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.

Every month we hold a primordial Daoist luck ritual, and every month it makes luck talismans and consecrates them. My teacher Andrieh Vitimus and I run it together. I'm the priest, and he's the shaman, the bridge to the spirits. Everyone chants the luck guardian's name over the altar and imagines the guardian itself. And the people in the room get graced with luck themselves, directly, alongside the talismans.

For about a thousand years the Chinese state kept a line of departments where those two sat, the talismans and the calling of spirits.

So chapter one put a date on your curriculum, seventy-five on the policy, seventy on the version you were taught. Now I put dates on the eight. Divination, sympathetic magic, talismans, energy work, gnosis, illumination, banishing, and the calling of spirits. And they didn't arrive together, not even close. They came in over different centuries, from different directions. There was never a morning in the Han dynasty, about two thousand years ago, when somebody walked in and switched them all on at once. So if somebody tells you a system has to switch on all at once to count, that's not how anything old gets built. London grew street by street over a thousand years, and nobody says it isn't a real city.

Dates on the eight

The ritual department, and the day it closed

I'll start with the ritual department. It sat inside the state medical bureaucracy for about a thousand years, and it kept getting renamed as the dynasties turned over. Three names, one department. Lin Fu-shih spent a career on this, and he traces it as one line, not three similar things. It ran for longer than your profession has had a college. The names are in the reading list for you.

It ended in 1571. Struck off the roster, alongside the massage department. The date itself is standard, it's in the ordinary reference books, 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 most of the medical histories you'd actually read skip the abolition or get the date wrong. Want the actual statute? The Collected Statutes of the Great Ming.

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. The point-by-the-clock methods, the ones 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. What got examined is the five periods and six qi, the doctrine that reads the year off the calendar. It got into the Su Wen in the eighth century and then, basically, became a tested subject in the Song medical bureau. And the receipt for that is a book. A book of model exam papers from the bureau. He Daren put it together inside the bureau, and his preface is dated 1212. Later that year he asks to get the papers printed, so candidates out in the provinces know the standard. Pulse, formulas, case questions, and periods and qi, right there on the paper. And how many did one man face? Under the bureau's own rules, two questions on periods and qi, every stream, needlers included. Two questions on a calendrical forecast, right? Picture your own licensing exam 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 is a reconstruction, and not He Daren's book as he issued it. Qing editors pieced it back together in 1781 out of an imperial encyclopedia, eighty-seven answers from more than one sitting. Not one man's paper. Which is why I gave you the bureau's rule for the count instead.

So that's one of the eight. Where were the rest of them sitting? Two of them were in that line of departments I just closed, and they sat in it together, the calling of spirits and the writing of objects that bind. You want the state's own word for it? By 1212 the Song bureau's own head was counting its departments, thirteen of them, general medicine first and written interdiction last, and written interdiction is short for talisman-writing and spell-interdiction. 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.

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 governing the spirit (治神), and that's Su Wen 25, the line you met in chapter two. For needling to be real, first govern the spirit. And the energy work is older than the canon, on chapter two's jade cylinder, around 380 BCE. And the gnosis, as the state that same chapter tells you to be in before the needle goes in. All three are still in your training, right, the mapping as the transport points, the energy work as an elective, and the gnosis 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. Same five chapter two said you can't pull out of the clinical act. That's your eight, and you can audit every line of it.

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.

Why reading the year is divination

The tradition filed periods and qi under medicine. It taught it as medicine and examined it as medicine. Here's how I read it. What matters is what the operation does, whatever they filed it under. Reading a year off a stem-and-branch cycle to predict what will sicken people is the same operation, whatever shelf it was catalogued on. Run it through the test from chapter two. Can you walk the line from a stem-and-branch year back to a fever in a village? There's no line to walk, and that's what puts it on the list.

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. The bureau's rules put periods and qi on the exam a century earlier, you know, but those reach us as a summary of a curriculum. A dated preface is paper you can hold, so that's where I start. 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 a dated preface on the state's own exam papers for one of these, and the last hard receipt for another being licensed by it.

1571 didn't stop anybody. That's Lin again. Physicians were still defending incantation therapy into the Qing. Centuries of people in your job, arguing for the thing your program doesn't mention. 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 down to my own teachers. So what did 1571 actually take away? The licence.

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. I'd call that a bigger hit to the machinery than 1571 was, and you'll hear about it even less. The date's in the reading list. Yu Yunxiu's motion in 1929 isn't on this list, because it never became law. Then the 1950s, which didn't touch a licence at all. Why would they? There was nothing left to revoke by then, and the only thing anybody could still rewrite was the curriculum. So they rewrote the curriculum.

So who's who. The line down to 1571 is Lin's. The twentieth century is chapter one's historians, Kim Taylor, Bridie Andrews, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei and Miriam Gross. I'm laying the two on one timeline. Lin's sources are below, theirs are in chapter one's.

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. Same points, different universe described around them.

