The text of the Yellow Emperor is the Bible of Eastern medicine and the one that gives the substance behind this text is the I-King, the book of transformations that dates back almost 4000 years of existence. The book of transformations is vast in its applications, it is not limited only to medicine, but also in the divining oracle and plenty of other disciplines including sciences such as mathematics, chemistry and physics.
But returning to the text of Yellow Emperor. There are two versions that exist, one that was made by Ohbiyo who put importance on cosmology and the other one who is Yojiyozen who elaborated each chapter of this text very well. Both existed during the time of the Tang Dynasty of the 7th century AD. In Yojiyozen’s version, it starts with the difficulty of transmitting all this knowledge of the learned by the written word or simply leaving it to the transmission of speech as in the Zen Buddhism, Isshin Denshin (transmission of the soul to the other soul).
He had taken the example of Lord Kanko who was reading the text of the ancient sage, he had the carpenter who worked making the trolley in the basement that went upstairs to ask his lord:
« My lord, that do you read?”
The lord replied « I read the word of sage »
The carpenter asked his lord « is there a sage present? »
The lord said « No, he is already dead »
The carpenter says « then, this word of wisdom has no validity ».
The lord replied « I read the word of sage »
The carpenter asked his lord « is there a sage present? »
The lord said « No, he is already dead »
The carpenter says « then, this word of wisdom has no validity ».
The lord got angry, saying to him: « Whoever is a simple trolley maker, does not understand the truth of this sage’s word ».
Then the carpenter explained his thought « if the thing is too soft, it becomes too fragile to consolidate, but if it’s too hard, it becomes difficult to be flexible. But if it is neither soft nor hard, one can feel in his hands, but his mind could not capture the subtlety of this sensation. We could not express this sensation by word. I have tried to pass on my knowledge to my child for 70 years, but I can not always transmit things that are extremely difficult to transmit by word”.
The story of this text is that we could not transmit certain things only in writing, without using the text, we could not transmit anything for a generation to understand what was the important subject of debate. Traditional Oriental medicine has always tried to maintain a delicate balance between the theory and practice of passing on their knowledge and letting each therapist make their own conclusion with his personal experiences while respecting the knowledge of traditional knowledge. This is called Onkochishin.