Studying TCM: You Must Both Understand and Memorize

Nowadays, as I study and practice medicine, patients often joke with me that they would rather meet me as a writer than as a doctor. They are surprised that someone who studied medicine can write so fluently, and some hope I will teach them writing. On this ability I really need not be falsely modest, but this foundation was built over thirty years and cannot be taught. When I was in middle school, taught by my respected mentor Li Lixin, I would practice writing for five or six hours a day to produce a piece that met his expectations; when what I wrote was not good, I felt I had let him down. The place where I held the pen became deformed from the pressure and is still misshapen today. Actually, back then not only my writing was trained—because I studied so hard, I came first in every subject. I read many medical books, and in the articles of veteran physician Xiong Jibai I found the feeling of a soulmate meeting a kindred spirit. He said: to study medicine you must endure great hardship; you must be both clever and diligent, memorize the medical classics thoroughly, and add decades of clinical practice before you can become an excellent physician. How true these words are—they are by no means false! This should be our highest requirement of ourselves as medical students.

My older brother had a photographic memory as a child and was much cleverer than I, but now he does not remember as much as I do, and at my age I am still memorizing texts. When I was seven, my grandmother—an devout Buddhist who collected hand-copied sutras from everywhere and recited them herself—coaxed and pressured me to read various Buddhist sutras aloud with her. As soon as I could use a dictionary, she had me teach her to chant. The old lady had a poor memory; often I had already memorized a passage while she could not yet recite it smoothly. This gave me a solid foundation in Buddhist studies and cultivated a good habit of memorization. From the age of four, I had my son memorize things: Buddhist sutras, the Four Books and Five Classics, and selected passages of various classics. I would explain them to him and then, once he was familiar, have him explain them back to me. Of course, what he memorized was of no use for exams or school advancement. His mother always worried his Chinese would be poor, but I was not worried at all. Confucius said he did not set his mind on learning until he was fifteen. Children may all love to play when young, but once the foundation is laid, when the child grows up and becomes interested in scholarship, they will astonish everyone. I am a science-and-engineering person, but, not modestly, more than ninety percent of liberal-arts students cannot match my reading volume or writing ability.

To study TCM you absolutely must memorize texts. When I first met my students and their parents, I told them: to study medicine you must lay a solid foundation, and five words matter most—"understand and memorize." On the spot I recited long passages of classics to them, and I required their children to be able to recite to my level, or even surpass me. When learning other knowledge you may understand without memorizing, but not in medicine; in medicine you must both understand and memorize. Without this perseverance and ability, do not study medicine. Xiong Jibai said he did not learn much in his whole life; he simply memorized a few books thoroughly, and so his clinical results were very high—that is the truth. If you cannot memorize texts, you cannot be a good TCM physician.

A fellow once asked me whether I was a Jingfang (classical-formula) school doctor. I said I was not; he looked at me with disdain, proud of being a Jingfang adherent. So I proposed that we recite the Shanghan Lun and Jingui Yaolue together. I recited whole treatises without a single missed or wrong character; when it came to him, he stammered, could not get through a few lines, and slunk away. Once, when I was at Longquan Monastery, a Buddhist believer thought my understanding of Buddhism was too superficial, so I likewise proposed reciting sutras; I chose several and recited long passages to him, then asked him to recite, but he could not recite a single line. Of course, my ability to memorize owes mainly to my good memory and to studying far more hours than most people. Never, after learning only a smattering, call yourself a follower of some school or lineage; in fact you may not even understand the very thing you claim to follow—by what right do you then look down on other schools?