So the swap left the reasoning standing and changed what the reasoning was for. Inside that swap there are three layers. The vocabulary, which changed completely. The structure of the operation, which didn't. And what the operation asks of you, which is the one this section is about.

I lean on Nathan Sivin here, the historian of Chinese science. 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 underneath the materialist presentation. He used it to measure the change. I use it to measure what kept running. Read him and decide for yourself.

So say Liver qi stagnation, needle Taichong (Liver 3). What did you just run? A correspondence operation. And the structure runs whether or not you've got a name for it, 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. And nobody in it would call the day's business a rite. Your clinic's the same. You're standing inside an older machine that never stopped running. Strip out every talisman, and you've still got a resonance engine sitting there, 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. 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.

Chapter one said their textbooks went on to render 邪 (xié, evil) as "pathogenic factor." Here's that character, in 邪氣 (xiéqì, evil qi). That rendering 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 the term for driving off evil spirits (驅邪). And take the graph apart before you let me lean on it, because it pays. The Shuowen, the standard character dictionary, files it under a place name in Shandong, so the moral sense rides on it as a loan. Your textbook's most technical-sounding word sits on a graph the dictionary reads as a postcode. Unschuld renders it "evil qi." Wiseman's dictionary makes it "evil." Sivin uses "heteropathic," to get the moral charge out of it. Three serious translators. Two positions. 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 evil qi as well, seasons and winds and depletion, paired against upright qi (正氣). So it isn't demons all the way down, and I'm not saying it is. What never got rebuilt is the moral sense underneath it. 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.

The techniques are all still there, on paper, right? The reasoning survived the swap too, that's the Taichong point. What got cut was what the old frame required of the person running them. Somebody driving a spirit out and somebody releasing a pathogenic factor are running exactly the same structure, and they are not asking the same thing of themselves while they run it. The hand is identical. 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.

That's stronger than the polite version people reach for when they're trying to be generous to the tradition, a medicine with some magic attached. It's stronger than the nostalgic one too, a medicine that used to have magic and lost it.

Six of the eight 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. Even the formula names give it away. White Tiger Decoction (白虎湯) is the textbook's heat-clearing formula, and the White Tiger, in the myth, is the one that culls. The beast of metal, it cuts, claws out in the mountains of the west, in autumn, the cutting season. Cheng Wuji said so back in the twelfth century, the White Tiger is the metal spirit of the west. And the medicine 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 every "clear" and "drain" you charted this week. That's six in the medicine. Chapter two's five and a half is your clinic.

The other two are past tense in one specific way, inside standardized TCM. For centuries it also wrote talismans and called spirits out by name and worked with them, in a line of departments the state licensed and paid for. Both are still on the page, side by side in Sun Simiao's Book of Interdiction (禁經), inside a formulary that's still in print, cinnabar, peach wood and all. Nobody in TCM does either one now. They lost their operator there. They still live on in Daoist and Buddhist Chinese medicine, off the state curriculum, where talismans are still written and spirits are evoked to bless the treatment items and products. The licence is what ended. The practice didn't, and you watched both at the top of this chapter. Every month there's a priest and a shaman in those two seats, and the talismans get consecrated, outside TCM entirely. The spirit work gets chapter seven, and that's where I stop being careful about it. So the identity claim, it's about the six that never stopped. The other two are the outside witness for the six. A state that kept a line of departments for them, staffed and funded, from the Sui into the Ming, look, that state was not confused about what kind of system it was licensing.

And let me be 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. It's the one in About This Book, and it holds 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. 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. A system can be magick and effective. It can be magick and inert. Which one it is isn't decided by what we call it.

Two eyes in one face

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 the book with the number. 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 gets deep, and that's the first 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. Apprenticed to my teachers since 2008, 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 judgement about reading the medicine, and it stops there. Plenty of people practise this medicine with one eye shut and practise it well, 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. Closing that gap is the offer, and you can check it yourself, on your own last ten charts. Pull them, and on a separate sheet, next to each treatment principle, write which of the eight it runs. And with both eyes open you've got more to work with. When one frame runs out of moves, the other one still has some, another way to read what's in front of you, another question to ask. That's a claim about your options. What any option does for a patient is the fence question, and it stays on the other side of the fence. 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: 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. And Sun Simiao wrote the incantation into the same book as the prescription. Receipts included. Get the free Index.

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 Secret Menu. The paid tier of this book. 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. Michel Strickmann, in Chinese Magical Medicine, reconstructed what the operators did from the texts. This goes the other direction, from somebody doing it. The first class ran on September 28, on yin and yang, and every member gets it. It's open, $75 CAD a month + tax. That rate is for the first 20 members, and it never goes up for you while you stay in. After 20, it goes up for people who come after that. 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.

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.

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 patient or client 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 cover, 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.

The classical readings here follow the translations named below; where none is named, the rendering is mine. Practitioners from other streams read some of these passages differently.

Zachary Lui, Daoist priest by transmission, Mao Shan Shangqing (茅山上清). The ritual, talismanic and spirit work and the teaching described on this page are not health care.