by Shifu Lindsey Wei
What distinguishes Daoist Medicine from what we know as Traditional Chinese Medicine? It is the ritual empowerment and worldview.
Daoist Medicine maintains a worldview that believes there are unseen influences affecting our health. The methods of talisman writing, incantation and prayer are a special language to communicate with those unseen influences. The practitioner is the bridge or communicator between worlds of form and formless, celestial and terrestrial.
Through sincerity and devotion, the practitioner distills a drop of golden light. This light is captured on paper in celestial language through the writing of a symbol. This talisman becomes the medicine, like an herb or a needle.
Daoist medicine relies on the cultivation level of the healer (their biomagnetic field) I and their connectivity to higher dimensions, thereby making it possible to distill this yang substance of “light.”
In Daoism, it is believed that every injury and ailment is a manifestation of karma. Karma is action and reaction, gan ying. Every action stems from the tip of a thought. Our thoughts, actions, and the way we act and the things we say all contribute to our karma and energetic field.
Inherited burden from ancestors is included, as we are a continuation of a genetic pattern. At the core of Daoist Medicine diagnostics is asking the patient, “Why do you think you are sick?” This brings up the story or belief that is linked to the ailment, the hidden cause. In a petition to remove the cause, the healer may need to ask the patient to recall the exact day, month, and year of the moment they began experiencing symptoms.
In the Chinese medical corpus, ritual healing largely fell under the rubric of zhuyou 祝由 to uncover and expel the unknown, imperceptible, and occult causes of illness. Often dealing with uncertain or incurable cases, zhuyou remained at the cutting edge of contemporary medicine. For a rising medical elite after the Northern Song, zhuyou was the branch of medicine to flexibly incorporate and critique the variety of ritual therapies into orthodox practice. Zhuyou employed prayer, incantations, talismans, gestures, and drugs in a nuanced clinical encounter to reveal the hidden root of disorder ranging from a blockage of Qi, spirit possession, emotional imbalance, or loss of virtue. These rituals opened an imaginative space for therapeutic play where patients and healers could use spiritual proxies and props to address difficult emotions or issues that were often the hidden cause of affliction. The development of zhuyou also reflected the changing role of ritual in the history of Chinese medicine and the exchanges among physicians, Daoist priests, and other ritual healers. The significance of ritual in Chinese medical history has largely remained unclear as most editions of medical classics republished since the early twentieth century excise relevant chapters and zhuyou manuscripts, until recently, were uncatalogued.
— Philip S. Cho, in “Healing and Ritual Imagination in Chinese Medicine: The Multiple Interpretations of Zhuyou”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43686801
Zhuyou, 祝由, has been translated as “exorcizing the cause,” “incantations for removal,” “to invoke the [demonic] origin [of illness],” and “to invoke the origin.”
Li Shi Fu once said, “With so many methods to heal, shouldn’t there be no illness that cannot be healed? And yet, there are so many mysterious ailments! This is due to human thought and action.”
A Daoist promise is to only heal those who you have the destiny to heal. Those who have the heavenly will and heavenly timing. When you are a clinical practitioner, you don’t have this choice anymore — you serve everyone, anytime of day, destiny or not.
There is also the promise to only heal those who are “begging” to be healed — or if unconscious, a family member can be in the state of begging. Only in this state can a miraculous healing occur. Only in this state is the patient ready to heal, and then you’re halfway if not almost entirely there.
The Daoist healer also has an empty mind, unattached to outcome. As Chapter 5 of Dao De Jing says,
Heaven and earth are not benevolent, they take the 10,000 things as straw dogs (trans. Assandri).
The ultimate compassion is the sun rising each day. When we are brought to our knees through hardship and suffering, or when encountering death, we know and understand the sacredness of the sun rising and setting. The most potent thing to be grateful for is life itself — how do we live without the sun, the air, the water? Therefore, this is what nourishes us. But the sun does not rise because it cares for us, it is simply following its nature.
Therefore, the state of mind of the healer has to be disinterested in the outcome, being “healed.” The healer simply continues with their nature, and if a healing is the result, then so be it. We can’t be “trying” to fix while healing.
I remember hearing from many who joined university to become acupuncturists, that the original wanting to study acupuncture was based in a seeking for a medicine that had intersections with spirituality and the unknown. They were always disappointed to find in university a medicine that no longer had that “magic” and was now standardized in a similar way to western medical science.
