ABSTRACT
The Su Wen defines the blood-vessels as 'the habitation of the blood' (fu mo che hsueh chih fu yeh3).a And from the time of the Ling Shu onwards it is al\vays said that't\1e (Yin) ying2 chhi travels within the blood-vessels (mo4), while the (Yang) weiS chhi travels outside them' .b At the same time the two chhi were regarded as intimately connected. Blood chhi and tract chhi have different names, says Chhi Po at one place in the Ling Shu, but they belong to the same category (i tning thung lei6).c Both are derived from the liquid and solid ingesta (shui ku chih ching chhi yeh7 ).d And the Ting commentary on the N an Ching says that 'the flow of the blood is maintained by the chhi, and the motion of the chhi depends on the blood, thus coursing in mutual reliance they move round (hsiieh liu chii chhi, chhi tung i hsiieh, hsiang phing erh hsing8) '.e
Now for the statements of the circulation. The Ling Shu says: '\\That we call the vascular system (mo 9 ) is like dykes and retaining-walls (forming a circle of tunnels) which control the path that is traversed by the ying lO chhi, so that it cannot escape or find anywhere to leak away (yung 0 ying chhi ling wu so pil I)~'f A commentary on this written by Wu Mao-Hsien l2 of the Ming (but earlier than + 1586) adds: 'it means that the ying2 chhi travels within the blood vessels round and round, day and night, meeting nothing to stop or oppose it (chou yell huan chuan, wu so wei ni I3 ), and that is what the blood vessels are'.g This is only the first of a number of instances of affirmations which historically could not have been derived from William Harvey's famous publication of + 1628. But there is no need to quote from Ming texts, because seventeen centuries earlier we can find statements such as this in the Su lVell, where Chhi Po says that 'the flow in the tract and channel (network system, of the body) runs on and on, and never stops; a ceaseless movement in an annular circuit (ching mo liu hsing pu chih, huan chou pu hsiul4) '.11 Clearly the circulation of the blood and chhi was standard doctrine in the - 2nd century, a situation contrasting rather remarkably with the long uncertainty in the Western world, with its ideas of air in the arteries, or a tidal ebb and flow of the blood. i
a NCSW/PH, ch. 17, (p. 91), NCSW/TVMC (p. 160). If the status of a material liquid such as one can study in a laboratory test-tube is denied to hsiieh, it is impossible to make sense of ancient Chinese thought on the circulation. Yet this is \vhat Porkert (I), pp. 27, 185, does. For him, hsiieh is' individually specific structive energy', i.e. that form of energy in the body \vhich responds to active energies by morphogenetic activity and physiological function.
