The Inner Canon Spacetime Model as the Master Coordinate System for Materia Medica

The second part of this section places Zhu Jinzhong’s clinical drug experience back into the model of the preceding “Spacetime” course. Its core insight is that materia medica, diagnostics, and classical formulas are not three isolated bodies of knowledge. They should all return to the master coordinates of Yin-Yang, the Four Images, the Five Phases, the Three Yin and Three Yang, the six excesses, and spacetime models.

Medicines, diagnosis, and classical formulas should all be understood within the shared coordinate system of Yin-Yang, Five Phases, Three Yin and Three Yang, the six excesses, and spacetime models.

Drug selection is not simply matching a medicine to a symptom. Once cause and pathomechanism have been determined, the question is how to choose a tool that can move qi transformation at the corresponding spacetime coordinate. Yin-Yang differentiation can return to the “Great Treatise on the Correspondences and Manifestations of Yin and Yang”; Five-Phase differentiation can return to the five-flavor entrances and generating/overcoming relations; five-flavor differentiation involves fixed verbs such as pungent disperses, sour gathers, sweet relaxes, bitter consolidates, and salty softens.

We show the table of contents of modern clinician Zhu Jinzhong’s True Transmission of Experience in Using Medicines and note that many of its perspectives on pattern-based drug use can be mapped back to temporal and spatial models in the Inner Canon. Even “detoxifying” methods can be traced to more basic Yin-Yang and Five-Phase classifications involving fire, dampness, plants, insects, and other categories.