Yaoshi Tongyuan: The Symbiotic Practice in Traditional Medicines

Abstract

We discuss the boundaries of symbiosis or gongsheng and coexistence under the theme of yaoshi tongyuan (food and medicine have the same source) in traditional medicines. The term wu wei, or five flavors, is explored in two senses: experiences of eating and cooking, and patterns of qi movement that animate and invigorate the body. Tracing the eventfulness and powers at play in healing and eating when they are seen as closely related forms of life, ancient and modern understandings of flavor are here shown to be a common basis for the healing and harming powers of both food and medicine. We argue that medical practice is also a long-term process of working with the ethics and politics of life forms.

A part of this chapter has been published under the title of “Food and Medicine: Qualities and Efficacies in Chinese Ethnic Medicines” in the journal of Chinese Medicine and Culture 6, no. 1 (2023): 4–54, manuscript code: CMC-22-086. The authors thank the journal for their permission to use the content.

“The beauty of a flavorful stew lies in the combining of differences, while the benefit of above and below is in their being able to cross each other.”¹ This ancient maxim suggests that the key to making a beautiful stew is the proper mixing of diversities and the masterful management of water (above) and fire (below). The term he geng 和羹, which we translate as “flavorful stew,” is even older than the Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE); it was first seen in the Shangshu 尚书 (Book of Documents) where the king of Shang praised his prime minister: “You are like the salt and the plums for my making of a flavorful stew” (若作和羹 尔惟盐梅).² The salt and plums that provide salty and tart tastes are compared to the prime minister’s personal virtues, revealed in his service to his lord. The social and political importance of flavors is made explicit in these Chinese classics. Intrigued by the proverbial Chinese view that “food and medicine have the same source,” i.e., yaoshi tongyuan 药食同源, this paper traces the eventfulness and powers at play in healing and eating when they are seen as closely related forms of life. Ancient and modern traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) understandings of flavor are here shown to be a common basis for the healing and harming powers of both food and medicine. The term wu wei 五味 , or five flavors (sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, and salty), is explored in two senses: experiences of eating and cooking, and patterns of qi movement that animate and invigorate the body. Drawing on the concept of symbiosis, we argue that practices of harmonizing (he 和 or tiaohe 调和) flavors in Chinese medicine, as in cooking, express a world of natural powers and expert embodiment that goes far beyond mere taste.

Flavorful Soup in both Culinary and Medical Practices

Let’s look more closely at the operative terms in the epigraph above, the relationships emphasized there are still important in some culinary and medical domains of practice. The word for stew (or thick soup) is geng 羹, a character that combines gao 羔 for lamb with mei 美 for beauty. Roel Sterckx, in his work on food, politics, and sacrifice in Chinese antiquity, asserts that “the prime dish was the stew, or geng, a soup consisting of meat, vegetables or cereals, or a mixture of these. The stew was known throughout Chinese antiquity where it also served as an important sacrificial offering.”³ Most obviously geng is a water-based mixture of diverse foods, but not only that. One dictionary we consulted first defined geng as “a thick soup with the five flavors harmonized” (五味调和的浓汤),⁴ following this definition with the Shangshu sentence quoted above. It seems geng itself is always already flavor-full. Furthermore, to cook up a he-flavorful geng, the key is to harmonize the five flavors. These flavors are more than the sensations registered in our mouths, as we will discuss shortly. For now, let’s keep in mind that all foods can be classified by the five-flavor system, though this system has a far-from simple relationship with the sensible flavors of plants and meats. As the epigraph states eloquently, a simple combining of different varieties of things (heyi 合异) is not yet harmonizing (he 和). The soup needs to be slow cooked over a fire; the work of harmonizing involves not only flavors but the heat of fire and the moistening of water. Thought of in yinyang terms, yin water flows down while yang fire rises upward. The yin-downward water and yang-upward fire, above and below, “cross each other”: this is exactly the image depicted in the No. 63 hexagram Ji Ji 既济⁵ of Yi Jing. A he geng 和羹, after “water and fire have crossed” (shuihuo jiji 水火既济), and “yin and yang have corresponded” (yinyang xianghe 阴阳相和), is the outcome of this dynamic transforming process. Thus, a geng being he-flavorful means much more than just tasty. By harmonizing the world’s myriad heterogeneities, it gives specific character to the Chinese experience of gongsheng and coexistence.

