Practitioner, Bastyr Center for Natural Health, Seattle, WA
Adjunct Faculty/Lecturer, Northwestern Health Sciences University,
Arizona School of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine,
Eastern School of Acupuncture and Traditional Medicine,
Clinic Supervisor, Bastyr University
Graduate student, Asian Languages and Literature, Univ of WA
Graduate student at University of Washington, Asian Languages and Literature department, 2019 to present.
Current Research:
Brief background -
The pronunciation of the characters comprising the Sùwèn is very different
now then it was when the work was written. It is likely the original rhymed
(such an argument is posited by modern scholars such as Paul Unschuld and
Herman Tessenow in their annotated translation of the Sùwèn).
Phonological reconstruction is the science of investigating the original
pronunciations of words. Reconstructing the Sùwèn allows for a unique
avenue of analyzing the version of the Sùwèn we have now to uncover
errors entered into the text over its long history of transmission.
Current inventory of reconstructions of terms (Updated 6/6/19)
Using the work of Axel Schuessler (Minimal Old Chinese and Later
Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa, 2009, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-3264-3)
And giving Middle Chinese, Late Han, and Old Chinese reconstructions
alongside modern pīnyīn, Chinese character, and Guǎnyùn rime
Brief background -
The use of shén in pre-Han dynasty literature (before the Nèijīng was written)
often referred to external entities, e.g., ghosts, gods. The contemporary
understanding of shén in Chinese medical literature is akin to awareness, the
clarity and effectiveness of awareness/consciousness, and is closely related
to all emotions. There, thus, appears to be a gap in meaning. As
the Nèijīng both acts as the fountainhead of current Chinese medical thinking
and was written very near the time when shén referred to ghosts/spirits, a
targeted investigation may cover the gap in meaning.
Brief background -
Most modern versions of the Sùwèn are based on the Song dynasty (~1,000 CE)
version Zhòng Guǎng Bǔ Zhǔ Huángdì Nèijīng Sùwèn 重廣補注黃帝内經素問,
Broadly Supplemented and Annotated Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic Basic
Questions, which was based on that of Wang Bing from the Tang dynasty (eighth
century). This means most modern versions reflect the edits and commentary of
Wang Bing. The Tàisù predates Wang Bing by roughly one hundred years. It,
thus, offers a glimpse of the Sùwèn before edits and changes made by Wang
Bing.
Brief background -
It is widely believed within the contemporary acupuncture and Chinese medicine
community that the meaning of Chinese characters can be derived from a reading
of the character as a picture. That is, characters are pictures of that which they
indicate (or, related, characters convey ideas directly, as "ideographs", and not
through the writing of a word). This appears to be based largely on a book by
Léon Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification
and Signification : a Thorough Study from Chinese Documents. Additionally, a
1,900 year-old Chinese dictionary, Shuōwén Jiězì 説文解字, is also understood to
indicate some characters are pictographs. And, to be sure, there are countless
online sources indicating Chinese characters are pictographic in nature.
The understanding of characters as pictures of what they represent is out-dated
and contrary to current scholarship (see below). Characters are the graphs of the
Chinese writing system. And as with all writing systems the graphs write words;
those words carry the meaning, not the graph itself. That is, the meaning of a
character is derived from the word it writes, not its physical appearance. (Note,
the semantic classifier, aka "radical", indicates the general category of meaning,
not the specific meaning.)
Confusion is understandable. Chinese graphs, "characters", are very different in
appearance from other, especially Western, graphs, such as the letters used in
the words typed here. Additionally, both classical Chinese literature, such as
the Shuōwén, as well as early twentieth century scholarship, such as by Dr.
Wieger, tells us that characters include components that are meant to be pictorial
representations of that which they represent. Many of the sources listed below, in
fact, speak directly to this widely held misconception:
Unfortunately, it [the Chinese character system of writing] has often been
misunderstood, partly through a tendency to oversimplify, and myths about
characters still abound. One of these myths, which we may as well knock on
the head right away, is that characters are "pictograms", i.e., idealized pictures
of the things they stand for.
Goddard, p. 188
Despite popular misperception, Chinese characters are not pictographs or
ideographs, but logographs that represent the sounds and words of a living
language...
Xiaofei Tian, in Denecke, Li, and Tian, p. 27-8
Initially, Chinese characters were understood in the West as being able to
communicate ideas directly without the need to be vocalized, that is, with the
medium of language and speech... In the second half of the 1930s, a heated
debate developed in Western Sinology precisely on the issue of whether
Chinese writing was ideographic or logographic...
Imre Galambos, in Denecke, Li, and Tian, p. 31-2
The question of pictography is of some importance because even early
Chinese writing, as writing, was logographic. That is to say, the Chinese, once
they were writing true writing, were using graphs to record words; they were
not using them to draw pictures or ideas even though pictographic elements
may originally have been used to construct the logographs and record the
sounds of the words.
David Keightley, in Senner, 1989, p. 188
Please see the below resources for additional information:
The first two by Professor Boltz of the University of Washington (and, for sake of
transparency, my Classical Chinese and philology professor and graduate
advisor) give the most comprehensive arguments, and are the most commonly,
nearly exclusively, cited by the others:
Boltz, "Pictographic Myths" 2006
------- The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System, 2003
Chang and Owen, The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, 2010
Denecke, Li, and Tian, The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature,
2017
Goddard, C. The Languages of East and Southeast Asia, 2005
Handel, Z. Sinography, 2019
Keightley, D. "The Origins of Writing in China: Scripts and Cultural Contexts", in
Senner, The Origins of Writing, 1989
Mair, The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, 2001
Norman, Chinese, 1988
Qiu, X. (Mattos and Norman trans.) Chinese Writing, 2000
Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach, 2005
Copyright John Aguilar, Jr., DAOM, EAMP. All rights reserved.
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