A Point Of Words
In a past life--a.k.a. when I was in college--I was an English major. In that, I learned the value of digging into the etymology of words. Pulling that thread can illuminate a story and history of cultures blending and transmuting, and the value each culture assigns a word, from practical to lyrical.
That interest continues especially now that I practice medicine--pulling on that etymological thread can provide useful insights into how best to perform that practice. And when a word is in a language like Chinese, which uses ideograms as a form of writing, that study can take on a whole new life via the addition of visual elements.
In that, the book Grasping the Wind has been a great resource for me. In the Western world, acupuncture points are often referred to like topographical coordinates--ST-36 is thus the thirty-sixth point on the channel that passes through the stomach, for example, counting from head to foot. Grasping the Wind, in contrast, focuses on elaborating on the Chinese names of each point, which can range from location description to functional to purely poetic.
As this book describes in its introduction, even more fundamental than the names of each point, however, is the word for an acupuncture point itself: 穴, or xué. While the English word “point” can be described as the place where two lines intersect, a one-dimensional spot that one can at least aim for, the character 穴 means “hollow,” “cave,” or “hole.”
Breaking down the character, the top portion is a radical that represents a roof; the bottom portion can be interpreted to mean a division, or removal. The two portions taken together lead to a greater, combined meaning: a removing to create a hollow--a space beneath a surface.
A place to insert an acupuncture needle is more than a memorized location reduced to a dot. It is a space that requires a more profound visualization to apply medicinal touch--not a literal hollow, but something that requires a more meditative application of thought to conceptualize and use correctly. Tracing that concept back through the word used to describe it is just the beginning of understanding, though--it takes practice to put that understanding to use.
Ellis, A., Boss, K. and Wiseman, N., 1989. Grasping the Wind. Brookline, Mass: Paradigm Publications.
