Insights and Updates

Zen Master Hakuin was the restorer of the Rinzai school of Japanese Zen. He practiced all his life in purity, his character luminous and open, and was deeply revered by his followers. Yet he too once suffered a great insult. Near where Hakuin lived there…

Professor Yu Rencun is a renowned Chinese expert in integrated Chinese-Western treatment of tumors. He proposed that deficiency of healthy qi (zheng qi xu) and excess of evil qi (xie qi shi) are important causes of cancer. The internal-deficiency doctrine he advocated has become an…

No achievement comes by luck. Human wisdom develops through day-by-day accumulation, like gathering fur to make a coat. To achieve anything in any field requires investing a great deal of time and energy. Therefore, a person who wants to achieve something in a professional field…

It has been a long time since I did my morning and evening practice. There was a period when, like a proper Buddhist, I would recite sutras morning and evening and repent my transgressions, but the habit did not last. Confucius said, "Reviewing the old…

Sun Bingyan (1920– ) was a native of Shandong, born into three generations of TCM practitioners. He practiced medicine in Korea for more than ten years, returned to China in 1953, and from 1957 devoted himself to the research and treatment of malignant tumors. He…

An old piece, written in 2013. During the Qingming Festival tomb-sweeping visit, I saw in the neighboring village an old tree so broad that five or six people could barely encircle it with outstretched arms. It stirred in me a longing for my maternal grandmother's…

In the book Waike Zhengzhi Quansheng Ji (Complete Collection of Surgery Patterns and Treatment), Wang Hongxu, in treating yong-ju (the swellings and abscesses of old surgery—i.e., what are today called tumors, both benign and malignant), states a principle: "dispersion is esteemed, support-drainage is feared." Previously,…

Since I began studying medicine on my own, I have read many books; a few statements have left a deep impression. The most important one is something Professor Zhao Shaoqin mentioned about how his father, Zhao Wenkui—who had been director of the Imperial Medical Academy…

Whether humanity's current understanding of cancer as a pathology is right or wrong is still hard to judge. Cancer requires countless people to sacrifice their whole lifetimes and energies to research, and the great majority may grow old poring over classics, expending a lifetime of…

Many late-stage patients have reached the point of being too deficient to tolerate tonification; taking tonics actually makes them worse. The first patient I saw, apart from my own mother, was a terminal colorectal cancer patient. At the time, Western medicine gave him only a…