Chinese Medicine Lost Its Licence in 1571

There was a ritual therapy department inside the Chinese state medical bureaucracy for about a thousand years. It was struck off the roster in 1571. Here are the dates on all of it, and what a licence ending does and doesn't mean.

From The Magick That Never Left: Classical Chinese Medicine and the Tradition Still Beneath It

~17 minute read, plus a reading list

Last time I ran nine operations through this medicine and found eight of them sitting in it. That piece is here if you want the list. This one puts years on them.

So I've spent two chapters dating other people's traditions. Now the eight. Divination, sympathetic magic, talismans, energy work, gnosis, illumination, banishing, and the calling of spirits, right? And they didn't arrive together, not even close. Different centuries, different directions, and there was never a morning in the Han when somebody walked in and switched them all on at once. Think of it like a city. Nobody stands in London and says it can't be a real place because it has no plan.

The ritual department, and the day it closed

Start with the one my own profession seems not to know. Did you know there was a ritual therapy department inside the Chinese state medical bureaucracy? For about a thousand years, and it kept getting renamed, as the dynasties turned over. 咒禁 under the Sui and Tang, incantation and interdiction. 書禁 under the Song, talisman-writing and interdiction, 書符禁咒, two operations under one seat. 祝由 under the Yuan and the Ming, incantation therapy. Lin Fu-shih spent a career on this, and he traces those as one line and not three similar things. Nobody taught you that line, and it ran for longer than your profession has had a college, right? The messier parts, the seat-counting on the Yuan roster and what split into what, are in the reading list for you.

It ended in 1571. 隆慶五年, the fifth year of the Longqing reign, struck off the roster, alongside the massage department. And the interdiction department? Already gone, two hundred years earlier, at the founding of the Ming. The date itself is standard, and it's in 《中國醫學通史》 and in the ordinary reference literature on the thirteen departments, so honestly, don't take it as mine or as Lin's. What I take from Lin is the continuity. One line, all the way down. Plus his finding that the abolition gets skipped or misdated in a lot of the medical histories. The statute is 《大明會典》, the Collected Statutes of the Great Ming, right?

The divination side, and the exam paper that proves it

The divination side has a date too, and it isn't the one I'd have picked. Zi Wu Liu Zhu and Ling Gui Ba Fa, 子午流注 and 靈龜八法, the two methods that pick your point off the hour and the day, off the calendar, basically, rather than off the patient in front of you, were never on a state curriculum. They circulated as texts, and that's all, right? What got examined is 五運六氣, the five periods and six qi, which entered the Su Wen through Wang Bing's recension in 762, and then, basically, became a tested subject in the Song Imperial Medical Bureau. And the receipt for that is a book. 《太醫局諸科程文格》, Model Examination Papers of the Imperial Medical Bureau, gathered inside the Bureau by 何大任 He Daren, whose preface is dated to the eighth month of 嘉定五年, 1212, and who petitioned that autumn to have the papers cut in blocks so candidates out in the provinces would know the standard. Six categories of question in it. 墨義 textual meaning, 脈義 pulse, 大義 general principles, 論方 formulas, 假令 hypothetical cases, and 運氣, periods and qi. And how many did one man face? Under the Chongning regulations, two 運氣 questions in the second session, every stream, needlers included. Two questions on a calendrical forecast, and there was no patient anywhere in the room, right? Picture what your own licensing exam would look like with that section still in it. Now here's the part I'd want from somebody else, so I'll give it to you. What we read isn't He Daren's book, it's a reconstruction the Siku editors pulled out of the 永樂大典 and handed up in 1781, eighty-seven surviving answers arranged into nine juan, and nine of those eighty-seven are 運氣. That's the anthology's whole stock of the category, drawn off more than one sitting, right, and it is not one man's paper. Which is why I gave you the Chongning number instead.

So that's one of the eight. Where were the rest of them sitting? Two of them were in that department I just closed, and they went in together, the calling of spirits and the writing of objects that bind. You want the state's own word for it? The Song roster of 1076 named the seat 書禁, and that's 書符禁咒, talisman-writing and spell-interdiction, short. They put the writing in the title, right? Whether the Tang licence stretched that far is a real argument and it's in the reading list, along with the sentence a specialist would use against me.