The “above and below” that “cross” in the opening epigraph certainly refers to the yin yang interaction of Heaven and Earth. The downward and upward flow of heating and cooling qi could be understood both in the body and in the kitchen. Consider the language of a classic exchange on the middle burner (zhongjiao 中焦):

Huang Di said, ‘I want to hear about what comes from the middle burner.’ Qi Bo replied, “The qi of the middle burner emerges from the stomach… The qi received there is secreted [downward] as the dregs of wine and grains, steamed [upward] as the various body fluids, and transformed into essential nutrients, which pour upward to the lung system [the upper burner) where they are transformed into blood, which in turn provides life to the body. What could be more precious!⁶

All these terms that refer to cooking are echoed in the language of traditional Chinese medicine, perhaps most markedly when they are speaking of the “hot and moist kitchen” of the “middle burner.” The relations of corresponding and harmonizing found both in the natural world and in qi-transforming physiology govern the making of Chinese medical decoctions. The herbal “soup” combines differently-flavored herbs and requires cooking, which is to say, proper control of water and fire. Both stew (geng 羹) and decoction (tangyao 汤药) are orally consumed and interact with processes underway in bodies. Even the word in modern Chinese for the soups that are food (tang 汤) and the decoctions that are medicine (tang 汤) is the same.

In this discussion, the proverbial Chinese view that “food and medicine have the same source” (yaoshi tongyuan 药食同源) is invoked to resonate with the contemporary discussion of gongsheng and coexistence. We focus on the qualities and efficacies of nutritional and medicinal plants by tracing the eventfulness and powers at play in healing, especially when medicines are thought of as deeply akin to cooking and eating food. We note various food and medicine mixtures, as we have encountered them in research in the worlds of mainstream traditional Chinese medicine and in some minority nationality medical practices. Here we report from the practice of healers who harmonize different flavors and transform patients or diners' bodies and experiences through the mediation of medical cooking.

The Way of Flavor (味道)

Yiyin 伊尹, a legendary cook of the early Shang (1649–1550 BCE), is said to have cooked food to cure diseases, and he is considered to be the inventor of medicinal soup (tang 汤) for curing diseases. The Zhou Li 周礼 (Rites of Zhou, 2nd C. BCE) records one kind of heavenly official (tian guan 天官) specifically in charge of “food medicine” (shi yi 食医). The same book states, “the five flavors, five grains and five medicines should be used for nurturing the sick,” already juxtaposing food and medicine. The term wu wei found in the even earlier text Zuozhuan already speaks of the five flavors’ power to stimulate and influence the movement of qi that animated and invigorated the body.⁷ Further, as part of the wuxing 五行 (five phases) system of cosmic correspondences, the five flavors were each associated with an organ system: the lungs, spleen, kidneys, liver, and heart. These correspondences are outlined in the medical classic Huangdi Neijing Suwen 《黄帝内经·素问》.

It is foundational to the logic of Chinese herbal medicine, which still draws on these early classics, that natural medicines have properties and characters, and that they have affinities with particular organ systems of function (zangfu 脏腑) and circulation tracks (jingluo 经络).⁸ Along with the classic notion of four qualities (si qi 四气, heating, warming, cooling, chilling), the five flavors remain central concepts in popular and technical medical discourses on health and well-being. Check any TCM materia medica text, every drug listed or explained has a known flavor, sometimes two.⁹ Indeed, understanding the “five flavors” in Chinese medicine requires seeing them as both classificatory rubrics (gathering, distinguishing, and comparing diverse things with diverse properties, or heyi 合异) and as direct efficacies in themselves. Correlated with the five visceral systems of the body and classified with the micro- and macrocosmic five phases, the five flavors have powers that a healer or cook can work with: Like the five phases, there are relations of generation and overcome (sheng ke 生克) between things of differing flavors. Sour constricts, bitter dries, sweet replenishes, pungent disseminates, and salt softens.¹⁰

