The early historical record was pieced together by China’s outstanding historians among whom were Confucius and Si Ma Qian. They are both good examples of how seriously the traditional Chinese valued their concept of virtue. From the time of the Yellow Emperor there were officials called “shi” or scribes who always accompanied the ruler. One stayed on his left side, and wrote down everything the ruler said. The other stayed to the right, and wrote down everything the ruler did. Naturally, this could get a scribe in trouble if the Emperor did something he’d rather not have known. Several times scribes were reported to have recorded how their lords murdered their predecessors and were themselves killed for their honesty. It was a rule that scribes should never record anything unless they were absolutely sure of the facts. Indeed, Confucius remarked that when he was young, he was still able to see a scribe leave a blank in his text, meaning the material to be recorded could not be verified. This absolute fidelity was the model, but was dying out even by Confucius’ time. Si Ma Qian (Fig.33), a later historian (c. 145-85 B.C.) was himself descended from several generations of scribes, and would not take even Confucius’ word as authoritative. He visited every place Confucius had mentioned and rechecked the tablet records in the dynastic archives dating back to the Yellow Emperor, before writing his Historical Records. In the end, he fell into disfavor with the Emperor for writing something unflattering, and himself suffered castration and imprisonment rather than repudiate his word.(26)
Figure 31: AN OVERVIEW OF CHINESE HISTORY.
This chart presents a highly condensed glimpse of Chinese history from its inception through the fall of its last dynasty, the Qing in 1911.
Figure 32: HUANG DI, THE YELLOW EMPEROR.
Yellow is the color associated with the middle, and China is referred to as the “Middle Kingdom” (Zhong Guo), so the Yellow Emperor is symbolically the founder of the Chinese nation. He is legendarily credited with originating acupuncture.
This office of scribe, record-keeper or librarian-shi was supposedly occupied in his day by Lao Zi, the founder of Daoism and author of The Way and its Virtue(27). In his official capacity, Lao Zi was reputed to have met and instructed Confucius, who had come to study the official archives (Fig.34).
The next period of history after Huang Di, famous for its lessons on virtue, is that of the Sage Kings: Yao, Shun and Yu. This was the period of the great flood, probably the same as that described in the Bible, which was threatening to destroy the world around 2300 B.C. Every year the flooding got worse–it just kept raining, and there was nowhere for the water to go. Yao was the Emperor, and he came to the realization that he could not stop the floods–the situation was beyond him (Fig.35). He decided to give China (which to him was the world) to anyone who could control the floods. The man he found was Shun, whose only claim to fame was his perfect virtue (Fig.36). He exemplified the cardinal virtue, to the Chinese, of filial piety. Frankly, Shun came from an absolutely awful family. His parents and siblings made him do all the work and then heaped abuse on him, and when he didn’t complain, that really enraged them, and they decided to kill him. They sent him up to work on the roof of the barn, and then they set fire to it. Miraculously, Shun escaped by using a pair of large bamboo hats as parachutes to break his fall when he jumped. Did that get Shun mad? No. Next, his family set him to dig a well, and when he was digging below ground, they covered him up—just buried him alive! Of course, by now Shun was on to their tricks and had already dug an escape tunnel in advance, so he foiled them again, and all this without ever creating any trouble himself.
Figure 33: Sl MA QIAN, THE GRAND HISTORIAN.
He was a meticulous scribe who based his writings on both literary research and firsthand interviews, and we owe much of our knowledge of early Chinese history to his endeavours.
Figure 34: LAO ZI AND CONFUCIUS.
Daoist legend claims that Confucius consulted Lao Zi on a question of ritual while the latter was an archival official.