And the last five never needed a department at all. Three are in the canon from early and they never leave. The correspondence work, as the five-phase mapping of the transport points and the flavours going to the organs. The energy work, as 治神, governing the spirit, and that's Su Wen 25, 寶命全形論, Discourse on Treasuring Life and Preserving Physical Appearance. 凡刺之真，必先治神. For needling to be real, first govern the spirit. Ahead of knowing your drugs, ahead of reading your patient. And the gnosis, as the state that same chapter tells you to be in before the needle goes in. All three are still on your syllabus, right, the mapping as the transport points and the other two filed under concentration. The last two sit in books rather than in an institution. Sun Simiao put the self-work at the front of his formulary in the seventh century, ahead of the formulas, and that's the illumination one. And Zhang Congzheng put the expulsion logic in writing in the thirteenth, which is the banishing. So one examined, two licensed, five needing nobody's permission. That's your eight, and you can audit every line of it.

The objection I'd raise against myself

The tradition classified 運氣, periods and qi, as medicine, taught it as medicine, and examined it as medicine. So calling it divination, this is my word over theirs, and that's exactly the move Nathan Sivin, the historian of Chinese science who spent a career on this material, warned people against. And a name does real work, so the objection has teeth, right? So here's my answer. I'm not asking what they filed it under. I'm asking what the operation does. Reading a year off a stem-and-branch cycle to predict what will sicken people is the same operation, whichever drawer the librarian used. It's the same way an actuary and a fortune teller are both telling you when you'll die, and only one of them gets an office. That's a real disagreement with the sources, and it isn't a knockdown.

So what's the number you want? A thousand years for the department, Sui down to Ming. And if you'll only take hard paper on both ends, three hundred and fifty-nine. 1212 out to 1571, and 1212 is the date on He Daren's preface, so it's the day I can put my finger on. Could I go earlier? I could. The Chongning regulations put 運氣 on the exam a century before that, and taking them would buy me another hundred years, you know, and I'm not taking them, because what I can hand you is a dated preface and not a summary of a curriculum. And that isn't the age of the medicine, so don't go filing it next to the seventy-five. What it is, is the span between the earliest dated receipt for one of these being examined by the state, and the last hard receipt for another being licensed by it.

1571 didn't stop anybody, and that's Lin again. Physicians were still defending 祝由, zhuyou, the incantation therapy, three hundred years after the department closed, right? Three centuries of people in your job, arguing for the thing your programme doesn't mention. Right. Think of it as a language that loses its official status and keeps every one of its speakers. It carried on in folk transmission into the twentieth century, and my teachers will tell you it came back in the nineties, though that last part is lineage talk and I can't hand you a paper for it. So what did 1571 actually take away? The licence. That's a better word than the one I started with, and the whole book is inside it.

The magick never left. It just lost its licence.

After that the losses keep coming. The Qing struck the acupuncture department out of the Imperial Academy of Medicine, in the nineteenth century. That's arguably a bigger hit to the machinery than 1571 was, and you'll hear about it even less, right? The date, and how far I'd trust it, are in the reading list. Yu Yunxiu's motion in 1929 isn't on this list, because it failed. Then the 1950s, which didn't touch a licence at all. Why would they? There was nothing left to revoke by then, nothing, and the only thing anybody could still rewrite was the curriculum. So they rewrote the curriculum.

But the sequence is mine, and I'll own it as a reading. The pieces aren't. The Ming abolition is Lin's work, and I'd never have found it. The twentieth-century staging is Fruehauf's, and his account starts in the late nineteenth century, and doesn't go back to the Ming. Putting his end and Lin's end on one timeline, that's the only original thing I'm doing here. And maybe somebody who knows the Ming better than I do tells me the join doesn't hold. Fair enough. You'd want to know that too.

What got cut was what the frame asked of you

Now maybe you're a practitioner reading this and going, wait. Plenty of these methods are still in mainland TCM. So what got cut exactly? Fair question. Two things going on here.

First, the frame around the methods got swapped. Classical CM held all of this inside a Chinese cosmological and ritual context, Daoist and Buddhist and Confucian and folk-religious strands woven in, depending on the lineage and the period. Post-reform TCM holds it inside a Marxist-materialist and biomedical-adjacent context, right? Same points, different universe described around them, and nobody told you, right?

