Pacific College of Oriental Medicine Alumni

Whatsoever attack comes from a might foe, Four ounces' strength thwarts a thousand-cattle blow.

How do traditions get passed down? Whether taught via textbooks, essays, lectures, or demonstrations, every field of knowledge has ways of being transmitted from generation to generation. One method for this used in old China that may surprise modern Westerners was the pervasive use of poetry.

While China has one of the most lengthy continuous literary traditions in the world-approximately three millennia-it wasn't until universal education was promoted in the 1900's that reading and writing became more wide-spread. The illiterate and semiliterate sectors or Chinese society prior to the twentieth century were possibly as much as eighty to ninety percent of the population.

In pre-twentieth century China, people whose reading skills were limited or nonexistent relied on a number of strategies to communicate about business, work, or learning. Those who were literate-letter-writers, sign-makers, calligraphers, fortune-tellers, and others-had marketplace booths where they served the public as literate intermediaries. Local and traveling entertainment such as storytelling and operas served as educational vehicles for history and values. Poems memorized by children, such as the "Three Hundred Character Classic" (Sanzijing), were repositories of Chinese culture and morals, and served to help build reading and writing skills.

Various arts, crafts, and trades also used specific tactics to transmit necessary knowledge. Oral and written literature were commonly utilized, depending on the literacy of those involved. In some cases written works were simply recordings of oral teachings. In other cases, they consisted of original written material.

Accompanying the hands-on aspects of apprenticeship, the oral tradition took the form of poems, ditties, sayings, and mnemonic devices. An apprentice would memorize poems that contained common knowledge, or perhaps poetically set "secrets" the master might bestow upon him. A master might also entrust an apprentice with family or lineage manuscripts.

The oral poems that were used were called jue or gejue (secret or knack), or ge (song or chant). I will refer to these as "ditties," as we don't have an exactly parallel tradition in English. The ditties functioned as verbal and mental reference works, containing theory, applications, practices, admonitions, and techniques.

The ditties were light poems that were simply structured, and had four, five, or seven characters per line with fairly predictable rhymes and tone schemes. One reason this style or poem was popular is that the Chinese language is so rich with rhymes, rhythms, and tonal patterns. It is a simple matter to create poems with easily memorized vocabulary utilizing these simple structures and compositional "rules." As with any folk tradition, changes crept into the material as it was passed around, which we can now use as evidence of its oral origins.

Taijiquan Ditties

A taijiquan ditty might list "key words" or "secrets' that were originally mnemonics for specific important topics to be elaborated on in person by the master. Other ditties serve to remind how sequences of moves follow one another and give reminders of the martial applications of the moves. An example of the latter is found in Yang family material. The Chinese is included here so readers can get a sense of the original sounds; English speakers will recognize the cadence as being the same as "twinkle, little star" (the q is pronounced ch, the x as sh, zh as j, and z as ds):

Taijiquan fa miao wu qiong,
peng lu ji an quewei sheng.
Xie zou danbian xiongtang zhan,
hui shen tishou ba zhao feng.

The marvels of taijiquan are infinite;
Ward-off, Roll-back, Press, and Push
are born of Grasp Sparrow's Tail
Step out on an angle and execute
Single Whip to strike the opponent's chest;
Turn the body and perform Raise Hands to seal his thrust.

Medical Ditties

Chinese medicine, with its huge quantity of material to be memorized, made extensive use of these poetic capabilities of the Chinese language. Medical practitioners of all backgrounds and levels of literacy learned hundreds of ditties that catalogued acupuncture point names and locations, functions, symptomatology, and needling techniques. Students still memorize and use these old ditties, which are reprinted in exam preparation books.

The Great Compendium of Acupuncture and Moxibustion from 1601 is a treasure trove of these medical ditties. In the following example, the acupuncture points for "difficult" illnesses are laid out within a rhyming, seven-character-per-line format. This particular stanza prescribes points for what Western medicine would call a stroke:

Four limbs flaccid,
attacked by evil wind,
Eyes rough, difficult to open,
attacked by diseases,
Spirit confused, tired, not speaking,
Fengch and Hegu one may then needle.

Translation of these ditties, as with any poetry, is difficult, as the force of the original rhythm, rhyme, and culturally imbedded meanings are usually lost. This translation of a section of a Chen Family taijiquan poem attempts this arduous task:

To hook, ward off, corner, and seize, all people do, but those skilful in dodges are surprises are who? Pretending to lose and to flee is note a defeat, With a counteraction, the enemy will be beat.

In our modern world, we take literacy for granted. Yet we, too, supplement the hands-on work done with teachers, just with the technologies of our own time: photographs, books, photocopies, posters, videos, computers, and such. Perhaps, though, for a change of pace, we should take a look back to the time-worn art of poetry, an art that has its own internal grace, logic, history, power, and uses.