Journal of Chinese Medicine • Number 111 • June 2016


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


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repositories” in contrast to the “long-term depots” among the organs. During the united Chinese Empire and even earlier, when the last separate kingdoms had grown into huge political entities, granaries as long-term depots of grain, a staple food, had become essential for feeding the population all year long. They had the same significance for the physiology and pathology of the human organism. Objections have been raised in the past to translating


the Chinese terms for the lung, heart, liver etc. as such. According to this argument, ancient and historical Chinese medicine associated


completely different


functions and structural classifications with these organs than e.g. Western medicine does. Regarding the eyes as a continuation of the liver, for example, seems quite alien to the European viewpoint. And yet, this argument is not persuasive. The morphological identification of the organs in ancient Chinese texts such as the Ling shu, the Su wen and the Nan jing is, without any doubt, largely identical with the morphology of the organs as it was known in Europe as well since ancient times. An excerpt from chapter 12 of the Ling shu illustrates this quite clearly:


"[Let us take] a male person of eight feet height [as an example]. He has a skin and he has flesh. His outer [appearance] can be measured. [His structures] can be followed and pressed [with the fingers] so as to locate them. Once he has died, he may be dissected to observe his [interior appearance]. Whether the long- term depots are firm or brittle, and whether the short- term repositories are large or small, how much grain [they have received], and of what length the vessels are, whether the blood is clear or turbid, and whether the qi are many or few, whether the twelve conduits transmit much blood and little qi, or little blood and much qi, and whether overall they contain much blood and much qi or little blood and little qi, all this can be quantified."


Location, capacity, size and other parameters are described with precision in the Ling shu. Especially chapters 32 and 49 provide this information. The term xin 心 does cause some difficulty. It can mean both “heart” and “stomach.” Otherwise, “lung” is the lung and “liver” is the liver. The difference lies essentially in the attribution of functions and in the presumed inner relationships. Interpreting the heart and small intestine as a pair in the same manner as the liver and gallbladder is alien to European thinking. Yet these differences do not justify the avoidance of literal translation. Otherwise, it would also be impermissible to translate the Chinese for “ears” as ears and the Chinese for “nose” and “mouth” as nose and mouth, for their physiological functions and structural relations within the organism are likewise partly alien to European thinking. This


applies also to the abovementioned concept


of blood. The substance of xue 血 is the same as that of haima in ancient Greece and of blood in our everyday


and specialized medical understanding of it. It is the vital substance that flows through the body, can coagulate within the body, flows out of the body during nosebleeds, menstruation and injury and which must be conserved. Blood is blood. Interpretations, however, of how blood is made, what purpose it has, where it flows and more, were different and – even in 19th century English texts – no longer corresponded to the state of our knowledge. Still, we always called it “blood.” In both ancient Greece and the ancient texts of Chinese medicine, the concept of “blood” as a visibly red bodily fluid contrasted with that of the invisible yet equally essential vapors. The ancient Greeks called these aer or pneuma, and referred to the “arteries,” literally translated as “air vessels,” since the arteries appear empty when a corpse is dissected. The authors of the ancient Chinese texts regarded the matter somewhat differently. Only the blood is bound to vessels, they thought. Blood that stagnates outside of the vessels following injury through blows or impacts was a pathological sign. On the other hand, vapors – the aforementioned qi – can make their way anywhere in the body. They enter the body through food and drink, as well as via the air inhaled through the mouth and nose. They can leave the body through the mouth and nose, through the skin and also, for example, as flatulence. The difference in mobility of blood and qi was reflected


in classifications of yin and yang. Blood is yin and the qi are yang. Blood is classified as yin because of its material weight: blood flows downward. The yang classification of qi is due to their lightness and literal intangibility: They spread out in all directions and are therefore yang. The authors of antiquity imposed


a second


categorization on top of these groupings. They believed that the body has a defense system with both a yin and yang component. They named these two components – corresponding to our ideas of “defense” – using military terms. The yin components were ying 營, or “military camps;” the yang components wei 衛, literally “guards” which can patrol freely. Ying and wei, camps and guards, are qi as an umbrella term; the blood was equated with military camp qi, i.e. as sentries fenced inside a camp, just as the blood is fenced in by the vessels. They are bound to certain locations and therefore yin in character. The qi in the more restricted sense was equated with the guard qi. Their mobility is a trait of yang, which can patrol both in the inner and outer areas of the body, always on the alert to identify and battle intruders. The term bo, “to strike at,” is the most common expression in the Ling shu for the encountering of mutually hostile qi.


6. The Causes Of Illness The causes for a person’s illness were in no way one- dimensional and definitely not simplistically presented in the Ling shu. Not least in light of the Ling shu’s broad


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