Year of Sagely Living : Scholarship and study as a category of practice
Be sure to check out the original introduction to the Year of Sagely Living. You can read other articles on the project by choosing the “Year of Sagely Living” category in the dropdown menu to your right.
This is an important category for me, as I am in my third year of Classical Chinese medicine study. I think it is very important to become a scholar in this medicine, both to increase my clinical effectiveness and to help develop the contemporary understanding of ancient medical science. I’ve listed below my initial thoughts for practices. I’d love to hear your ideas, both comments on what I’ve written and practices you are considering. Because January is just around the corner, I will announce my practice choices tomorrow. After that, I will post a brief entry each day that touches on my experience with the practice as well as revealing substantive content related to what I learned.
- For students: Study each course subject every day for at least half an hour. EVERY class. For me, next term - this would mean doing half an hour of the following subjects every day:
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- Advanced cosmology and symbolism
- Medicinary practicum
- Qigong
- Business seminar
- Formulas
- Pharmacology
- Acu-moxa point lecture
- Acu-moxa point techniques
- Internal medicine
That’s 4.5 hours a day!!! In the interest of maintaining sanity, I could reduce a few of these - combining some of the less intense courses. If you have fewer classes you may not need to do this. Further, to make this more realistic and participants more likely to succeed, I suggest the following nuances :
- No study of a given subject on the day one is in class for it - just a quick review of notes at the end of that day.
- Utilize “in between times” for half an hour of flashcard study, for instance. For me, I’m often on the bus for at least an hour a day. That hour could take care of two subjects. The idea is simply to engage the material each day for enough time to actually learn, re-learn, memorize or come to some conclusion about something. This will substantially reduce the amount of time needed to study for any tests and should increase overall comprehension.
- Daily writing: One of the best ways to learn something is to explain it to others - or attempt to. Writing, whether in an online or offline form, can really help solidify your concepts. Ask yourself questions about the material. For instance, let’s say you’re studying herbs. Take five herbs you’ve learned and ask yourself basic questions about those herbs such as: how does this herb work? what are its properties? what qualities does it share with other herbs you’ve learned? where does it grow and how? how long has it been used in Chinese herbal medicine? what conditions is it used to treat? what does the Shennong Bencao Jing say about it (if anything?). The same can be done with formulas, similar questions could be asked of points. Write out these answers in a narrative form, read it over and write anything else you can think of about the herb. If you are currently working on a major paper, project or thesis/dissertation, try writing for half an hour a day. Just sit down and write from your last stopping point.
- Reading the classics: Study, and even memorization, of the Classic texts of Chinese medicine should be a basic practice of any scholar in this field. Choose one classic you would like to come into greater relationship with - this could be a non CM classic for folks who prefer that, but it should be an ancient text. If you can read the original language, do that. If not, find a highly recommended English translation. Read a chapter or two each day, seeking to understand all you can. Write for 5-10 minutes about what you’ve learned. Alternatively, simply memorize the lines of text. It would be best to do this in the original language. You might get through less using this method, but it could be quite valuable. You could also combine the two techniques as follows: (a) choose 15 lines of text from a Classic, (b) on the first day, memorize the first line in the original and with a translation, (c) on the second day, study that line carefully - writing a page about what you’ve learned, (d) repeat b and c with the second line and so on.
- Take a subject you have a basic grasp of to the next level. Produce an in depth article about this subject that reflects the deeper understanding. Spend the first half of the month studying and the second half writing.
- Memorize an essential set of facts that you work with on a regular basis, but that you don’t have ready at hand. This is especially good for students and new practitioners. For instance, I do not have all of the points and point names memorized yet. I might take the month to well and truly memorize as many point names as I can. To get through most of them, I could take ten points a day - create flashcards for them, and study them whenever possible throughout the day.
- Dive deeply into a basic principle of Chinese medicine - such as Yin/Yang, the 5 Elements or the 6 Qi. Pick a book each day and find every elaboration of these principles in that book, record them, consider that grouping. Or you could do a Chant database search for that term or set of terms. You could look through lecture notes, as well. Write each day about your evolving understanding of that concept several times a week. You could clean this up in the last days of the month and produce an article for publication on your own blog or website or that of someone else. Just ask!
