As a much refined form of the language, classical Chinese writings , its usage of every words , has much abundant meanings than texts written in modem Chinese . It is especially true when we consider those written by great TCM doctors /thinkers.

One easier way to enter this wonderful world is through reading those TCM writings written in the Ming and Ching dynasty , provided that you already master some modern Chinese.

Another point I want to add is the necessity of qigong practice that Richard seems misses to mention. With personal feeling of qi running inside your body, I think many strange description in the classical TCM texts will no longer sound odd to you .

The ultimate goal in Chinese medicine is to understand the intricate workings of the body, which is a part of nature. The body’s intricate–that is energetic and thus invisible–dynamics are hard to grasp by human senses and a brain made of matter. The story of King Midas tells of this predicament, when he wishes that anything he touches will turn to gold, and it does (with dire consequences). For modern people like us, anything we touch turns to matter. The people who established the functional/energetic foundation of Chinese medicine in Han and pre-Han dynasty times were respectfully called sages (shengren), because they could directly perceive the layer of reality that governs all others and is thus most important, yet most subtle and elusive and not perceptible to the untrained eye.

The ultimate classic, of course, is nature itself, and it is undoubtedly most beneficial for any Chinese medicine practitioner to learn how to read it directly. At a time, however, when there are very few “sages” alive who can instruct us how to read this ultimate text, it is most helpful to read manuals written by people who once could. For me, this is the ultimate essence contained in the term jing (classic)–an unveiling of the invisible “warp” that the material weft of reality is being attached to, and the core message that all Chinese books called jing/classics are dedicated to transmitting.

In one commentary to the Yijing it is said: If you read this book with the eyes of love, all you will see is love; if you read it with the eyes of wisdom, all you will see is wisdom. This implies that if we read the classics with our not-very-special matter oriented eyes, all we will see are not-very-special commentaries on matter; something that can be checked off as known once a modern translation has been produced.

Most modern translations, unfortunately, are just that: letters produced after reading transmissional information with common eyes. The original text, in contrast, has the potential to effect us like nature itself. As we gaze at it, its secrets may gradually become revealed. True classics are meant to be an inspiration tool that can unlock our intuition, like a mandala. As Zhang Zhongjing once emphasized in his preface to the classic Shanghan zabing lun: “The guiding hand of the classics serves as a source for constant reflection and improvement, for the purpose of evolving one’s static bag of inherited tricks.”

This is the benefit of reading the classics in their original form–similar to why it is better to walk in nature than watching nature on TV.

I think there is a little too much generalization going on here, which I also contributed to in my last comment. I want to address what I see as readily available in modern Chinese based on my (often obsessive) visits to Chinese medicine bookstores here in Taipei. If we are talking about the Su Wen, Ling Shu, Shang Han Lun, and Jin Gui Yao Lue, then yes, many translations into modern Chinese exist and many of these are quite good (though as I stated previously, their goal seems more to be on teaching people to understand the classical texts based upon their annotations). There are also books that help practitioners come up with innovative ways of using the principles of these books in a clinical setting, and some of those books are now making their way into English.

However, if we are talking about the thousands of others medical texts that were written between the Han and Qing dynasties, there are few translations available. I would say that 95-98% of those books have never been translated into any language and exist only in their original form. Many of these books are available in their classical Chinese form with commentaries from later authors, but there are no translations available. For example, I recently bought copies of all of Zhang Jie-bin’s works, but they are only available in their original form; in my view, Zhang writes some of the most interesting essays on medicine available.

The only way I know of to have access to the vast amount of information available is to learn to read classical Chinese. So yes, there are tons of translations into modern Chinese, but only of a fraction of medical books.

I also disagree that learning to read modern is much easier than learning to read classical. That has simply not been my experience. I find classical Chinese much more succinct. It very much depends on the types of texts people want to tackle. For example, I still have a VERY difficult time with classical literature (Tang Poems, for example), but because I have a Chinese medicine background, medical texts are not that much of a leap. Perhaps, you coming in as a non-clinically trained person, you find the modern texts much more illuminating than people who have already learned that information in school. Like I said in my last post, that was my personal experience…modern books were not teaching me anything I hadn’t really already heard. It was not until I got into the classical texts that I began seeing theoretical and practical information that no one is currently teaching or writing about.

Personally, there are not many books in modern Chinese that I would heartily recommend to people and that is why I don’t recommend people spending their time learning modern Chinese if understanding the classics is their goal-it just doesn’t make sense to me. The greatest benefit I have gained from learning modern (apart from the fact that I live in Taiwan and must speak Chinese daily) are the commentaries on some of the texts that helped me grasp classical Chinese. There are also some good scholarly books on the history of Chinese medicine in modern Chinese that are good. I am curious which books you are recommending people to read in modern Chinese?

I think we do agree that learning both is probably the best way forward. I often say that learning to read the classics is not for every practitioner and I do not personally think it is a prerequisite for being even a very good clinician. I wrote the series I did for the obsessive people, like myself (and there are many of us) who prefer to learn as much as they can from as many sources as possible. It’s not for everyone and I hope that nothing I write ever makes any practitioner feel like they are inferior because they can’t read the classics. It’s just that for me, nothing else I have done has increased my theoretical and clinical understanding as much as learning to read the classics.

First of all, I have to admit that I’m not a practitioner. I come from a background which encourages me to adopt an interest in Chinese Medicine. So in a way, I’m speaking my own opinion as someone who is leisurely interested in CM. I just want to be clear about this before I go on.

