The Importance of Sun Simiaofor Today's TCMThe conference organizers have asked me to talk to you about the importance of Sun Simiao for today’s practitioners of Chinese medicine. Doing this in 10 minutes is next to impossible. I trust by now that you have all read the short description in the conference book about the significance of Sun Simiao in the history of Chinese medicine. To summarize very briefly, he is the seventh-century author of a huge encyclopedia in 30 volumes with over 5000 entries of medicinal prescriptions, acupuncture and moxibustion, ritualistic and folk healing, magical recipes, and advice on nurturing life (yang sheng) by cultivating qi by means of diet, regulated sexual intercourse, meditation, and breathing exercises. You still find this book of formulas on the desk of any educated physician of Chinese medicine in China and Japan, well-worn from frequent use as reference. Celebrated in China as the God of Medicine (yao wang) and founder of many medical specialties such as gynecology, pediatrics, and geriatrics, he is most famous in the West, if known at all, as a so-called “Daoist alchemist,” a pine-cone-eating hermit who devoted the latter part of his life to the pursuit of immortality in the company of a tiger and a dragon, gathering herbs and mushrooms in the mountains. In addition, some of you may be familiar with his essay on the “Great Physician,” translated by Paul Unschuld in his volume on medical ethics, in which he outlines the qualifications of the ideal physician. But what does this long-gone obscure and unworldly figure have to do with your and my life today as we translate, practice, discuss, and think about so-called “traditional Chinese medicine”? In such a short time as this, I can only speak to you directly from my personal experience, after being deeply immersed in his writing for a good 10 years by now. I am not even a practitioner of Chinese medicine in the strict, licensed, sense, just a scholar, one of those ivory-tower academics studying history in dead languages. My fascination with this man, going back to my graduate studies at the University of Arizona, is rooted in the belief that what he has to teach us about medicine is really, at the heart of it, a discourse about life itself, about the relationship between the macrocosm and the body as one of many possible microcosms. The wisdom he accumulated on treating the human body, beginning with the female body as the pivot around which family life, procreation of the family, and therefore the health of the state as a whole revolved, then on to pediatrics, general medicine, and finally geriatrics and the pursuit of immortality, is not just of clinical relevance but of value for all aspects of life. This is the piece that is so frequently missing from conversations in Chinese medicine schools about curriculum choices, about which subjects to cut when students get overburdened with all the tidbits of clinical information they must learn in order to navigate the stormy waters of healthcare in the modern world. But in my experience, practitioners and students alike are hungry for the wisdom found in texts like Sun Simiao’s, no matter how overburdened their brains may be with the mountains of technical knowledge they must master to practice Chinese medicine. When I first taught a class on the “History of Chinese Medicine” at a new acupuncture school in Tucson, Arizona many many years ago, at a faculty meeting another teacher (and well-known acupuncturist) suggested that I should not assign homework or be allowed to give grades in my classes or fail students since the knowledge gained in my course was not essential to becoming a practitioner, which meant passing the licensing exam. At the time, I was simply dumbstruck because as an academic, I could not imagine how anybody could claim to practice “traditional Chinese medicine” without knowing any of its history. I had never before had to defend the value of what I knew of Chinese medicine. I now have a long string of counter-arguments to explain why Chinese medicine is more than knowing point locations, patterns, and symptoms. In fact, I have devoted a large part of my life to deconstructing such a reductionist approach to Chinese medicine. In my eyes it simplifies and reduces something that I admire greatly to one small aspect of everything it could be. I cannot tell you how encouraged I am by the fact that this conference has been dedicated to Sun Simiao who to me is the perfect example of the well-rounded person we should all strive to be in our personal and professional lives. You all know the story of the six blind men who touched different parts of the elephant and thought it was a wall (the side), a snake (the trunk), a spear (the tusk), a tree (the knee), a fan (the ear), and a rope (the tail). Confronted with the whole of Chinese medicine, we are like these blind men. Sun Simiao’s writings can serve to lead us blind seekers by the hand, touch the tail, foot, trunk, ear etc of the elephant, and recognize the beautiful, majestic, powerful whole that the elephant of Chinese medicine truly can and should be. As Sun Simiao stated so succinctly in his essay on the Great Physician, familiarity with the medical classics and with technical skills are necessary but not enough. Without mastering the arts of divination, he (or she these days) will be “like a traveler at night without eyesight, blindly stumbling to his death.” Having studied the Confucian classics, historical and philosophical texts, Buddhist sutras, and Daoist philosophers, the great physician will know the “Way of Humaneness and Righteousness”, the affairs of the past and present, … and the virtues of compassion, sympathy, joy, and abandonment. He will “shoulder perfection in his physical activities” and if he has, lastly, studied the art of astrology, “there will be no obstacles and hindrances in his Way of Medicine, and it will be characterized by perfection of skill as well as perfection of beauty.” And that is what I want to remind you all of. That the aim of medical education should be not just to create skilled craftspeople who know where to stick the needles or what herbs to prescribe for a list of symptoms, but to create true healers, in the fullest sense of that word. That is why I credit Sun Simiao with the inspiration for my own lifestyle of raising goats and apples in the mountains of New Mexico where I live mostly off fermented raw goat milk and browsing on wild asparagus growing in ditches and mushrooms in the forests. He was the first to spell out what it took to be a true practitioner of Chinese medicine and continues to inspire countless generations of philosophers, practitioners, students, and just plain ordinary people to follow his ideals. It is my sincere hope that with this conference his influence will also take root in Europe and among modern Western practitioners of Chinese medicine, to inspire all who strive to be practitioners of “traditional Chinese medicine.” All
of us here involved with Chinese medicine are bridge builders. Sun
Simiao was simply the first to celebrate and institute that tradition.
Building bridges between the three great thought systems of his times,
namely Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, between the art and the
craft of medicine, or in other words between the skilled hands-on
technician and the morally and spiritually enlightened
philosopher-cosmologist, or in the case of gynecology, between old
aunty-type midwives, religious specialists, and humanitarian
upper-class literati physicians with their books of complicated
formulas. This tradition continues on through the Communist barefoot
doctors, the current integration in China of TCM with biomedicine
through clinical trials and the like, down to us here today, building
bridges between Chinese and Western languages and cultures, between
ancient and modern times, between body and mind, between institutions,
MDs, independent practitioners, historians, anthropologists, plant
people, and other totally unconventional healers, and between different
medical ideologies. May all your bridge-building be fruitful! |