The Herbal-Medicine Fishing Net and Returning to the Source

The first danger in materia medica is mistaking an expansion in the number of medicinal substances for an expansion of wisdom. The drug section begins by comparing the historical expansion of materia medica to a “fishing net cast ever wider”: data on tens of thousands of substances, aliases, origins, effects, and symptoms may be immense, but without first principles that can gather the whole field together, more information can make the physician lose the governing thread.

As the number of drugs expands, a model capable of gathering the whole field is needed; otherwise one sees the data but loses sight of the Way of materia medica.

The core principle of this article is to pull materia medica back from being merely a database and restore it as a science of derivation. A medicinal substance is not an isolated entry. It is the result of interactions among the spacetime of Heaven and Earth, Yin and Yang, the Five Phases, the Three Yin and Three Yang, and the human black box. If one merely chases drug names and listed effects, one falls into stacked correlations. Only by asking why a drug has this nature, flavor, form, bodily structure, and function can one return to a causal chain.

The drug section is organized into four levels. First, Huang Gongxiu’s Bencao Qiuzhen demonstrates how an ancient author tried to converge materia-medica knowledge through symbolic classification. Second, Zhu Jinzhong’s clinical experience demonstrates how drug selection can correspond with spacetime models. Third, a general framework is built for decoding the Shennong Bencao Jing. Fourth, interpretations by Zhang Zhicong and others show how rules from the Inner Canon can be used to connect and explain each medicinal substance.