What I was trying to say in my last post is that people will struggle a lot to understand Classical Chinese and once they get the hang of it, they’d have already spent a lot of time on it; whereas, they could have used that same amount of time to study works or transcriptions by scholars in modern prose, which is much easier to understand. You can even compare them to figure out where they differ and to investigate why they differ. However, I won’t deny any additional benefit of being able to understand the classical texts. But like I said, the classical texts have already been transcribed by several well-known scholars, so the work has been cut in half for you.

I’m also trying to remind people that they should not merely expect to become better doctors by studying the classical text. Clinical experience counts the most for any doctors. The ancient texts are not absolute bibles; there are parts that are questionable as well. Ultimately, unlike Western medicine, Chinese medicine does not have a rigid system where it trains practitioners to think and to follow the same system (i.e., Herbalism). There are more shadowy grounds where you have to “experiment” with different methods to acquire sufficient clinical experience to become better doctors.

Modern texts have an advantage in resolving this dilemma. Nowadays, scholars publish their methods, findings, transcriptions of the ancient texts, etc. in books…I mean, the study and the practice of Chinese medicine is evolving and inevitably the new will sometimes contradict the old. I agree that more insights can be gained by looking into the past. But I question, at what cost on a person’s time and effort? The modern transcriptions are easier to read and forward-looking. They are more synoptically designed than the Classical texts; especially those that are written and published by people specialized in the field. As a result, it’s much more efficient and effective to study the modern texts.

Lastly, I would encourage anyone to learn to read the Classical text. But don’t expect to learn anything substantially different than what is already covered in Modern Chinese texts (don’t know about English translated texts though).

Take a look at the characters for yin and yang for example in both modern and classical. The modern shows a hill, and then interpolates the sun radical or the shade radical, which basically tells us “ok, the difference between yin and yang is the difference between the sunny side of a hill and the shady side of a hill. Ok, they’re opposites. One is the presence of light an done is the absence. That presents dichotomies such as light and dark, good and evil, etc.”

If you look at the Classical version, its a whole different story. The hill radical is still there of course. However, it’s important to keep in mind what that hill radical would have been a symbol for to teh ancient mind. The character looks more than a little like a pregnant woman and is the symbol for communication between heaven and earth. Yang now is that symbol of communication, followed by a symbol of the sun’s rays reaching the earth. This is a statement about the nature of yang. The character for yin is even more telling. The hill radical is present again but now it is coupled with the image of steam rising up from a bowl of rice being cooked in the home. This is a marked difference from the modern interpretation. Now put together, yin and yang appear to be making a statement about SOMETHING ELSE, one showing active energy, the other showing latent or passive energy. It’s the active principle vs the passive principle. They are not shown as opposites, but instead are demonstrating Something Else being manifested two different ways, that yin and yang are manifestations of something, not concrete ending points in and of themselves.

Look at the character shang (damage) from the Shang Han Lun. In the classical character set, we see the radical for man paired with the rays of the sun striking the earth as in yang, but also with an arow, the symbol for injury. The statement that can be inferred here is that shang or damage is what harms someone’s yang qi.

This has enormous implications in the way one treats. If you treat yin and yang as polar opposites and treat in such a way that you are trying to achieve perfect equality between the two states in the patient, this is going to produce a completely different result than if you are trying to preserve and support yang as the prime factor. This is the difference between seeing Heat everywhere and trying to constantly cool down the body vs using warm herbs to try and bolster function. One cures the patient, the other is spotty at best.

So there are numerous and important reasons for learning Classical Chinese with very tangible results from doing so. Relying on modern translations that have to be authorized by the governmental edifice that stripped Chinese medicine of the bulk of its efficacy (thus creating TCM) is simply not going to cut it.

Without knowing the classical language and being able to compare the modern Chinese translations not just with each other, but with the source text itself, it is very difficult for readers to know which translations actually reflect the classical language. I do not know your background, but it sounds like you have some knowledge of modern Chinese and these translations. If you have read any number of them, I’m sure you can agree that their interpretations vary quite a bit. All of the interpretations, whether translated into modern Chinese or English, are interesting, but they become a lot more interesting when a reader can compare them to the source text and see how each translator came up with a different interpretation.

My own experience was much different than you have described. Like most people, I learned modern Chinese first. In that window of time between knowing modern Chinese and learning classical, I could read the modern translations and a lot of the modern medical books, but felt like I really was not learning anything that I could not have access to in English. Learning to read the classical medical texts has been (by far!) the single best thing I have done in my Chinese medicine career. Every day, I am quite literally floored by some of the things I read and the depth with which classical authors talked in a very poetic way about medicine. Modern Chinese and English translations may be able to convey the general meaning, but in my opinion they do not capture the essence and beauty of the texts.

I can’t speak to all of your points, because I don’t know much about how people best learn languages. I’ll speak to the points I feel strongly about, however.

I believe that, if a school is going to teach the Classics (they all should, imho), they should teach them from great English translations, guided by a competent teacher with the intent to extract clinical guidance from the texts.

Unfortunately, there aren’t very many good translations. In fact, not many at all. Most of them are painful, really. Until this can be remedied, I believe we avoid a lot of damage by teaching students enough of the Classical language that they can begin to decipher the texts for themselves. While this can sometimes lead to hilarious and sad results, most of the time I have seen it elevate students’ understanding of the medicine and improve their clinical results.

All that being said, my blog isn’t a school. What I wrote was an open invitation for anyone with interest in the Classics – regardless of where they are in their training. People will self select, and will get out of it what they put in.

I have received TREMENDOUS benefit from learning the Classical language. I’m now beginning my adventure in learning modern Chinese so I can read more contemporary works. I don’t think I would have reversed this order – Classical first, modern later. But, that’s a personal feeling and doesn’t come from any rigorous understanding of the “best” way. Hopefully, people more learned than I will respond to this post to give their opinions on the matter.

Eric