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Historical Roots of Chinese Modular Solutions
Throughout millennia, Chinese practitioners have imaginatively attempted to improve upon tradition. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Zhang Zhong Jing, author of the Shang Hun Lun, demonstrated that good formulas are not necessarily mixtures of individual herbs, but can be alliances of smaller and larger groups of herbs – modules – that work well together. Each module embodies specific properties of its own.
Three hundred years after Zhang Zhong Jing, celebrated herbalist Sun Si Miao wrote a commentary emphasizing that traditional formulas should be used flexibly, not dogmatically, also reducing many of them to their modular components. Sun further proposed that a clever practitioner could handle a wide range of disharmonic patterns with a limited repertoire of formulas. He designed 30 formulas, each with a broad sphere of action which, when properly combined, could address an even larger range of disharmonies.
In 1980, after seven years of practicing acupuncture in San Francisco, Efrem Korngold travelled to Kunming to study Chinese herbal theories, returning again to Shanghai in 1984. He then spent two years studying with Fang Feng, a Chinese herbalist who had spent his early life caring for people in the Saigon countryside. Dr. Feng carried a portable repertoire of powdered formulas to be mixed as needed. Fang Feng embodied the creative, pragmatic tradition of the classical herbalists, encouraging Efrem to use traditional knowledge in imaginative ways – not merely to emulate, but to innovate. The concept of a modular system was reinvented while Efrem Korngold and Harriet Beinfield were writing Between Heaven and Earth.
Based on the categories of traditional assessment and interpretation, each module corresponds to a specific aim – tonify Qi, disperse Moisture, purge Heat, strengthen Lung, etcetera. Conceptually elegant and eminently practical, Chinese Modular Solutions preserve, yet simplify the art of Chinese Traditional Herbology.
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