So, Emperor Yao figured if anyone could save China it might be Shun, because of his perfect virtue—mind you, not because he knew the least thing about flood control! Yao offered the Empire to Shun and Shun refused it–he didn’t think himself worthy. Finally, he allowed himself to be persuaded to become co-emperor with Yao. Together they searched for the best engineer, who turned out to be Yu, the founder of the Xia dynasty (Fig.37). Yu directed the dredging of the great rivers to deepen them. By “moving mountains” and “changing the course of rivers,” Yu saved the country. Yu’s virtue centered not on filial piety, but on goodness or compassion, meaning a sense of responsibility for the sufferings of others, to the point of simply not being able to bear that others should suffer. It was said of Yu, that if anyone drowned as a result of the flood, he felt as if it were he himself that had drowned him. Yu’s labors on flood control lasted thirteen years, during which time he was so pressed with work that he never once was able to visit his home and family, including his infant son who would become heir to the Xia dynasty.(28)(29) The story of Yu’s virtue is one that I think is most pertinent for those in the healing professions to ponder.(30)
Figure 35: EMPEROR YAO,
the first of the Sage Kings in the time of the great flood. His story begins the Classic of History (Shu Jing).
The Xia dynasty was succeeded by the Shang or Yin dynasty, which flourished until around 1100 B.C. It was ushered in around 1800 B.C. by King Tang, also famous for his virtue, but by 1100 B.C. the dynastic virtue had deteriorated to where an absolute demon, Zou, was on the throne. Here was a man who disemboweled pregnant women to satisfy his curiosity as to the sex of their offspring! I can’t even bring myself to relate any of the other atrocities that he committed–it was time for Heaven to remove the mandate.
Figure 36: EMPEROR SHUN, THE EXEMPLAR OF FILIAL PIETY.
He is shown with his ministers (including Yu) conducting a divination in which a heated rod will be applied to a tortoise shell to produce a pattern of significant cracks. See Figure 41 and the accompanying text for a more complete description of this ceremony.
There was, at this time, a scholarly noble, King Wen of Zhou, who was trying to administer his domain in a virtuous manner.
Figure 37: KING YU, THE MASTER OF THE FLOOD.
He was the last of the Sage Kings and the founder of the Xia dynasty. He was not only a consu-mate engineer and an exemplar of compassion, but also a shaman as indicated in footnote 48.
Naturally, the wicked king Zou saw him as a threat, and had him thrown in jail for several years. But this was a man who did not waste time. He took his imprisonment as an opportunity to meditate, and then wrote the 64 hexagrams and their commentaries which form the Yi Jing or Book of Changes.(31) Zou foolishly took this as a sign of weakness and released him, but Wen Wang’s son Wu Wang, the Martial Emperor, overthrew Zou and established the Zhou dynasty. Wen Wang’s fourth son, the Duke of Zhou, was his collaborator in writing the Yi Jing, and the author of much of the material that eventually became part of the Confucian classics. The Zhou dynasty continued through the time of Confucius and Lao Zi until it, in turn, fell to the Qin dynasty.
What I’ve presented in this chapter is a brief glimpse at the legacy of Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, from the dawn of history proper (around 2700 B.C.) down the ages through the eras of the Sage Kings and then of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, to 221 B.C.—that’s a span of about 2500 years. Now, if you look at the genealogical tree of Huang Di(32), (Fig.38) you will see something truly amazing: during those 2500 years every King of China was a lineal descendant of the Yellow Emperor! That means one family, broadly speaking, ruled China for 2500 years. Imagine, if you will, what the Western world would be like now if we had all been ruled by one family since well before the time of Christ. What a set-up for developing and reinforcing tradition, and thank Heaven, that the guiding concept of this civilization was virtue.
Figure 38: THE GENEALOGY OF THE YELLOW EMPEROR.
Various branches of the family tree of Huan
g Di were claimed as their ancestral lines by the rulers of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties. Even if the claims turn out to be inaccurate, they still fostered a remarkable degree of cultural homogeneity in traditional China.
4
From Mythology to Medicine: A History of TOM
Having established the desired aura of respect for what is “traditional,” I must confess that when it comes to studying the history of acupuncture, the very meaning of the word traditional itself becomes ambiguous. There are at least three different lines of tradition evolving simultaneously, and of course, continuously interacting. The most well-known is the written tradition, which consists of the relevant classics and their subsequent commentaries alongside more recently published works. A second line is the oral tradition—what is passed on from father to son, teacher to student, in a culture where this form of learning is both time-honored and the predominant mode of tuition. Finally, there is the actual historical record, unearthed by archaeologists and their ilk, which attempts to reveal the “facts” upon which the first two traditions base their teachings. As an example, both the written and the oral traditions ascribe acupuncture’s Classic of Internal Medicine to the Yellow Emperor in the 27th century B.C., but historical studies show that this text could not have been written down until more than 2,000 years later.(33) Could it have been maintained for this long by oral transmission alone? Historical research can go only so far in documenting or rejecting parts of this, or any, oral tradition—there will always be mysteries, questions for which we have no answers, and we will see this same phenomenon happening even now in the twentieth century, in the next chapter.
