The Peach and Plum Trees Speak Not, Yet a Path Forms Beneath Them

I have long admired an old TCM physician named Li Zhijian. Apart from me, probably no one on the internet mentions him. He is nearly a hundred years old; though frail with age, he still diagnoses and treats people. He should never have done any publicity in his life, nor worked in any large hospital; relying only on word of mouth, yet his doors were always full of patients.

His patients were mostly rural folk, coming from many provinces including Jiangxi, Hubei and Anhui. I admire him for his lifelong consummate skill, lofty medical ethics, clean hands, lack of bombast, and complete absence of commercialization - relying only on patients' word of mouth, yet never having a moment's leisure.

Nowadays, whenever I feel myself getting a little impetuous on the internet, thinking of him makes me feel deeply ashamed. A good doctor should be like him: relentlessly refining his skill while truly embodying the heart of a parent toward the sick, rather than courting publicity through loud advertising. From my own limited life experience, old Dr. Li Zhijian counts as one of the most effective TCM physicians; though he treated my mother, he could not cure her.

There is an old Chinese saying: the peach and plum trees speak not, yet a path forms beneath them. Applied to a doctor, it could not be more apt. When Zhao Benshan advertised for an anorectal hospital, he shouted, "Don't watch the ad, watch the efficacy" - which was itself an advertisement. But a folk master like old Dr. Li Zhijian has truly put that advertising slogan into practice.

The path Dr. Li Zhijian walked is the path I too will walk in this life. Perhaps one day I will return to the countryside; between farming and study, I will hang up my pot and save the world, far from all glamour. In that way, perhaps I shall truly have learned the essence of TCM's "spirit internally guarded."