And this is the part that does the work. So the swap left the reasoning standing and changed what the reasoning was for. Three things there, right, and not two. The vocabulary, which changed completely. The structure of the operation, which didn't. And what the operation asks of you, which is the one nobody mentions. Now, I'm leaning on Nathan Sivin here, and I'll tell you it's awkward, awkward for me, because Sivin's work is the thing most likely to be used against this whole book. He died in 2022, right, and the objection outlives him. What I take from him is narrow. He translated and studied the 1972 Revised Outline of Chinese Medicine, a textbook written to teach this material to biomedically trained physicians, and what he showed is how much old correlative reasoning is still carrying the load, still carrying it, underneath the materialist presentation. He was interested in how much changed. I'm interested in what didn't. Read him and decide for yourself, because he was a better historian than I'll ever be. So say Liver qi stagnation, needle Taichong. What did you just run? A correspondence operation. And the structure runs whether or not you've got a name for it, right, which is exactly why it survived the swap. What it asks of you is a separate question, and that's the one the swap answered differently. It's like a courthouse. The oath, the robes, the standing up and sitting down, the reading-in of a charge. Every one of those is a ritual form that still does real work in that room, right? And nobody in it would call the day's business a rite. And you're standing inside an older machine that never stopped running. So that's why I say the magick never left. Strip out every talisman, and you've still got a resonance engine sitting there. Right. Because the resonance engine is the medicine.

Second, the public naming went underground. The state doesn't officially endorse ritual or spirit or magick, not as part of clinical medicine. So classical methods that depend on those frames get reframed in materialist language, or they get quietly dropped, and nobody says a word about it. Some ritual practice survives in regulated forms, state-recognized qigong, registered Daoist temples, some Buddhist medical contexts. But inside the standardized medical curriculum, the magickal frame is not on your menu.

So look at what the translators do with one character. 邪, in 邪氣. Your textbook renders it "pathogenic factor," which sounds like it came out of a microbiology lab. It didn't. 邪 means crooked, deviant, heterodox, malign, and it's the same character sitting in 驅邪, to drive off evil spirits. And take the graph apart before you let me lean on it, because it pays. The Shuowen, around 100 CE, doesn't define 邪 as crooked at all. It gives you 琅邪郡, Langya commandery, a place in Shandong, 从邑牙聲, the city radical with 牙 for the sound. So the character is a place name, and every moral sense it carries got loaned onto it later. Your textbook's most technical-sounding word rests on a graph that started life as a postcode, right, and picked up its morality on the way. Unschuld, translating the canon itself, renders it "evil qi." Wiseman's dictionary standardizes it as "evil." Sivin uses "heteropathic" specifically, to get the moral charge out of it. Three serious translators. Two positions, right, and the split runs straight down the middle of the problem. Unschuld and Wiseman both keep the moral charge. Sivin built a word to get rid of it. So what does that tell you? Probably that it isn't a word with a clean technical history. It's a word people keep having to do something about. Now, the medicine did build a graded physical model around 邪 as well, seasons and winds and depletion, paired against 正氣, upright qi. So it isn't demons all the way down, and I'm not saying it is. What never got rebuilt is the model underneath. The word got a new coat of paint, you know, and the thing it names kept its old shape, which is why the translators can't agree on it.

So what got cut wasn't the techniques. The techniques are all still there, on paper, right? What got cut was what the old frame required of the person running them.

Now these are two different levels, and I need you to hold them apart, because I've just said two things that sound opposite. The reasoning survived the swap. That's the Taichong point, and it's why I can say the magick never left. What did not survive is what the operation asks of the operator. The operation is identical. The act isn't. Somebody driving a spirit out and somebody releasing a pathogenic factor, they're running the same structure, the same structure exactly, and they are not asking the same thing of themselves while they run it. The hand is identical, right? What's behind the hand isn't, and this medicine has always said the thing behind the hand is the part that decides what kind of act it is. I mean what it is, and not whether it works.

So this is the claim

Chinese medicine is a magickal system.

