”You are only half a teacher if you don’t know the medicine.”
Hsu Hong-Chi
The practice of medicine in a martial arts tradition has three primary goals. The first is obviously practical, when you train hard and when you fight there will be injuries and it is best to know how to manage them.
The second is equally practical but perhaps less obvious. The daily practice of martial skills is all too easily a daily meditation on violence, doing harm to others and developing malevolent intent. This is damaging to a person’s heart and soul, called their shen. One of the truly genius innovations of Chinese martial arts is the way in which the training methods have been developed to allow continual enhancement of skills over a lifetime without this poisonous dwelling on evil.
One important aspect of this is the practice of medicine. Every moment spent practicing medicine, your actions alleviating suffering and your thoughts dwelling on helping rather than hurting, offset the time in practice spent on thinking of hurting. You become ever more aware of the results of your actions as a martial artist and ever more ready and willing to seek solutions other than violence.
The third goal is to become more self-aware and to understand how and why the training is done as it is. The training methods of the internal boxing schools are often presented as esoteric but it is more correct to say it is highly specialized. It was designed according to the tenants and understandings of Chinese medicine. All serious students should aspire to understand the basics of this way of thought or else risk never being able to even talk about their arts profitably let alone plumb them to their depths.