- Learn Chinese (or another language) using self-study and report progress each day. I wrote a post recently of some great free resources to help with a practice like this. You could also buy a proven product like Rosetta Stone
. Obviously you won’t be able to learn the language in a month, but you could make significant progress.
Eric
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Tags: chinese-herb, chinese-language, Cultivation, habits, Learning, scholar, students, study, studying, Year of Sagely LivingRelated posts
Who wants to learn about Chinese language, culture and medicine for free?
I am (very nearly) done with finals for Fall term 2007! Hurrah! I am currently working on a couple of articles to publish over the next few days concerning what kind of gifts to get your favorite Chinese medicine student. In doing research for that I ran across a half-written article that I should have just published ages ago.
It occurs to me that many of you may not know about the phenomenal resource that is MIT OpenCourseWare. For those of you students about to start break, here’s an opportunity TO NEVER STOP THE ENDLESS FLOW OF INFORMATION INTO YOUR BRAIN. Ha! Seriously, though, this is an excellent effort on the part of a major educational institution to reduce the number of restrictions on people to get a quality education. MIT, a prestigious institution by any measure, has made the majority of their courses available ONLINE for free. You just have to go download the packages onto your computer and follow the instructions included in the “read me” file. If you have any technical problems, there are plenty of resources there to help you through any issues. It doesn’t substitute for real-time learning, of course, but it’s a wonderful thing nonetheless. The courses include notes, slide shows, audio, video, extensive bibliography (some of them annotated) links galore and even test materials. I have worked through a course before and can attest to its usefulness. For those of you skeptical that this kind of learning would work for you, just try it!
For my readers there are several courses of relevance, including:
- A four course language series followed by a two course series in Chinese culture - these include audio and video resources, an online book, assignments and loads of other resources. I have heard great things about this course. I’m going to begin it this break along with beginning the Rosetta Stone program (Chinese I). Along with interacting with my professors and spending time with other Chinese language speakers, it’s as close to immersion as I’m going to get without paying some serious money. :) There is also a streamlined Chinese language series for people who speak some Chinese but need help with reading and writing.
- Traditional Chinese Literature: Poetry, Fiction and Drama for those of us interested in delving deeper into Chinese cultural traditions.
- Government and Politics of China. I think understanding where the government of China is today and where it’s come from can help us to more fully understand the landscape of our medicine. For instance, are we going to be able to get herbs imported in the next decade? What might influence our ability to do that?
- A class about the experiences of Chinese people as they lived through the big changes of the 19th and 20th centuries.
- A course about the “human side” of medicine which I believe refers to the more philosophical issues inherent in medicine. What is a doctor? What is a patient? What does it mean to be in one of these roles? It looks like it focuses on Western medicine, but valuable nonetheless.
- An anthropology course called Myth, Ritual and Symbolism that would be of interest to anyone seeking to open their minds to the more symbolic ways of looking at reality. Great for people just starting in Chinese medicine.
- A fantastic looking course on Medical Anthropology which should be of interest to people in any medical discipline.
- A history course about East Asia and its impact in and influence on the world.
- Here’s a link to the whole Division of Health Sciences and Technology section of OpenCourseWare, any of those classes could be of interest, particularly if you are interested in integrative medicine.
No classes on Chinese medicine, as such, but such great information that can really enhance your overall complex of knowledge relevant to your studies. If you take a course, let us know how it goes! If you would like to read more articles like this one, be sure to subscribe to this blog via RSS feed or via email.