It goes without saying that food also has the four qualities si qi, and the five flavors, and thus has healing or harming powers. When we learn the physiological powers of the different flavors of things—for example that “pungent spreads and disseminates, moves qi and blood” (辛散走窜能理气血)—and when we learn how to combine the flavors of drugs and foods for efficacy—then flavors become “potent” and the skills of the good doctor indistinguishable from those of the good cook.

Flavors in European usage, by contrast, are confined mainly to the realm of cooking and eating food; they are weak and epiphenomenal to the nutritional factors that we learn from reading package labels.¹¹ The biomedical magic bullet, moreover, like an antibiotic, is a flavorless pill. Its powers engage pathology outside of our experience. All it has in common with medicinal soups is that it is swallowed.

Five Phases: The Boundaries of Gongsheng and Coexistence

As stated above, the five flavors system is key to understanding yaoshi tongyuan, not only due to their shared properties of nature (xing 性) and flavor (wei 味), but also the shared guiding principle for combining, cooking, and eating foods and medicines. All are expressed in the shared perceptions of the body and the cosmos, as shown in the chart above. More importantly, each of the five phases is considered to act either as an adversary overcoming another phase or as a promoter generating a third one. The five phases, mutually generating and overcoming, their cycling interconnectedness and inter-transformations could further help us understand the boundaries of gongsheng and coexistence and the ethics and politics of eating.

Derrida, in an interview about “eating well,” once asked, “since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good, how for goodness sake should one eat well? And what does this imply? What is eating?”¹² The issues taken up by Derrida is a good call to be cautious of romanticizing the idea of gongsheng and coexistence, especially when it comes to the practice of eating (no matter food or medicine). To put it in other words, symbiotic boundaries are essential for any serious undertaking of living together. As Derrida has perceived, eating is fundamentally political: who eats whom; how shall the eating self and the eaten other be understood, and how shall their relations be regulated? Can a broader and more ethical gongsheng be achieved, and on the basis of what experience should ethical discriminations be made?

The practical logic of Chinese medicine, especially the five-phase principle, might offer some fruitful responses. Putting Tables 11.1 and 11.2 two together, they have shown that the affinities of the five phases to organ systems could further serve as a theoretical and practical ground for treatments. The visceral systems continually transmit while transforming, the human body is also seen as a contingent site in an active network. In practice, considerable technical expertise is required to determine where there is blood or qi that should be set in motion by pungent drugs, what subtle hungers can be reached by sweet drugs, and which inner “swamps” can be safely “drained” by bitter drugs, etc. In Chinese medicine human body operates in accordance with the fine balance between the sequences of mutual generation and overcoming of the five-phases system. Eating can never be immoderate, what to eat is never at will.

Table 11.1 Correspondence between five phases and phenomena in Suwen

Table 11.2 Mutual generation or overcoming among Five Phases in Suwen

Chinese medical practices not only involve the patient’s body, but also intimately involve the doctor’s body. As introduced above, pharmaceutical classification is presented as reflecting the actual tastes of substances in the materia medica corpus. That these tastes are then correlated with particular efficacies is a fact that requires no explanation in Chinese discourses beyond the usual reference to accumulated historical experience. The technical complexities of the TCM specialty of the formulary are well known: there is both an archive of classic formulas which are analyzed and understood partly with reference to the matched flavors they include, and there is a logic and techniques for designing tailor-made formulas in ways that can maximize the efficacies of flavors and characters while avoiding clashes and cross-purposes. This is a kind of harmonizing, translated into present-day practice as the Chinese medical sub-discipline of the formulary.

