Journal of Chinese Medicine • Number 111 • June 2016


Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu: The Ancient Classic on Needle Therapy


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and sacrifices of the living were directed toward the shen, always in the hope that these powers could be bribed with good things, emotionally moved by good words or perhaps frightened by appeals to even more powerful beings. Among broad sections of the Chinese people this attitude has survived into the present day. At the time it was a firm conviction for probably everyone. It was in opposition to this conviction that the new world view appeared, and with it the new medicine. The fundamental idea of this medicine is the reversal of dependency in the relationship. Spirits do not hold sway over humans. It is the human being that controls the spirits. The intellectuals who created the new world view did not make the mistake of asserting that there are no spirits. They offered instead a new interpretation of a familiar concept. It states that every person contains spirits that are harbored in the body organs. There they are “confined” in a sufficiently stable manner as long as enough resources are available to hold on to the respective spirit. Only once the resources of an organ have been used excessively and a state of depletion ensues can the hitherto confined spirit break out and do harm to a person. In other words, it is up to each individual to conserve one’s resources so that the spirits remain confined in the organs. Doing so lays the foundation for existential autonomy.


An important and likewise new concept stood for these


resources: qi. The pictogram of the characters for “rice” and “steam” formed only in the later Zhou or early Han period, i.e. the time in which the new medicine was also being conceived, refers to vapors of the most minute materials that, along with blood, are essential for the survival of the human body. The qi of an organ, i.e. its resources, are depleted most easily by the emotions. Undisciplined emotionality permits the excessive drainage of qi from the respective organ responsible for grief, joy, fear, etc. and leads to two possible yet equally unpleasant consequences. The unleashed spirit can inflict health problems on the affected individual. Even today in the societies of East Asia influenced by ancient Chinese culture, one is struck by the emotional restraint among the people. That may well be an aftereffect of the idea that emotional exuberance is a prime cause of illness.


3.4 zheng 正, xie 邪 At least as important for the assessment of an inner “depletion” as a condition that endangered one’s health was an experience from the time of the Warring States that began to be used in concepts of pathology at this time. Wherever a state of depletion arises, it is immediately exploited by neighboring forces that penetrate from their own territory. Everything that is located where it belongs is “righteous” or zheng 正. Everything that leaves its proper place and exploits a “depletion,” xu 虛, in another place and goes where it does not belong is evil or xie 邪. This juxtaposition of “righteous” and “evil” introduced


the two topics of the new attitude’s view of sickness and health. On the one hand, medicine provides a constant warning to behave “righteously” in every respect, i.e. to perform one’s duties where one belongs, for anything else would be evil. The value judgments used here apply, it was believed, both within nature and society. On the other hand the idea of “evil” established an alternative to possession by demons. It was no longer the demons that are evil, the evil that afflicts humans. It became natural phenomena such as wind, moisture, heat and cold, which were considered “righteous” as long as they carried out their natural functions outside the human body; yet the moment people exposed themselves by opening a “depletion” in their bodies, in the moment that “righteous” natural phenomena exploited this “depletion” and penetrated a body they had no business in, that was when these phenomena became “evil” and had to be driven out. But it was not only intruders from outside the body that could take advantage of a depletion. The organs themselves played the same role in the organism that the individual kingdoms played for centuries during the Warring States period. Any vulnerability in a neighboring territory resulted immediately in an invasion. The organism mirrored this condition. If any organ’s resources, i.e. its qi, became excessively depleted, then qi from a neighboring organ would invade – something that, depending on the relative power of the organs in question, had health consequences that were more or less serious for the individual. The new medicine therefore pledged that whoever behaved “adapted,” shun 順, and “righteously,” zheng 正, in the right place, whoever bridled their emotions and therefore kept the spirits in check, as well as shielding their inner structures from external attack, had attained existential autonomy within the possibilities of biology, i.e. nature. The opposite behavior, of ni 逆 or violation of the laws, and an attack on foreign positions, xie 邪, would be punished just as strictly as the culpable depletion of one’s own resources, which allowed alien forces to take over the weakened terrain, cheng 乘. The terms were always the same, regardless of whether the subject was one of conduct toward one’s own body in nature or the behavior of society. People know what to expect when they behave this way or that. The new Chinese medicine was a profoundly holistic, comprehensive healing art. It merged the individual body and the politics of society in the closest manner possible.


4. The Holism Of Politics and Medicine This holism is still expressed as another legacy of the Warring States period, which lasted for centuries, ended with the unification of China in 221 BCE and whose traumatic effects linger into the present day. As all social philosophers of the time agreed, human society yearns for ping 平, or peace; an 安, or “security,” and he和, which is


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