Eric
Tags: chinese-language, cultural-differences, education, internet, Learning, studyRelated posts
On standardization of Chinese medical nomenclature
First, let me start by saying that I am not wholly familiar with the nomenclature debates. I have read the most recent articles, had discussions with a few professionals and thought about it for about 6 months. This by no means qualifies me as an expert on the subject! I wanted to report about my AAAOM conference experience, and Wiseman’s talk on Chinese medical translation was the first, and most interesting, talk I attended. I did not attend the debates on the prior day because I had midterms. I hope to further familiarize myself with the full breadth of the debate and as I learn more I will write more about it. I do most earnestly request that if you have an opinion or further information on this topic that you reply in the comments so we can have an open discussion. It’s too important an issue to ignore.
My first impression: Wiseman is composed, entirely rational and of impeccable intellectual achievement, also clearly passionate. The talk itself was frankly a bit of a marathon - four hours with no breaks. For an NCNM student used to my breaks every hour on the hour, it was a challenge. :D Kidding - but not really. I came to the talk with my mind completely open and ready to learn.
The bulk of the talk:
Wiseman started out by discussing the general way that transmission of knowledge and artifacts from one culture to another happens. It was an interesting preamble and the general point seemed to be that transmission happens most easily from a culture with high influence to cultures with less influence. He moved on to discuss the way that Western medicine was transmitted to China as a comparative model to analyze how Chinese medicine has been transmitted to the West. In general, I took a few things from this portion of the lecture. First, Western medicine was easily transmitted to China because the West had/has great cultural influence thus Chinese people tended to know Western languages and were generally open to Western ideas. Second, Chinese medicine transmission has suffered in the West because of the absence of these things. Third, and less overt in Wiseman’s actual words, Chinese medicine transmission to the Western world has been negatively impacted by the extremely high influence of Western concepts in the realm of medicine. In other words, when the medicine is transmitted, there is a greater tendency to put everything in explicitly Western CONCEPTS, not just Western LANGUAGE. Does that make sense?
He then moved on to the center of the lecture. In short, Wiseman believes that Chinese medical terminology should be standardized and that the standard terminology should be as literal as possible, with few exceptions. He seemed to be arguing largely against people who use biomedical translations for Chinese terms - for instance using “conjunctivitis” when translating the characters for “wind-fire-eye.” 风火目 (pardon if I don’t have those characters correct, I don’t have a text with that in it right in front of me). I am entirely behind the thrust of Wiseman’s argument on this point. Not only is it simply annoying when book authors do this, as opposed to providing a list of POSSIBLE correspondences, it’s also flatly irresponsible. Most of the biomedical approximations are just that, approximations, and often do not include important information that the Chinese term possesses.
In general, the lack of term standardization can be extremely confusing for people, particularly when Chinese characters are not available for a given concept. Wiseman pointed out several situations in which certain translations were not only merely confusing but actually misleading. I have to say that I am frankly confused by people’s resistance to standardization, particularly when that standardization is literal. If the standardization were clearly ideological (such as using all biomedical concepts) I could understand the resistance. Some have expressed concern that the standardization would prevent them from being able to express their unique understanding of a particular concept or text. However, the standardization would not mean that you couldn’t continue to explain to students or colleagues your understanding of a term, even when it differs from the standard. In fact, it would provide a convenient place to start that conversation.
My thoughts: I think the ideal situation is that everyone learns Chinese well, including Classical grammatical structures, before starting study or at least while they are learning the medicine. With this standard in place, the Chinese can be used and we avoid the problem of terminology at least for the educational environment. Whether we would still want to translate for the benefit of the general public and whether it would still be best to standardize in that situation is up for debate and largely unimportant.
But people aren’t going to learn Chinese, so this is simply impractical. Would it be fair to have this as a requirement for Chinese medical education in English speaking countries? I don’t know. I haven’t learned Chinese in the way I should have - but I’m working on it and I hope to have basic mastery within the next few years. Travel to China will certainly help me in this quest. I think regardless of its fairness or unfairness, it’s just not going to happen. Short of having people learn Chinese as a mandatory step in the Chinese medical educational process, a standard nomenclature seems best. It will help people communicate with one other and streamline the learning process for students. I’m looking forward to hearing your comments.
Eric
Tags: Character, chinese-language, chinese-medicine, nigel-wiseman, nomenclature-debates, translation, translation-problemsRelated posts
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