Further, in the research we have been doing on ethnic medicines in China’s southwest, there are a great many local herbs in use that have not made it into the national or even regional materia medica handbooks. The local gatherers and users of natural medicines have involved their very own bodies to determine the flavor classification of the previously unknown things they use in their medical practices. As we sought out mountain herbalists, we often thought of the legendary sage Shen Nong 神农, who—prior to all disciplines—is said to have “tasted the 100 herbs.” We asked many healers in southern China whether they personally tasted the herbs they gathered and used. Most said they did, some of them emphasizing that this personal testing of unknown substances with their own bodies was the experiential foundation of their knowledge and practice. Moreover, everyone knows that it takes an informed palate to classify the taste of a natural substance for medical use: that is, it may be easy to say whether a leaf or root has sweet or astringent qualities, but this unknown plant also has a number of other flavors that may or may not be medically powerful. Thus, the immediate taste in the mouth of a relatively unfamiliar plant collected in the forest is only the first step in understanding how a type of flavor might translate into a predictable therapeutic effect. Some “clinical” experimentation, beginning with the vulnerable body of the healer, is required to characterize local and novel drugs in a way that can lead to more effective (and safe, and harmonious) combinations.

Indeed, many of those we have talked to in the south tell us that one key difference between a mere “folk” herbalist and a genuine practitioner of a local system of medicine is the latter’s ability to efficaciously combine herbs.¹³ Healers have special skills both to know medicines with a special sensitivity—an informed sense of taste gained from their time spent gathering and sampling medicines in the mountains—and to know how to combine their finds—how to cook flavor-full soups—for reliably good results.¹⁴

Doctors of ethnic medicines know their plants’ efficacies, even as they continue to experiment with them. So do practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.¹⁵ The five flavors in TCM are first identified by taste, that is, by human sensory organs’ reaction to contact with drugs. Then they are abstractly summarized as “the five flavors”, classificatory rubrics that guide practitioners as they combine different plants according to the five-phase system. Experts work with principles such as “sour constricts, bitter firms, sweet replenishes, pungent disperses, salty softens.” These functions make reference to processes of qi transformation. When it comes to making out prescriptions, further, the doctors’ bodily practices of collecting, tasting, processing, and combining medicines, are to go along with what they learn from both their successes and their failures with patients over past experiences.

That is to say, the quality and flavor of drugs are not self-evident. “Knowing” them requires not only the doctors’ own bodily perceptions but also a considerable period of rather experimental clinical application. To a great degree, the skills in tasting the flavors of plants require more than just sensory perceptions; rather, their knowledge is cultivated through long-term (and not just individual) experiences of gathering, tasting, mixing, and putting drugs to use. Even the “traditional” knowledge that is passed down from seniors to disciples is more experiential in this sense than it is formal or systematic. To the doctors who are known as “herbal kings” and “miracle doctors,” the efficacy of their healing strategies is not only related to their skills in combining drugs but also dependent on the quality of the plants (the potency of their flavor) and the qualities inhering in bodies (those of both doctors and patients).

All these discussions point to the central point that traditional medicine doctors’ practices always maneuver within all kinds of limits, from the qualities of herbs, the doctors and patients’ bodies, their historical experiences, to the geographical locations and climate conditions, etc. It works as a powerful response to the questions of eating raised by Derrida as the traditional medicine doctors’ practices to a great degree extend the ethical and political concerns of eating to questions of the gongsheng boundaries. As we shall show in the following two ethnographical cases, both doctors treat their clinical encounters as an ethical, political, ecological, and very practical problem. They understand perfectly that medical practice is also a long-term process of working with the ethics and politics of life forms.

