Medical Ethics in Sun Simiao’s Recipes Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold
Xiao Zhong, BA, Current MA student in Religious Studies, University of Chicago Divinity School
“Whether life is worthwhile living and when—this question is not asked by medicine,” Max Weber points out in his famous essay Science as a Vocation. Modern science has forgotten this issue, to which great significance was attached in ancient times. In traditional Chinese medicine, a worthwhile-living life is not an unexamined assumption, but a carefully clarified state of being. This study intends to explore the issues about spirituality, life and medicine in an important Chinese medical classic, Recipes Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold (RTG) by Sun Simiao (孙思邈, 581-673 A.D.) who is renowned as the King of Medicine in China. Accompanied by heated discussion of medical ethics in the Western academy, the ethical values of RTG have attracted some scholars’ attention. However due to the limited translation of this lengthy and esoteric work, current discussion concerning medical ethics focus on one essay entitled “On the Absolute Sincerity of Great Physicians” which is treated as the “Chinese Hippocratic Oath.” Yet Sun’s thought concerning medical ethics is scattered throughout his works. Given the current research situation, I would like to base my study on the full text of RTG which contains the preface and thirty chapters. In this study, I intend to supply RTG with an intricate ideological background, which reveals both the syncretic characteristics of RTG and a particularly tight relationship with Confucianism. Then, through a close reading of the full text, I point out that the spirit of valuing life is the backbone of this work, and I sort out thoughts concerning medical ethics in line with this spirit. These explorations might offer us some valuable perspectives and thoughts on why we should re-enchant medicine and how we do so.
“Whether life is worthwhile living and when—this question is not asked by medicine,” Max Weber points out in his famous essay Science as a Vocation. Modern science has forgotten this issue, to which great significance was attached in ancient times. In traditional Chinese medicine, a worthwhile-living life is not an unexamined assumption, but a carefully clarified state of being. This study intends to explore the issues about spirituality, life and medicine in an important Chinese medical classic, Recipes Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold (RTG) by Sun Simiao (孙思邈, 581-673 A.D.) who is renowned as the King of Medicine in China. Accompanied by heated discussion of medical ethics in the Western academy, the ethical values of RTG have attracted some scholars’ attention. However due to the limited translation of this lengthy and esoteric work, current discussion concerning medical ethics focus on one essay entitled “On the Absolute Sincerity of Great Physicians” which is treated as the “Chinese Hippocratic Oath.” Yet Sun’s thought concerning medical ethics is scattered throughout his works. Given the current research situation, I would like to base my study on the full text of RTG which contains the preface and thirty chapters. In this study, I intend to supply RTG with an intricate ideological background, which reveals both the syncretic characteristics of RTG and a particularly tight relationship with Confucianism. Then, through a close reading of the full text, I point out that the spirit of valuing life is the backbone of this work, and I sort out thoughts concerning medical ethics in line with this spirit. These explorations might offer us some valuable perspectives and thoughts on why we should re-enchant medicine and how we do so.