After years of accepting the established modern version of Chinese Medicine, has that original wanting for the unknown been eclipsed? Is there even a way to integrate this into the mainstream? It has been known as the mi jue 秘诀, the secret arts, and maybe it must stay that way, on the fringe, on the edge of society, reserved for those who have put in years of cultivation and refinement of self?
Touching the sacred is an endangered place within us, no different than what we talk about in the transition into “Qigong” during and after the cultural revolution, where religious notions were extracted from culture. The same cultural revolution happened for us “westerners” somewhere along the line, as well.
We were brainwashed to think that faith was the ultimate brainwash and was dangerous — we could “lose ourselves” in it. But what did we replace that story myth with? A world where nothing is animate, nothing has spirit, and that which is mysterious has no space to be real?
Blind faith, without wisdom, is of course, a dangerous thing. Wisdom within faith is called “discernment,” and this can be gained only through experience, trial, and error.
Self responsibility, having agency in one’s choices, should not be renounced with religion. It is also wrong to think that if you believe in a higher power, and pray to the gods, that nothing bad will ever happen to you. On the contrary, possibly more bad things will happen to you, because you are here to grow and to learn. To elevate, sublimate, transform.
How can you transform if not put through pressure tests? How do you respond? What are your true intentions? Are you sincere, honest, authentic, compassionate?
In our Wudang lineage, a healer must have a ferocity and a strength in physical form, a fortitude and clarity. If some healings are like exorcistic battles, you can see why the healer would need such prowess, power, and command. Courage, awareness, stillness under pressure, the ability to eat bitter, and be a healer but also a protector.
Talismans are either curative or protective. To heal is to exactly fight demons, internal and external forces — only no one can see this, it is in the formless realm. Why are so many Daoist deities wielding swords? Not because they were fighting off bandits, no. It is a symbol of their healing power. A symbol of the thunder of heaven.
I apprenticed with Li Shi Fu, issuing talismans, empowering water, using fire healing, guan zi, gua sha, pai da, prescribing dao yin, and prescribing herbs. He would take us on walks in the mountain forests and cliffs and we would harvest the wild herbs, just like Tao Shi Fu taught Li Shi Fu when he carried her on his back because she could not walk at her old age.
Sometimes Li Shi Fu prescribes simply changing the environment, changing habits, changing thoughts. Sweep the temple, clean the altar, offer incense. Gather the herbs, brew them over the fire, drink them. Wake up and recite scripture, practice gongfu.
My personal journey as a healer is to heal through teaching. Ultimately the goal is to empower the person to heal themselves. Only the healing which you create yourself is long lasting. Others can help and assist but that is borrowed power.
It is my mission to create space and preserve the practices. The practice itself is what heals. The landscape heals — it is the ultimate healer, so much older and grander than a single person. A temple even, it lives beyond one single life, like a forest, a mountain. To tend to these places is my passion, my method.
In contemplation of what is illness and disease and how do we heal, I leave the reader with a quote from The Xin Yin Miao Jing (Heart Seal Wondrous Scripture).
上药三品
shang yao san pin
The high medicine has three qualities
神与炁精
shen yu qi jing
Shen, Qi and Jing
Lindsey shares how to nourish your life with Wudang Qigong in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.
Lindsey Wei is a 24th-generation lay disciple of the Chun Yang Sect of Wudang Daoism. She trained in Traditional Chinese Gong Fu at a remote mountain temple in the Wudang Mountains, Hubei Province, and in China under her master Li Xing De for more than nine years before returning to the U.S. in 2010 to start her martial arts teaching career. She is a practitioner of Tai Ji Quan, Qigong, Ba Gua, and Double Edge Straight Sword (Jian), as well as other weapons arts.
I experience being humbled by your teachings, Lindsey. Many blessings to you.
The tension between formalized TCM and Daoist ritual healing really captures something lost in modern standardization. That idea about healing only occuring when the patient is 'begging' to be healed - it reframes agency in a way thats different from both biomedical and mainstream alternative approaches. I've noticed in my own health journey how that readiness to change actually mattersmore than the intervention itself. The formless realm part about wielding swords as symbols of healing power is pretty interesting too - never thought about those deity images that way before.