Case One: Master Li’s Healing Magic

An embodied knowledge of how to combine herbs and how to make a flavorful therapeutic soup is not only a feature of “ethnic” or “folk” medicines. All medicines in China, including Han TCM, are committed to the principle of treating “in accordance with specificities of time, place, and person” (因人因时因地制宜). Even if the technicalities of flavor classification in Chinese medicine are not much emphasized among southern healers, their expert work can still be seen as quite similar to great cooking: Master Li, who, when we met him, was running a clinic of Qiang ethnic medicine, said as much while we watched him assemble an herbal prescription from his personal pharmacy (without the benefit of written prescription or balance scales). “This is just like cooking,” he said; “You can feel it in your hands.”

After the catastrophic 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, when the mountainside where his family home had perched was destroyed by landslides, Li Senior was invited by the health department to open a clinic in the county hospital. This is where we first met him. But he regularly goes farther up into the mountains in search of wild herbs. He has transplanted and cultivated about 20 different kinds of herbs in the hillside ruins of his large Qiang-style stone house. Along with his transplanted varieties, he finds many different kinds of wild herbs in the partly re-forested slopes around and above his mountain home.

Local people in this earthquake-stricken county refer to Master Li as a “divine healer” (shenyi 神医), an appellation that refers mostly to the unusual effectiveness of his therapies. Residents of a village near the county town all know how he brought a pancreatitis patient back from the edge of death with his amazingly effective treatments. Li Junior drove us to this patient’s house for a visit, so we could better perceive the quality of Master Li’s healing powers.

This village-dwelling mother and grandmother had stayed for 70 days in the tertiary-care provincial hospital, where her condition had been treated in many very expensive ways. Eventually, however, she was discharged by her doctors, who had decided there was little hope of a cure. Taken home by way of the county hospital, severe vomiting of blood induced circulatory shock. Everyone thought she was dying; her children bought her coffin and made funeral preparations. They brought her home, but three days later, she was still struggling tenaciously at the edge of death. Master Li, the divine healer, was fetched by the families to make a last try at treating her illness.

It is worth noting that “pancreatitis” (yixianyan 胰腺炎) could have meant little or nothing to Li Senior. Even in mainstream TCM theory, the pancreas barely exists, and such internal organs are not usually thought of as the sole cause of symptoms. The illness that was presented to Li Senior by these Qiang villagers was not a diseased anatomical site, rather it was a pattern of severe symptoms involving the whole body, which needed to be engaged and nudged into more wholesome ways. Li Junior, introducing us to this complex case and the patient, explained a bit of his father’s thinking: “when we first arrived at her bedside, her feet were swollen, and her abdomen also looked very swollen. On top of this, the most urgent situation was her constant hematemesis, so the pressing matter of the moment was to stop this vomiting of blood. Otherwise, no medicine would work. If we succeeded, we could hope to carry on [and treat the more fundamental disorders].”

On that first visit, Master Li only gave the patient an herbal paste, administered externally, to stop bleeding and told her family members, if there was any improvement, to come to his clinic the following morning for custom-made medicines. Leaving the patient in the early evening, Li Senior and his son went directly to their clinic, where they spent three hours—working among their own herbal medicines—discussing how to assemble a proper formula: what drugs to choose and how the combination would take effect on what symptoms. The most challenging issue was the combination of swelling and bleeding, which demanded contradictory operations: to relieve swelling (a form of stasis in the digestive and circulatory system), one needs to promote qi movement. But to stop bleeding, it is better for the qi movement to be moderated. Second, given the patient’s long-standing and excessive loss of blood, there was also a pressing need to replenish blood. Third, the relief of abdominal swelling, and the restoration of a proper downward flow of food and nutrients,¹⁶ requires rather potent medicines, but the patient was too weak to survive any strong intervention. “These were all extremely delicate issues, we were wracking our brains,” Li Junior told us.

