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


Journal of Chinese Medicine • Number 111 • June 2016


and seemingly modern etiological palette, we must again ask: where does all this experience come from, given that the Chinese sources offer no hint of an extended period in which this knowledge could have developed? Perhaps one should keep in mind that the one or two centuries between the end of the Zhou and founding of the first Han dynasty and the probably writing of much of the Su wen and Ling shu were no less creative a period than the two hundred years between 1800 and 2000 in Europe. It was a long time, and in this long time much was conceived, applied and transformed into experience and knowledge. This may well also have been so in ancient China. As the content of the Su wen and Ling shu demonstrate again and again, their authors were intellectuals of a high order, and we can assume that their thinking was as fruitful and incisive as that of their counterparts two millenniums later.


Sickness, as they recognized, is a highly complex matter. Sickness is unwanted and must therefore be fought in two respects: before it can affect a person; and once it is already there. Just like European medicine in the time before antibiotics, Chinese medicine sought primarily to prevent sickness from emerging in the first place. The best-known and oft-cited remark on this concern can be found in chapter two of the Su wen:


“The sages did not treat those already ill, but treated those not yet ill. They did not govern what was already in disorder, but what was not yet in disorder… Now, when drugs are employed for therapy only after a disease has become fully developed, when [attempts at] restoring order are initiated only after disorder has fully developed, this is as if a well were dug when one is thirsty, and as if weapons were cast when the fight is on. Would this not be too late too?"


The fundamental idea that it makes sense for the


individual to make proper life choices and for the medical practitioner to prevent a manifest illness through prompt intervention is found repeatedly in the Ling shu. A passage from chapter 55 immediately parallels the above-cited excerpt from the Su wen:


“The superior practitioner initiates a cure where there is no disease yet, he does not cure where there is a disease already.”


To reach this goal, however, one must first know the origins of disease. And the variety of these causes did not remain obscure to observers of the time. In keeping with the tenets of the new view of the world, first all non- natural causes of illness were excluded. “Heaven,” as was repeatedly stressed, is absolutely neutral. It cannot be blamed for anything. A detailed discussion is dedicated to this idea in chapter


58 of the Ling shu. In one of the most remarkable dialogs of the entire text, Huang Di asks many questions on the relationship between external pathogenic influences and the – as we would call it today – psychological condition of people on the one hand and their illness on the other. Each time he is enlightened by the clear words of Qi Bo. The conversation finally ends with the doubts of Huang Di:


“When someone has never encountered evil qi, and has no fearful mind, and suddenly falls ill nevertheless, what is the reason? Could it be that [he falls ill] because of the workings of demon spirits?”


This question might also be asked today by someone not entirely convinced by purely secular explanations for all the events and processes of life. Qi Bo responded:


“This, too, is because old evil [qi] have remained [in the body], without having broken out [as a disease]. When someone has an aversion to, or excessively longs after something, his blood and qi will be disturbed internally, and the two qi beat at each other. The origins are quite subtle. One may look at them, but will see nothing. One may listen to them, but hears nothing. Hence it seems as if demon spirits were involved.”


One might ask whether in our time, two thousand years later, one could give a better answer to Huang Di’s question. Yet Huang Di is not yet convinced and points out that sometimes patients are healed after a prayer is said. Qi Bo then instructs him that those who say such prayers already know in advance which temporal and other circumstances overcome an illness, and if they also know how the illness arose they can put two and two together and say a prayer that allegedly brings about the healing. In chapter 60 of the Ling shu Qi Bo saw himself compelled


to use strong words. Obstruction- and impediment- illnesses are discussed there. These are blockades of the bodily conduits through which the blood and qi flow. These “obstructions” and “impediments” finally lead to abscesses, carbuncles and similar lesions, as the blockaded blood and qi rot when they cannot flow, and then break out through the skin above. Qi Bo used this explanation to stress once again the emergence of this and some other illnesses from within the organism:


“Now, the emergence of obstruction- and impediment- illness, and the formation of purulent blood, that is not something sent down by heaven, and it does not come out of the earth. It emerges from minimal accumulations.”


One can almost watch him gradually lose his patience at


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