Cosmological Origins of the Obverse-Reverse Zang Fu Pairing in Chinese Medicine

Abstract

Most of the rich philosophical and scientific concepts which nurtured the Chinese thought we know today, were developed during the troubled final end of the era before ours, from V to II centuries. After reading reputed sinologists’ work on the cosmological origin and subsequent evolution of the Chinese concept of parallelism-pairing in poetry, literature, mathematic and other disciplines and since it is a tradition that all branches of knowledge in China are based on the development of those initiatory thoughts, the author asked herself if such knowing on the cosmological genesis of the parallelism concept could also be applied to Chinese medicine, science that describes its coupled structures and functions in pairs, simply based on yinyang, matrix of all pairings. Therefore, this paper proposes to apply those foundations, to explain the pairing of dynamisms in medicine. This work starts out from the oracular inscriptions in ancient times, cosmological basis of these ideas and their applications to Chinese literature and from there translates this approach to the study of the pairings described by Chinese medicine, and thanks to which (qi xue) blood-energy circulation occurs in human beings. Organic and functional pairs described by Chinese medicine are the basic element to understand the concept of health and disease, and this paper is about the cosmological roots of those pairings, the cosmic resonance influence and the numerology influence in them, and the whole is illustrated both through the description of the (obverse-reverse) biao li pair, different from (inside-outside) nei wai, and the functional relationship between these two couples.