Luckily the patient’s vomiting slowed after the herbal plaster was applied. Her family came the next morning for the first formula. Li Junior told us that, in such a severe illness, the first eight formulas are essential. Usually, in Li Senior’s practice, patients eat one formula of medicine for 7–10 days, but in this case, each formula was used only for three days. Each successive formula was revised after the doctors’ close observation of how the patient’s body was responding. Li Junior told us in detail, for example, of another “delicate” moment:

After taking the third formula [successfully] for three days, the patient’s condition suddenly became aggravated. She had begun to vomit blood-streaked black-watery stuff, which was a very bad sign. If she suffered this kind of bloody vomiting again, my father would not be able to bring her back to life again. We rushed to her house immediately, inquiring about what she had eaten. The families finally admitted that, in addition to her medicine, she had eaten four fermented soybeans.

Li Senior revised the third formula, focusing on stopping bleeding and suppressing coughing while addressing pain, dysuria, weak heartbeat, and respiratory problems—all signs, we note, of disorder in the regular downward flow and upward transformation of qi, blood and nutrients. Li Junior lamented how hard it had been “to combine and mobilize all the drugs in the formulas to work on those intertwined situations.”

This “intertwining” took place as the patient slowly recovered and while Master Li and his son monitored interactions between the body, medicine, and food. She confessed to them that she had felt so much better after the first two formulas that, by the time of the third dose, she had really wanted to eat some food with flavor. But just four fermented soybeans, with their complex flavors, triggered a serious bodily reaction. Apparently, the efficacies of food and medicine really can be thought about in the same way, they “have the same source” (同源). One principle that governs the intertwining of symptoms and of drug powers is “flavor” (味道).

Case Two: Doctor Huang Asks, “Do You Believe in Fate?”

In the course of anthropological field research in southern China, we met Dr. Huang, a senior practitioner in a Yao nationality medicine hospital. Having been introduced by Yang Jian, our research associate who was interning with Dr. Huang, we followed him one morning as he began his rounds in the inpatient ward of this 40-bed hospital. He went first to see a 50-year-old patient diagnosed with lymphoma. He told us she had been through six rounds of chemotherapy over the past six years. Her current main complaint was a terrible ulcer near her left popliteal lymph node. Dr. Huang examined the open sore closely, then he left. Yang Jian told us that he was going downstairs to prepare a very special herbal plaster. She had already said that Dr. Huang had been trying to find a certain special herb for this patient for a long time. He had asked almost every herb collector in town, even eventually riding on a motorcycle with one of them so they could go together deep into the mountains, where he himself dug up the precious root.

Very curious, Lili went with Dr. Huang to see this special drug. He went into his clinic and took out a large tuber that looked rather like a bamboo shoot. Yang Jian told us later it is the tuber of qiyeyizhihua 七叶一枝花 (seven leaves per flowering stem, or paris polyphylla). We were impressed—this is a famously rare herbal drug. After peeling the tuber, Dr. Huang told Lili that no metal should be in contact with the tuber as it was prepared, so he put down the knife and picked up a big rock. “Step back a bit further,” he warned her, “the herb is poisonous.” Then he put on gloves and safety glasses, and started to carefully smash and grind the tuber with the big rock. He was trying to make the paste as fine as he could, so it took quite a while.

“Will this freshly-made paste, put into a plaster, work for the patient?” Lili asked him. He first explained that the ulcer looked like what is called in Yao medicine a “grievous toxic sore” (da du chuang 大毒疮), and the “seven leaves stem” paste was known to be specific for this kind of ulcer. He also noted that he had already tried many different therapies on the patient to see which might work better. Then he smiled and asked Lili: “Do you believe in fate?” Sometimes the method that works on one patient will not work on other patients. You have to believe in fate and ride the waves of personal destiny.