Not a medicine with some magic attached to it, which is the polite version, right, the one people reach for when they're trying to be generous to the tradition. And not a medicine that used to have magic and lost it.

Seven of those parts are present tense, and I mean that literally, so take them family by family. It reads the year off a calendar, today, in every school that still teaches the great treatises. It runs on sympathetic correspondence, today, in a clinic near you. It still writes things down to make them act, and I made one this week, actually, on my own altar and nowhere near a treatment room. It works with an energy it treats as real, it still tells you what state to be in before the needle goes in, and it still tells you to work on yourself first, in a chapter sitting in front of the formulas. And it still expels, today, naming the thing, choosing its exit, and that reasoning is sitting right underneath a formula you wrote out this week.

The eighth is past tense in one specific way, and I'm not going to fudge that either. For the better part of a thousand years it also called spirits out by name and commanded them, in a department the state licensed and paid for, the same department, the same one that licensed the talismans, and it's gone. It's like a bar closing and everybody carrying on drinking at home. The licence is what ended. The practice didn't, and I do it, on my own altar, outside my registration, never with a patient in the room and never as any part of anyone's treatment. Chapter seven is where I stop being careful about it. So the identity claim, it's about the seven that never stopped, right? The eighth one is how you know the other seven aren't my invention. Because a state that kept a department for it, staffed and funded, from the Sui down to 1571, which is the better part of a thousand years, look, that state was not confused about what kind of system it was licensing.

And let me be precise, precise about the subject of that claim, because chapter six is going to make me pay for it otherwise. I'm talking about the reasoning. How does this medicine decide what's wrong with you, and what to do about it? That's the thing I'm naming.

The fence

Now the fence, and it's the same fence for the whole book, so read it once and hold me to it. I'm making a claim about what kind of system this is. That's a historical and philosophical question about a body of reasoning, and you can check my work against the sources at the bottom of every chapter. Right. I'm making no claim whatsoever about clinical outcomes. Does a treatment help you? Different question. An empirical one, answered by research and regulated practice, and nothing in this book is a promise to you about it. Those two questions don't touch, right? A system can be magick and effective, right? It can be magick and inert. Which one it is isn't decided by what we call it.

So what does the second eye get you

Both versions are Chinese medicine, the standardized and the classical, and only one of them admits what it's running. And the one that won't admit it is the seventy-five-year-old one. That's why I opened with the number. Not to make your training small, but because a version that young is a version somebody decided on, recently, in a room, for reasons you can read about. The older thing didn't decide to stop saying what it was. It got edited.

So think of it as two eyes in one face. You can work with one open, and most people do, and one eye sees plenty, right? What one eye doesn't give you is depth. Same reason a surveyor takes two marks and not one. Both open and the picture doesn't get brighter, it gets deep, and that's the only thing I'm claiming for the second one.

So do I think the older stream makes you a better reader of your own medicine? I do. Better at knowing what you're running and why. I mean that, and not better results for anybody's patient. Apprenticing since 2008, registered since 2015, and working both ways the whole time. That's where I've landed. And I'll tell you exactly what that is. It's a practitioner's judgement, formed on my own cases, and I have no trial, no data and no way to hand it to you as anything firmer. Plenty of people practise this medicine with one eye shut and help plenty of patients, and I'm not taking that off anybody.

What I can put in front of you is the other thing, and it doesn't need my say-so at all. The second eye closes the distance between what you're actually doing and what you'd say you were doing, if somebody stopped you in the hallway and asked. Right now, for most practitioners, that distance is enormous. You run a correspondence engine all day and describe it in the vocabulary of a system that doesn't have one, right? Closing that gap is the offer, and you can check it yourself, on your own last ten patients, without taking a word from me. And that's what the rest of this book does. One piece at a time, with the dates and the receipts attached, starting with the next chapter.

Next chapter: The Magick Was Never the Add-On. The Yellow Emperor's classic has a chapter where it says, in its own words, that the ancients cured disease by the spell-cure alone. Also "charms and spells" as a taught and certified subject of the state medical bureau, sitting on the roster next to acupuncture. Receipts included. Subscribe and you'll get it when it drops.

