I have been curious lately about the jue yin level. Specifically about how it turns from yin to yang, and more to the point– which yang it opens into. As is often the case when I’m feeling stumped I pull some of the Chinese books that have collected themselves onto my shelf and see if I…
Category Archives: Classic books
Levels and Formulas
Following up on a previous post where we took a look at how Hu Xi-Shu makes sense of the six levels, and how both yin and yang have exterior, interior and pivot levels. In this post we take a glimpse of how he categorizes different formulas based on which level they treat. Categorizing formulas from…
Navigating the levels
If you are regular reader of classicformulas.com then you have a pretty good idea of the value that Dr. Huang places on constitution, formula presentation, illness and the interaction between them. If you have worked with these methods yourself in the clinic, it is likely that it has at times sharpened your clinical eye…
Read Chinese
The back of Richard Goodman’s book says it best “Why not go deeper?” I ran into Rick back in 2005. He was just arriving in Taiwan, I was on my way back to the USA; he rented the penthouse studio that overlooked Eternal Harmony City and the Xin Dian river that I’d been living in…
Paired Herbs
One of the really interesting things about use of the “jing fang” is that the change of a single herb, or even the amount of an herb used, can have a significant impact on the function of the formula. A friend of mine who has shelves full of books concerning the Shang Han Lun once…