Dr. Huang is a widely respected expert in the herbal medicine practiced by Yao nationality doctors in the Great Yao Mountains of northern Guangxi. He is one of the founders of a modern hospital of Yao medicine, he supervises junior residents and interns, and sufferers come from far and wide to receive his treatments. As is evident in the episode described here, he knew the natural medical resources of his home region better than almost any of his colleagues, and he was known for the many years of clinical experience that informed his therapeutic strategies.¹⁷ He knew the unnamed and trackless places in the great forests near the hospital where ‘seven leaves stem’ might be found growing. He knew his lymphoma patient’s sad history. He knew what the visible characteristics of her skin ulcer could tell him about the state of a disease process. He knew how this kind of “grievous toxic sore” had been understood and managed by Yao practitioners in the past. He knew how to protect himself, his patient, and bystanders from the toxic fumes of the pounded root. And he worked hard to put his skills and understanding into service as good medicine or healing.¹⁸

But he did not know what would happen in the future. Lili’s question, “Will this plaster help?”, asked for a prognosis or a prediction and implied that there might be a knowable cause and effect chain linking natural drug, bodily lesion, and the progress of the lymphoma. But to answer such a question Dr. Huang had to turn interrogative himself, and invoke not knowledge but belief: “Do you believe in fate?”

The word he used for fate or destiny was mingyun (命运), which literally means the (particular) flow of a (particular) life and death.¹⁹ Though it is usually humans who have a ming, in this instance in which Dr. Huang was putting several agents into a close relationship with each other—the forest plant, the mashed root fibers, the gauze-wrapped plaster, and his own hard labor and devoted time—the fated particularity seems to be the relationship among these players, and their convergence upon a clinical problem. A therapeutic grouping has been conscientiously gathered. Perhaps as it nears the patient’s body, it will join with her particular destiny and help to re-direct the flow of her life so far.

But mingyun cannot be known definitively even by skilled diviners (and it’s possible that Dr. Huang was such a diviner in his spare time). If anything, the practical divide between what can and cannot be known reminds us how many mundane practices of medicine are referred to in the paragraphs above. Expertise like Dr. Huang’s, relating to the forest and its natural agents (both toxic and healing), is far from universal among the residents of villages and towns near his Yao medicine hospital, so locally, he is a rather unique expert knower. And even health policy-makers in Beijing hesitate to dismiss his medical expertise as mere belief, superstition, or folklore. Committed as the modern world may be to knowing trans-local information, when faced with a knowing practice that heals in place, the limits of knowledge must be respected.

The Gongsheng Practice in Traditional Medicines

Flavor, as Vivienne Lo points out, has been associated with potencies from a very early time in China. The manipulation of flavors links to a history of nourishment ideas that echoes today through everyday life across the country.²⁰ The shared sources of food and medicine invite practitioners to cook with flavor to achieve an inspired mixture, a wise and skilled “combination” (pei 配), and “harmonization” (he 和). Both healer and cook are able to combine flavors to directly address and, through the human faculty of taste, share our hungry or uncomfortable embodiment. Further, the five flavors are not a mere sensation confined to the mouth. They are forces that bring about physiological results. Flavor both expresses the healer's hard-won experience and wisdom and addresses the patient’s particular needs and situation. And it is not the flavor of each drug itself that really counts but the mixing of several that is truly, brilliantly efficacious. A miraculously effective drug formula developed by a local healer, once cooked up in a soup at home, reaches the patient’s whole body of intertwined flows with its care.

The five-flavor principle and “food and medicine have the same source” approach are not only suggested guides that can inform practitioners’ efforts to combine drugs in accord with organ systems correlations and all manner of other (fivefold) expressions of organic process. They also refer to the interaction and mutual transformation between herbs, food, and the human body, directly speaking to the idea of gongsheng and coexistence in traditional medicine practices. More, they always involve further questions of the ethics and politics of eating: what ought to be eaten, what ought not; what is good to eat, and what is not. To take a step even further, the yaoshi tongyuan “food and medicine have the same source” approach embodies the always entangling and entangled forms of life on the planet.

This also reminds us that to talk about symbiosis, gongsheng or living together, the ethics of politics of life shall not escape from our attention, as they concern precisely the symbiotic boundaries. Maybe the core question for gongsheng or symbiosis is to reconsider questions of body and life or embodied lives: after all, what is body, and how to live (well)?