Let us start with the archaeological record. The origin of acupuncture is unknown, but scholars generally agree that it was in neolithic times, at least prior to 1,000 B.C.(34) There is even some evidence to support a date as early as 3,000 B.C., the time of the Yellow Emperor himself. (35) One of the oldest Chinese books, the Classic of Mountains and Seas,(36) mentions stone needles called “bian” used to cure illness, and these same stone needles are later mentioned in the Classic of Internal Medicine as having originated in the East.(37) Korea is situated east of China, and interestingly, archeological relics including stone and bone needles putatively dated to 3000 B.C. were exavated in Korea in 1929 and are now in their National Museum (Fig.39). In 1963, Chinese archeologists discovered ground “bian stone” needles at a neolithic site in Inner Mongolia (Toudaowa) which they estimate to be between 4,000 and 10,000 years old.(38) The Classic of Mountains and Seas also mentions other needles called “zhen” in a different context, but the ideogram it uses for zhen is based on bamboo rather than metal, as in the more recent ideogram for needle, suggesting that the earliest acupuncture needles other than the bian stones may have been of plant origin, and thus unknown to the archaeological record.(39) Metal acupuncture needles have been in use at least since 800 B.C.(40), the earliest examples being bronze needles found in 1978 in Inner Mongolia (Dalate)(41) which are specified only as “bronze age” and therefore would date to the late Xia, Shang or early Zhou dynasty (Fig.40).
Now the archeological record gives us some idea of the antiquity of acupuncture, but unfortunately it tells us little about how acupuncture was used or about the identity of its practitioners. To get some insights into these matters we might look at the meeting of the archaelogical and literary traditions which historically occurred in two forms. The first consists of some 400 specimens of ceremonial bronze vases dating from the Xia and Shang dynasties which bear engraved inscriptions showing 1098 characers with 4200 variations.(42) This earliest strata of Chinese writing (reputed to have originated around 3,000 B.C. by Cang Xie, minister of Huang Di, The Yellow Emperor(43)) was used by the late French sinologist and acupuncturist Jacques Lavier to reconstruct the original meanings of the terms used in traditional acupuncture. His speculative interpretations have been largely ignored in scholarly circles, but are mentioned here both for their intrinsic interest, and because Lavier was an important influence on J.R. Worsley as will be shown in the following chapter. The form of early Chinese writing which did seriously impact the scholarly community was that found on the so-called “oracle bones,” or jiaguwen, which were only discovered in China at the beginning of the twentieth century (Fig.41). At that time farmers near Anyang in the neighborhood of the ancient capital of the Shang dynasty were selling curious pieces of inscribed bones they had dug up in their fields to drugstores as “dragon bones,” a traditional component of Chinese herbal remedies. Liu Tieh-yun, a scholar who was procurring some herbal medicine to treat himself for malaria, happened to notice that the inscriptions on the dragon bones seemed to be a form of ancient writing, and after considerable research the writings were discovered to be recordings of divinations performed at the court of the kings of the Shang dynasty, whence the nickname “oracle bones.”(44) The bones used were either ox shoulder blades or tortoise carapaces and plastrons which had been heated, causing cracks to appear (Fig.42). The meaning of the divination was revealed by the pattern of cracks, and both the matter to be divined and the answer given were subsequently inscribed on the cracked bone. From these records yielding about 3,000 characters (45) and from the previously mentioned bronze artifacts we have a lot of contemporary information on the nature of Shang civilization. In addition to confirming the genealogy presented in Chapter Three, the records indicate that the Shang practiced ancestor worship in which the earliest of their line was deified as Shang Di, or “Lord on High.” Illnesses in this culture were seen as punishments by angry ancestors, and the only recourse was to appease them with the proper rituals and sacrificial offerings. For this, a specialist was needed, the shaman, or as he was called in Chinese, the wu (Fig.43). Thus the earliest type of medical practice in China of which we have knowledge is a form of shamanism in which the wu divined the will of the deceased Spirits and then carried out a ritual to appease them. This type of shamanism is indeed native to an extensive northern hemispheric zone centered in the Altai—Ural mountains including Manchuria and Mongolia in China, and also Siberia, and its practice has amazingly continued to this day with only relatively minor alterations in Korea, where the shaman is called mu or mudang or manshin instead of wu (Fig.44). Archeological digs in Shensi Province, the cradle of Chinese civilization, have yielded artifacts dating to the Xia dynasty side by side with Siberian pottery, indicating the antiquity of shamanistic cultural influence on China.(46) Also, the similarity of the Chinese and Native American shamanistic healers, or medicine men(47), begins to make my facetious remarks in Chapter Three on the origins of acupuncture approach the domain of credible hypothesis, for as we shall see, the earliest acupuncturists may very well have been the shamen.
