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


Journal of Chinese Medicine • Number 111 • June 2016


“harmony.” These conditions seemed very distant during the time of the Warring States and, even since then, have become reality in China for only short periods at best. Little wonder, then, that the new medicine should have promised to implement this desire, at least within one’s own body, or that the utopia of social harmony has to this day remained a political buzzword with an exceedingly high standing in China. Reaching this social and political goal requires adjustment, or tiao 調, among rival groups and regions; it leads ultimately to order, zhi 治. Like the Su wen, the Ling shu does not have a discrete


term for “health.” There is a concept of “normal” people, with certain bodily and skeletal measurements that are laid out in chapter 14, and whose physiology, especially in the act of breathing, follows very certain sequences and schedules, which are described for example in chapter 15. People, however, are not equal, which is why chapters 64 and 65 identify the characteristics of 25 types of people. The ideal condition of the “healthy” individual is ping 平, i.e. peace, or he 和, meaning harmony. This condition is reached through “adjustment,” tiao 調, among the rival forces in the body. These are first and foremost the yin and yang qi, which are forever trying to exterminate each other and therefore keep seeking revenge as well. Therefore, as the unnamed author stresses in the Ling shu, chapter 33:


“Knowing how an adjustment can be achieved is useful. Not knowing how an adjustment can be achieved is harmful.”


Therapy is therefore a matter of ordering, of governing, or zhi 治. As if Huang Di had needed a bit of tutoring, in chapter 45 his dialog partner Qi Bo wishes to recapitulate the parallels identified in chapter 29 between state order and physical health. And when Huang Di immediately interrupts him with the words, “I would like to be instructed in the WAY of using the needle, not about affairs of state!”, Qi Bo replies that the one is not possible without the other: the WAY, or dao, is identical with that of managing a state. Order, zhi, is opposed by disorder. Several terms in medicine were taken from the colloquial language for


the concept of sickness, being ill and suffering: bing 病, ji 疾, huan 患 and ku 苦. Yet the real opposite to zhi, “order,” is considered to be luan 亂, or “disorder.” Fear of luan, of social disorder, continued to echo long after the trauma of the Warring States period and thereby also became the umbrella term for illness, both in society and one’s own body. The political-medical holism of Chinese medicine was the most important guarantee that this healing art should have achieved such a long continuity as an integral element of the Chinese Empire’s political culture. The problem of translating terms as centrally significant as zhi and luan into a Western language also makes clear that a classical, let alone authentic, rendering


of Chinese medicine is impossible in European culture. By translating the terms zhi and luan in a political context into “ordering/governing” and “social disorder,” and in a medical environment as “treating/healing” and “illness,” we dissolve the most important conceptual trait of Chinese medicine and relegate it to the exclusive sphere of the healing arts, a seemingly irrelevant area for society.


5. Morphology – Substrate and Classification In the Ling shu and Su wen the terminology and concepts of the individual body and the body politic – the state – are largely identical. The new medicine offered not only a new approach for dealing with individual healthy and sick bodies. It also embedded this approach within a very definite social order. The bureaucracy – essential for the functioning state – appeared in the body as well. In chapter 8 of the Su wen, one umbrella term for the actors in the body that we call organs is guan 官, “administrator” or “official.” Just as in English the anatomical term “organ” was applied to the state and its “organs,” in Chinese medicine the process was reversed: the bureaucratic term guan was applied to the “administrators” in the body. In the Ling shu the term guan is used differently. There, the eyes are the administrator of the liver, the nose is the administrator of the lung, the mouth is the administrator of the spleen, the tongue is the administrator of the heart and the ears the administrator of the kidneys. In the secular view of the world, all phenomena are


either yin or yang. The same applies to the organs. In both the Ling shu and Su wen, the yin-yang theory is applied to the subdivision of the entire body and its functions and, therefore, the organs themselves. Some lie deep inside the body and are dedicated to the long-term storage of resources: the lungs, heart, spleen and kidneys. They bear the designation zang 藏, “long-term depot.” Then there is a second group, the large and small intestine, stomach, gall bladder, bladder and a never exactly defined, so-called triple burner. These organs receive their stores today and relinquish them again tomorrow. These are the fu 府, the “short-term repositories.” The meaning of fu changed at the end of the Warring


States period. The definition “grain repository” or “granary” was replaced by “administrative building” and, finally, “palace.” At this point the designation of the “wind palace,” feng fu 風府, becomes understandable: an opening through which the wind preferentially enters the body. However, there was also a small misunderstanding documented in one of the dialogs between Huang Di and his adviser Qi Bo in chapter 79 of the Ling shu. The former believed that there is only one wind palace in one particular place, namely in the nape of the neck behind the upper end of the spine. The latter corrected Huang Di in that, during malaria, the wind palace permits evil to enter at the level of a different vertebra every day. Otherwise in the Ling shu, the term fu designates only the “short-term


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