Infusing Chinese Medicine with Spirit: Daoism, Shamanism, & Chinese Medicine in the Modern World

175 Infusing Chinese Medicine with Spirit Daoism, Shamanism, & Chinese Medicine in the Modern World MARY KAY RYAN Chinese medicine as it is developing in the modern world and particu‑ larly in the so‑called West is engaged in a debate over the place that spirituality will play in its practice. On the one hand are those who be‑ moan the exclusion of “spirituality” from our medicine (e.g. Jarrett 2000), while others work diligently to create something they call a “modern secular Chinese medicine” (Lake and Flaws 2001, ch. 2, 37). Succinctly put, the latter view states: “In contemporary professional Chinese medi‑ cine, spirit is nothing other than a certain quantity of heart qi. Thus the concept of spirit in Chinese medicine is not ‘spiritual’ in any conven‑ tional religious sense” (Lake and Flaws 2001, 17). In this paper, I will make a fourfold argument: —that spirituality has always been and should still be a deeply in‑ trinsic part of medicine and that therefore Chinese medicine does indeed need to consider some kind of spiritual content if it is not to be sub‑ sumed wholesale into the materialist worldview of the mainstream medical system; —that Daoism should probably contribute the largest part of that spirituality —that to do so, it may have to consider remaking itself in some sense to appeal to a much wider world audience; —and that shamanic practices might be able to offer a method that could make Daoism more accessible outside its native China. 176 / Journal of Daoist Studies 4 (2011) Spirituality In order to talk about Chinese medicine, Daoism, and shamanism, all large subjects in and of themselves, let us define some terms first. What for instance is “spirituality?” Under the rubric of Chinese medicine and alternative medicine in general in the twentieth century, the term has come to be defined as almost coterminous with the emotions.112 This is a rather odd development, given that in most spiritual systems, especially those with a mystical bent, the emotions are seen as problematic in spiri‑ tual pursuits and can be things that have a tendency to “get in the way of” spiritual development (see Walsh 1999). Another irony is that the model of the emotions being grafted onto Chinese medicine as “spirituality” usually comes from various versions of Western psychology, which in turn is based on individualist ideas of the person totally antithetical to ones held historically in Chinese and Asian cultures. Asian cultures have tended to embed the person in a va‑ riety of contexts, both social and natural, rather than seeing people as autonomous “free agents” who have an individual identity outside their socially defined roles.113 That is another topic entirely, but for our pur‑ poses here, it is important to comment on another discordant aspect of this marriage between Chinese medicine and psychology. Western psychology (or at least that of the 19th and early 20th centu‑ ries) derived from a scientific and materialist worldview—that is, one that sees causality as linear and mechanical, where meaning derives from matter and not the reverse and where “what you see is what you get.” There is no “invisible world” behind or prior to the material one. This is, of course, the opposite to the most basic belief of almost all spiri‑ 112 The Worsley School of Chinese medicine probably began this trend, but it has continued among other well respected practitioners such as Jeremy Ross. 113 It could be argued that Daoism and other spiritual traditions from Asia counterbalance this highly socialized view of the person: they provide a some‑ what socially acceptable space in which to explore one’s identity. But it is equally notable that this “identity” relates to the universe, the spirit world, destiny writ large, and so on, rather than to highly personalized ego‑structures or histories. Indeed, Asian philosophies are highly suspicious of individual ego‑based iden‑ tity and mostly see this aspect of the person as problematic. Ryan, “Infusing Chinese Medicine with Spirit” / 177 tual systems which either see spirit as preceding matter or at least as re‑ lated in some kind of highly complex interconnected and inter‑creating dance of the two. In other words, here I...