The Secret Menu. The paid tier of this book, and later the classes. The free side argues that this medicine is magick. The paid side is where I stop arguing about it and start teaching the spiritual practice on its own terms. Ritual, cultivation and correspondence work. Strickmann reconstructed what the operators did from the texts. This goes the other direction, from somebody doing it. It's open, $45 a month, Canadian. That's the founding rate, and it closes when the first class ships. It goes up for people who come after that, and it never goes up for you while you stay in. Cancel and it's gone, and you'd come back at whatever the price is then. So the rate is for members, not for names on a list.

<small>What it is and isn't. It teaches ritual, cultivation and correspondence practice as spiritual and educational work. It is not a clinical course, it does not teach acupuncture or TCM diagnosis, nothing in it is offered as treating, diagnosing or curing any condition in you or anyone else, nothing in it is presented as making any regulated treatment more effective, and finishing it confers no competency to treat. It is not open to my acupuncture patients, and subscribing creates no practitioner-patient relationship of any kind.</small>

A few things before you go

This is a personal essay on the history and philosophy of Chinese medicine and my own practice, not medical advice. Every person described in this book is a composite drawn from several sources, with identifying details altered or invented, and no scene is a record of an actual patient or session. When I argue that this medicine is a magickal system, that's a claim about how a historical system of reasoning works, not a claim that any treatment produces any effect.

Who I am, what the credentials are and aren't, how I handle the Chinese, and the full scope note. About This Book. It's one page, and it dates my own lineage, the same way this chapter dates everybody else's.

I'm not a historian, and I'm not a translator. The classical readings here lean on the scholarly translations below, and practitioners from other streams will read some of these passages differently.

Zachary Lui, R.Ac. Registered Acupuncturist, College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario. The reading, ritual, correspondence and teaching work described on this page is not provided under that registration and is not health care.

The Secret Menu Index. One page. Everything the standardized curriculum dropped, renamed, or de-framed, and where each piece went. Free, by email. Get it here.

The apparatus for this chapter. The twentieth-century history is with chapter one; the nine operations, the character work and Zhang Congzheng's 《儒門事親》 are with chapter two.

On the character 邪. Go compare them yourself. Unschuld's translations render it "evil qi," Nigel Wiseman and Feng Ye's A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine (Paradigm, 1998), which standardizes it as "evil," and Sivin's Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China (University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1987), which uses "heteropathic" to avoid both. The disagreement, that's the evidence. And one more rendering, because it's the load-bearing one and it isn't in the list above. "Pathogenic factor" has a date and an address. It gets fixed for English readers by Cheng Xinnong's Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1987), the state-sanctioned teaching text, which uses it throughout. And the World Health Organization's International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region (2007) doesn't endorse it as the headword: at entry 1.6.3 it standardises 邪, 邪氣 and 病邪 as "pathogen," with "pathogenic factor" and "pathogenic qi" listed only as alternates. So that's four renderings and a standards body, and none of them agrees with the others. And Sivin is where the materialist-reframing argument comes from, in the narrow form I use it: his study of the 1972 Revised Outline shows how much correlative reasoning is still carrying the load under the materialist presentation. He reads that differently than I do. Chase him anyway.

