Balance Beams and Jade Tubes

In today’s episode, Brenda Hood and Leo Lok are joining me again to continue the public Pebble in the Cosmic Pond podcast that dropped two weeks ago, about “The Yellow Emperor’s Broken Heart.” We follow Leo’s lead in exploring how we ground ourselves in our bodies and feel into how our reading of a classical passage fits with our clinical practice and experience. Leo introduces two passages in the middle of Lingshu 1 that describe in quite mysterious terms the ideal needling technique. Given that neither of these passages make clear sense in a literal reading, how do we find meaning? Our search takes us from a scale’s balance beam, to understand the term “suspended Yáng,” to jade tubes and forgetting in the exploration of “haphazard.” Ayaaa! How do we choose one or the other option, if two thousand years of commentary tradition can’t make sense of it? This is where we get to the difference between TRANSLATING and READING the classics, and critically look at that poor finger that is all of a sudden no longer pointing at a single moon but perhaps at multiple moons, or the moon as a moving target, or perhaps even the invisible disk that is outlined by the tiny sliver of a newly waxing moon. It turns out, that jade tube used by the pre-Shang people to look for the North Star is more relevant to this conversation than any of us expected when we hit the record button. I hope you can follow us on this journey and find as much joy in it as we did! Stay tuned for this month’s Imperial Tutor scroll for some textual material to support this exploration.Research LinksFree Course: Introduction to Classical Chinese — Translating Chinese MedicineTriple Crown Training Program — Translating Chinese MedicineImperial Tutor membershipAll Courses - Voices of Our Medical Ancestors<br/>