On The View Of Monism Of Essence And Shen In Traditional Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), being deeply rooted in Chinese culture, regards the people asking for treatment as its guiding ideology, in which they are seen as a unity of natural quality and spirit-culture quality, and the concept about unity between essence and shen that man takes essence as form and shen as leader goes through the whole TCM theory. As such, this paper begins with distinguishing the connotation of essence and shen from each other in the sense of TCM, and then proves the concept of monism of essence-shen that essence can transform into qi and shen, while shen can control qi and essence in such two perspectives as accumulating the essence to preserve shen and guarding shen to consolidate essence. Then further focusing on the traditional Chinese culture, I discuss the Daoists’"let things take their own courses" ideology, who, through self-observation and inner-exercise, practice essence into qi and then into shen, namely melt the intangible shen and Tao into the tangible essence and qi, achieving the harmony and freedom of flesh and spirits. Finally, the developing tendency of combining the culture and science is proposed after the discussion of bioelectrical mechanism of moniism of essence-shen from the perspective of modern science, the set-up of a life-model hypothesis of mutual transformation between essence and shen, and the exploration of human’s unity between their material attributes and spirit attributes in the level of material-power-information.