How Did Chinese Medicine Become Experiential? The Political Epistemology of Jingyan

1. Translating Experience

It is now common wisdom that Chinese medicine, unlike modern biomedicine, is founded on thousands of years' accumulation of jingyan (experience). In terms of consulting the practitioners of Chinese medicine, Chinese people generally believe that the more experience a doctor has in treating illness, the better he or she is. In academic circles, the notion of experience has become the focal point for both historians and anthropologists of Chinese medicine. Treating medicine as pragmatic activity instead of abstract knowledge, some scholars recently have gone beyond textual analysis of Chinese medical canons to examine the dialectical relationship between medical texts and embodied experience in the processes of learning and practicing Chinese medicine.¹ Anthropologist Judith Farquhar goes so far as to suggest that unlike its Western counterpart, “knowing” in Chinese medicine actually means “personal and historical experience formed in scholarly, didactic, and therapeutic practice.”² Thus both our mundane evaluation of Chinese doctors and the scholarly understanding of Chinese medicine have been mediated by the notion of experience. Although we take it for granted that traditional Chinese medicine was based on experience and progressed through accumulating experience, we note that this way of characterizing Chinese medicine is a completely modern phenomenon.

The term jingyan (experience) did appear in Chinese medical texts long before the modern time. The ways in which jingyan was used by Chinese people nevertheless changed dramatically when the notion of experience was introduced into the Chinese language along with Western empiricism. In this sense, when the Chinese term jingyan was picked up to translate the Western concept of experience into Chinese in the late nineteenth century, its own meaning was irreversibly transformed in the translating process.

3 Unlike its new usage as a noun, traditionally jingyan was mostly read as jing yan, a verb compound. It was used adjectivally to describe a collection of well-respected formulas of drug prescriptions as being jingyanfang, that is, formulas whose effectiveness was demonstrated “through testing and being confirmed.” Therefore, jingyan was not something that an individual could possess. Pre-Qing medical texts rarely suggested that individual Chinese doctors were either lacking or abounding in jingyan, although this is precisely how jingyan is typically used in twentieth-century Chinese language. Now that the new usage/meaning of jingyan has become so entrenched in Chinese medical language, it is difficult to imagine that for quite a long time Chinese people lived comfortably without it. The problems are (1) What was the historical context in which Chinese people suddenly perceived Chinese medicine to be based on jingyan? and (2) What have been the consequences of that historical event since which Chinese people started to treat Chinese medicine as if it were exclusively based on jingyan?

By the beginning of the Republic era the term jingyan was clearly being used to refer to something very close to the notion of experience. For example, in 1919 when a Chinese doctor proposed instituting a certifying examination for practitioners of Chinese medicine, he differentiated two kinds of medical qualifications, xueshu (scholarly learning) and jingyan.

⁴ According to the author, Chinese doctors should be tested first on their scholarly learning. Only those who passed the examination of scholarly learning would be allowed to take the test on jingyan. The Chinese doctors who had experience (youjingyan) but lacked medical learning had to attend supplementary classes in order to receive a certificate. Therefore, while jingyan and scholarly learning were juxtaposed in Chinese medicine in the 1910s, the former was subordinate to the latter. Elsewhere another Chinese doctor asserted, “In Chinese as well as Western medicine, the excellent doctors must be those who had abundant scholarly learning and experience. Nevertheless, to comprehend the [medical] principles and the concept of qi, Chinese doctors must be the ones who were good at studying books.”5 At this time there was no sign that the basis of...