Now fully revised and re-edited, this book begins with the presentation of the liver and gallbladder in Suwen chapter 8 and continues by looking at the five phase resonances of wood and liver as set out in Suwen chapters 2, 4, 5, and 9.

The second part of the book looks at the physiology and functions of the liver, its relationships with qi and blood, with emotions, with digestion and assimilation, with the muscular forces (jin) and with jue yin. All of these explorations are well rooted in textual references and an examination of Chinese characters.

The causes of disease in the liver are then detailed in full, followed by a section on the liver’s functions and related symptomatology. There is a short section on the gallbladder alone, and finally a discussion of the syndromes of the liver and gallbladder.An appendix brings together key texts from the Neijing and a major commentary and gives a brief summary of principal causes of disease, symptoms and syndromes. An index contains all the Chinese characters found in the book along with the main concepts.

Excerpt from The Liver:

Claude Larre: "To understand the relationship between heaven and earth in man we have to understand that which we call the dao. The dao is proper to man, and a man following the dao is a saintly man. But what about the origin of the dao itself? Its origin is in the inscrutable mystery, so there is nothing to search out from heaven. Heaven is heaven, and you have to just say ‘amen’! You have to stop, and if you do not, you are just a Westerner who wants to know the mystery of Chinese thinking, and there is no end to that process. Contemplation brings us closer to the fact that life exists, and all descriptions of life lead you to that point where there is nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard, nothing to be touched. But on the surface of the earth we see the mystery of heaven multiplying itself in the diversity of the 10,000 beings, and not just separate beings but connected beings, and not stable beings but beings under constant change, all of which is registered in the 'Yi jing, the Book of Change'.

"Here we understand that there is a three-fold nature to what we want to know: the mystery, the dao, and the transformations. If you understand transformation you know life as a current, if you understand the dao you know how to conduct yourself, and if you accept the mystery you have to be reverent of what exists, whatever you may call it. This is the Chinese viewpoint, and not only Daoist because Confucius said just the same thing in his commentary on the Book of History, which was about the changes in the situation of his native place, the principality of Lu, and its relationships with other small kingdoms. The dao is not only proper to the Daoist. The dao is the rule you discover and practise, be you Daoist, Confucianist, Legalist, Mohist or Christian. They are all just ways of behaving between heaven and earth, and it is always the same heaven.

"All this is found within a book of medicine. If you just treat people in order to relieve their pains, if you are not able to put them back on the right track in accord with the person they are and the situation they are in, then you are only doing half your work, and maybe you are wasting their time not to speak of your own."

210 x 145mm

159pp

(For this item please quote stock ID 9206)

Related Subject Areas:

TCM Classics      Yellow Emperor