What's the Scholarship All About?

Readers of this blog know that the Academy of Classical Oriental Sciences (ACOS) in Nelson, BC is the first Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) school to contribute to our goal of providing educational opportunities to Bhutanese students interested in the health care field.

They have done so by offering a full tuition scholarship to their 3 year acupuncture program. Having completed this program myself, I can say with no hesitation it was one of the most challenging and difficult things I have ever done. University was like daycare in comparison.

People ask me what made the course so much of a challenge ("it's only school, right?") and I start with a standard reply of "you learn acupoint names, disease names, diagnostics, and pretty much everything else other than western bio-medicine in Chinese". Even friends of mine who have attended other schools are stumped when we talk of acupoints. Mine are in Chinese. Theirs are in numbers, a system passed down from the World Health Organization.

And is there any value in this style of linguistic learning? A good question, one which merits discussion. I think the fundamental aspect of Traditional Chinese Medicine which makes it so much of an academic challenge is its depth. A student can pass their course, attain professional status from their governing bodies, and work and provide genuine help to their patients having never learned a single thing in Chinese.

The inherent problem with learning Chinese Medicine in English boils down to which translated text you rely on to interpret the original Chinese texts. Translation removes us from the cultural geist and context of any original text. Personal biases and beliefs as well as ingrained societal behaviours makes translation an almost dubious pursuit, perhaps the ultimate test of objectivity and cultural acceptance for the linguist.

For example: I often wonder just how accurate the North American adaptation and understanding of Buddhism is given that the number of practitioners is certainly less than translators. Dogma it would seem outnumbers linguisitic inquiry. The idea of the mind ruling everything and being the mechanism of one's suffering sounds curiously similiar to Cartesian thought with its inherent belief that the mind is separate from the body... is this the case or merely the result of English translators cut and pasting choice Buddhist morsels from the plethora of ancient scrolls into American society with no heeding of the original cultural contexts from which the texts sprung from?

Learning the Chinese takes a student deeper into the traditional Chinese mindset and its conception of health, humans, and our relationship to the world around us. In my opinion, ACOS does a fantastic job of bringing to life for English speakers the language and socio-cultural mores of Chinese medicinal thought. Warren Fischer, the dean of ACOS, was the first caucasian Canadian to complete in TCM training in Beijing in Chinese. The depth of his understanding of TCM is incredible. It has been an exhausting process taking in as much of his acquired knowledge as I could. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface...

The issue of language in Chinese Medicine in North America is one that all the big names in the needle game have weighed in on. I think any serious student of acupuncture needs to consider this important component when mulling over their education options and know well in advance that ACOS offers a 10 meter diving board from which to throw yourself off into this vast and limitless arena of study we call Traditional Chinese Medicine.