Excessive Piety in Faith Represents Only Ignorance and Paranoia
Everything good is ruined by two kinds of people: those who use it to swagger and deceive, and the irrational superstitious. TCM, science, various ideas, and even religious faith are all the same. If a person lacks the spirit of critical inheritance and the ability to think independently, he will easily study anything into a paranoia.
Take TCM, which actually contains a great deal of dross. Yet some die-hard TCM fans are superstitious about TCM to the bone, stubbornly clinging to some of its near-mystical theories. As a TCM practitioner myself, in clinical practice I have met many irrational TCM fans; some deeply fail to understand that we should look at modern medical examination reports, always thinking that TCM should diagnose by pulse alone and should not look at modern reports.
Taking the pulse is indeed important, but to say that pulse diagnosis is more precise than modern medical examination equipment is pure bullshit. The ancients long said: "If the viscera could speak, the doctor's face would turn the color of earth." TCM pulse diagnosis is only a way in which, unable to probe the real state inside the viscera, ancient TCM doctors gathered various signs of the patient through the four examinations—inspection, listening-smelling, inquiry, and palpation—and then judged the patient's condition. This kind of experience is not very reliable, and relying on any one of them alone is even more impossible.
When the late Shanghai master physician Professor Jiang Chunhua was alive, he once planned to carry out scientific research on pulse diagnosis, gathering a group of Shanghai's most famous old TCM doctors to take the pulse of the same group of patients and then independently write down their findings. On comparison, the proportion of matching pulse-diagnosis conclusions was less than one fifth. Professor Jiang Chunhua, a TCM predecessor with very high clinical efficacy in our country, decided, because of this statistic, to give up scientific research on pulse diagnosis and turn to scientific research on tongue diagnosis. Professor Jiang felt pulse diagnosis was too subjective to be worth studying. I believe this seeking-truth-from-facts attitude is the most valuable quality in this TCM predecessor.
If you talk to some die-hard TCM fans about the unreliability of pulse diagnosis, you will encounter a flood of abuse. Others like to make pulse diagnosis sound supernatural, speaking of it as more and more mysterious; it is nothing but self-deception after being fooled by others, or deliberate grandstanding. Let them actually write a prescription and treat disease, and the efficacy is not notably brilliant.
Not only pulse diagnosis: many theories in TCM, and some of the recorded specific methods of treating disease, can only be regarded as conjecture or hypothesis, and part of them are just nonsense. Chinese medicine and pharmacy are a great treasure house, but, as Professor Tu Youyou said, this great treasure house cannot be used just as it is. People today must study Chinese medicine and pharmacy and dig out what is valuable; one still needs to take its essence and discard its dross.
Or take Buddhist ideas such as the six realms of rebirth, the cause and effect of three lifetimes, and the doctrine of karmic reward—these are truly hard to persuade anyone of. Even the greed, anger, delusion, arrogance, and doubt—the human vices that Buddhism, and the Buddha in particular, especially recommended eliminating—I feel the Buddha himself did not fully eliminate. When the Buddha's cousin Devadatta differed from the Buddha on worldview and caused a doctrinal split in the sangha, the Buddha fell out with his cousin and even had Ananda and others go about speaking ill of Devadatta. One can imagine how angry the Buddha was at the time, completely unable to control his emotions.
By comparison, Confucius was far more honest. Confucius said: "There are three things the way of the junzi requires, and I am unable to do them: the benevolent are free of anxiety, the wise are free of perplexity, and the brave are free of fear." Confucius meant that a junzi must meet three standards: the benevolent are free of anxiety, the wise are free of perplexity, and the brave are free of fear; Confucius himself admitted he could not meet these three standards.
The Buddhist scriptures, by contrast, simply exalt the Buddha to the heavens, holding that what the Buddha realized was "unsurpassed, complete, and perfect enlightenment"; complete and perfect enlightenment was not enough for them to brag about, so they had to add "unsurpassed." So we see that many Buddhist believers, after studying the Buddha, hold their tails high, thinking that with this faith they are somebody and can look down on the world.
Of course, in fact the Buddha himself could not possibly have been as self-aggrandizing as the scriptures describe. Idols are all like little girls dressed up by their fans; if ten percent of an idol's historical record is true, that is already good. The Buddha is no exception. Buddhists compiled the scriptures again and again, still compiling them hundreds of years after the Buddha's death; such compilation inevitably added embellishments and glossed over faults. So there is not much in the Buddhist scriptures worth reading. If a person reads the scriptures without discarding the dross, he not only harms himself but also does the Buddha a great injustice.
We Chinese treat science with the same attitude. At first we thought it a flood beast; later we thought it omnipotent. The result is that studying science also turns oneself into a paranoiac. Of course, most people who truly delve deeply into science respect facts. But such people are extremely rare even among science's believers; most science fans end up as scientific superstitious, showing the same ignorance and paranoia.
So now, whatever kind of devout believer, I personally keep a certain distance from him. Such people are easily deceived by swindlers, because they have no judgment of their own; in the end they easily fall into the traps others have set and, plop, dash themselves to death for their faith. Dashing oneself to death is bad enough, but what is annoying is that they never stop trying to assimilate others, always trying to use their so-called wisdom to remake other people into someone like themselves—and that is what is so hard to bear.