Figure 39: STONE & BONE NEEDLES.
These archeological relics from neolithic sites in Korea attest to the antiquity of the practice of acupuncture. They were unearthed at Songpyong-dong in 1929 and are kept in the National Museum of Korea.
Figure 40: BRONZE NEEDLES.
These examples date from the late Zhou dynasty, however since the “bronze age” began as early as the Xia dynasty it is possible that metal needles were in use long before those in this illustration.
Figure 41: ORACLE BONES - A.
These Shang dynasty tortoise carapaces were used for divination, at times concerning medical issues, but mostly for affairs of state. The names of 36 diseases have so far been deciphered from them.
Figure 42: ORACLE BONES - B.
Carapaces and ox shoulder-blades were both used to perform and record diviniations and preserve some of the clearest examples of ancient Chinese writing. The divination itself simply involved the formation of a Y-shaped crack in response to applied heat, so large bones were often used for multiple divinations.
Figure 43: THE WU OR SHAMAN.
This dancing ceramic figure is from approximately the third century A.D., probably from the Luoyang district. Shamanism had a strong influence on Daoism, and through it on TOM.
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p; Figure 44: A KOREAN MANSHIN.
This female shaman was photographed during her ritual “dance” near the turn of the century. Essentially identical ceremonies can still be observed in present day Korea.
Figure 45: THE COSMIC TREE.
Shamanistic crowns discovered in Korea invariably contain tree-shaped ornaments alluding to the central axis of the cosmos, along which the shaman could fly in ecstatic trance.
Many of the cardinal ideas of TOM can be found in shamanism, starting with the doctrine of the trinity of Heaven, Earth and Man. In its earliest form, the three realms were Heaven, Earth and the Underworld represented by a cosmic tree with its roots in the Underworld, its trunk on Earth and its branches in Heaven (Fig. 45). The shaman was the one individual who could, in ecstatic trance, fly up to Heaven or down to the Underworld to commune with the Spirits and intercede for his community so as to restore harmony. Thus, it is not strange to find that in the earliest traditions, the shaman was the king, who as the “Son of Heaven” was the only individual allowed to perform the rites to Heaven and Earth, and was described as the “one man.”(48) Eventually the roles of king and shaman became separated in China and over many hundreds of years the shaman was reduced to a much lower social status, but not before leaving his mark on the concept of illness and recovery. I’ve used the masculine gender in referring to the shaman because apparently the early shaman-kings were male, but as the two roles became distinct sometime before 1,000 B.C., the wu became predominantly female as are the mudang still active in Korea today. The Chinese character for wu, , depicts two shamen dancing to obtain rain, and forms part of the more complex characters for both divination (shi , where the Yarrow-Achillea stalks used in Yi Jing consultation are included) and spiritual power (ling depicting the dancers calling out for rain). As recently as 1977 a Korean shamanist ritual was employed to deal with the drought in Los Angeles which had lasted one hundred days at that point. Following the ceremony which involved the ritual use of the rain-bearing dragon painting in Figure 46 a cloud burst occurred within hours!(49)
In the Footsteps of the Yellow Emperor Page 5