On the ritual department and when it closed. Everything in that section traces back to one scholar. 林富士 Lin Fu-shih,〈中國傳統醫學社群對於「祝由」療法的評價與態度──從隋唐到清代〉, "The Chinese Medical Community's Evaluation of and Attitude Toward Zhuyou Therapy, from the Sui and Tang to the Qing,"《新史學》New History 31.2 (2020), and the posthumous book-length version,《從正統到異端：祝由科的歷史》, From Orthodoxy to Heterodoxy: A History of the Zhuyou Department (三民書局 Sanmin, 2024). This is where the 咒禁 spell-and-interdiction to 書禁 written-interdiction to 祝由 incantation-therapy continuity comes from, where 1571 comes from, and where the finding that most medical histories misdate it comes from. Lin's central finding is the one that matters most here: across a millennium the Chinese medical community's attitude toward zhuyou was broadly affirmative, and the hostile literature appears only after the abolition. He also finds the abolition had little to do with any conflict with orthodox medicine, and that the practice carried on regardless of the roster. Sixty-four peer-reviewed pages, by a specialist with no stake in my argument. Ying Zhang, "Combating Illness-Causing Demons in the Home," Late Imperial China 39.2 (2018), has the printed evidence for the carrying on. 1571 is Lin's, off 《大明會典》, the Collected Statutes of the Ming. Why I count the talismans as licensed too. The honest objection first. The Tang job description doesn't say 符. 《唐六典》 gives the 咒禁博士, the professor of incantation and interdiction, as teaching 咒禁 to expel malignant spectres, and glosses the craft with five methods: 存思 interior visualization, 禹步 the pace of Yu, 營目 eye-fixing, 掌訣 palm-formulas and 手印 mudras. All of that is body and mind, and not one of it is a written object. Sun Simiao's own preface separates them as well, listing 禁咒 and 符印, interdiction-and-incantation and talismans-and-seals, as two of five emergency arts. So a specialist can tell you the Tang licence covered speech and gesture, and they'd have the text on their side. I haven't had 《唐六典》卷十四 in front of me in print, and I'm taking that gloss from the secondary literature. Here's why I still count two. The book that survives from inside that world is Sun Simiao's 禁經, in 《千金翼方》卷二十九 and 三十, and the oath a student swears in 受禁法第二 is 「弟子某甲受持符禁之法」, the method of talisman-and-interdiction. Not incantation. Talisman. And the contents match the oath: 朱書此符, writing the talisman in cinnabar; 桃符一板...朱書板, a peach-wood talisman board written in cinnabar carrying the reign date and the demon's own name; 朱書帛素, writing on plain silk; 畫地作鬼字, drawing the ghost graph on the ground. Charmed water sits in there too, in 解穢禁水. Then the Song stopped making anybody infer it. The thirteen-department roster of 熙寧九年, 1076, ends with 書禁, written interdiction, and a department name is not an inference. The spirit-summoning is in the same book, in 咒童子令說鬼姓字第二十二, incanting over a child so the ghost states its own name. One department, both operations. Hold me to the Tang alone and I'll concede the seat and keep the Song.

The dating apparatus, for anybody checking the joins.

The Song exam window. 《太醫局諸科程文格》, Model Examination Papers of the Imperial Medical Bureau, gathered by 何大任 He Daren, 成安大夫特差判太醫局, whose preface is dated 嘉定五年仲秋朔旦, the first day of the eighth month of 1212, with a 原牒 of the tenth month of the same year asking leave to print papers from the Bureau's thirteen specialties as models for candidates outside the capital. The text anybody reads now is a Qianlong reconstruction: the Siku editors assembled it out of the 永樂大典 and submitted it in the ninth month of 乾隆四十六年, 1781, arranging what they recovered into nine juan. 墨義 9, 脈義 6, 大義 37, 論方 8, 假令 18, 運氣 9. Eighty-seven answers, and they are anthology totals across multiple sittings and specialties, not one examination paper. Two more things you should have. The Siku 提要 says the editors did not know who had gathered the collection, 其裒為一集不知何人所編, so the attribution to He Daren rests on the preface and the memorandum, which come down outside the Siku recension. And for the load on one candidate, use the Chongning curriculum the same 提要 quotes out of the 宋史: 次塲方脈及臨證運氣各二道, two 運氣 questions in the second session, with two more for the needling and sore streams. That per-candidate figure is stronger ground than an anthology total, and it's the one the body uses. The 嘉祐 Jiayou-era promulgation of the 1050s and 60s, and Huizong writing 運氣 into the state compendium, both sit earlier and both are inference rather than examination text.

The Yuan roster. It carries 祝由 incantation therapy at position twelve, and a separate 禁科, the interdiction department, at thirteen. So the ritual work sits in two seats, and not one. Whether the Sui-Tang 咒禁 incantation-and-interdiction split into those two, or whether they had separate ancestries, is unsettled in the literature. The lineage is Lin's; the seat-count is open. And a roster is not the imperial examination, it's a bureau certifying its own staff, so when I say the state examined this, I mean the medical bureau, not that a man sat the 科舉, the imperial civil service examination, in exorcism.

The 1822 strike. The Qing removal of the acupuncture department from the Imperial Academy of Medicine is conventionally dated 1822, on secondary sources. The statute itself is where to go.

Next: The Magick Was Never the Add-On