dedicated, effective, bravest, and strongest “human angels” out there (in my friend Lillian Bridges’ beautiful phrase that I love to use) need a place to replenish their soul, to fill their well before it runs dry, to sit on a mountain top and take a deep breath of clean clear air. If I don’t take time to periodically stop what I am doing, no matter how much I love it and know in my heart that it is exactly the work that I am here to do, and spend some time “non-doing,” in the Daoist sense, I will end up hitting a wall. Of course learning classical Chinese is still a Dào, a path that we are walking on, a form of “doing.” But in my experience, it is a different way of “doing “that ultimately encourages “non-doing” 為無為. I can’t crank out translations like a machine but eventually and invariably land in places where I just have to give my left brain a break and wait for insights through dreams, in stillness, from my right brain, what we might call “no-knowledge.”
I think I will leave it at that and visualize the happy old tortoise dragging its tail through the mud. All this talk of non-doing and non-knowing has made me tired, and I need to follow Zhuangzi’s advice and take a nap, like the logger under the old gnarly tree, to contemplate the magical place between being usefulness and uselessness…
And to briefly return to usefulness, if you now want to learn classical Chinese, please explore my offerings and consider joining me for the next Triple Crown cohort, which starts on September 14 with the Foundations course.
