Leslie J. Franks - Stone Medicine: A Chinese Medical Guide to Healing with Gems and Minerals

To my mother, and all my female ancestry, for giving me strong Jing/Essence and a model for graceful aging

Acknowledgments

F irst and foremost, to Marc Gerstein, my partner in all things, who gracefully accommodated the radical lifestyle changes that emerged as this project moved to completion. He was incredibly helpful with the late-stage readings and editing, bringing his sharp eye and keen intellect to the process. His involvement has made for a much more polished book. I couldnt have done it without him.

To Linda Leatherman, my fellow massage therapist and Jeffrey student. She diligently typed and generously shared her notes from Dr. Yuens 2013 Healing with Gems and Stones class, which allowed me to stay up to date with Jeffreys presentation of the material. Her help with the quick reference chart following the materia medica is much appreciated, as is her sharing of stones from her collection for photographs. Linda has been my steadfast cheerleader throughout this project.

To Margery Gerard, my Chen taiji colleague, who read every page (!) of an early stage of the manuscript, as well as a more recent version. Her careful reading and thoughtful comments were invaluable in making the information clearer and more accessible to the general reader.

To Kathleen St. John, who was my sounding board as I worked to make intellectual concepts more real in the early stages of this project.

To Donna Ford, who helped with the practicalities of manuscript submission and formatting and who spurred me on to completion!

To Ian Coupal, who helped with translations of some of the Chinese names of stones and for being such a consistent taiji student, despite the vicissitudes of life!

To Mark Meunier, for his great enthusiasm for stones, and his generosity in loaning his collection for photographs.

To the many patients who read early versions of the primer and pointed out the parts that were obscure or downright unintelligible.

To my family and friends (especially Tom and Saffiyah), who have been supportive throughout this process.

To Vicki Thaler, friend and jeweler, who so freely and trustingly loaned her collection of gem-quality stones for the purposes of the photographs in this book. She loves her tourmaline!

To Kevin Downey, photographer and mineralogist, who shared not only his collection of mineral specimens for the photographs but also his wealth of mineralogical knowledge.

To the staff at Inner Traditions, especially the project editor, Jamaica Burns Griffin, and the copy editor, Susan Davidson, who have worked long and hard on this very large text. Their effort has propelled this book through a process of further separation of the clear from the turbid, allowing for more purification and refinement, to its ultimate completion. I appreciate the decisions they have made. Their work conveys intelligence, maturity, and sensitivity, and I am deeply grateful that they were on my team!

To my taiji teacher, Master Wang Haijun, whose generous, hands-on teaching style and emphasis on the fundamental principles has significantly deepened my practice of taiji. My foundation in taiji body understanding has made this a better book, and working on the book has made my taiji better.

And finally to Jeffrey, whose bighearted, inspirational presence has positively influenced the personal transformation of so many. His faith in our potential never falters.

Thank you, everyone, for your energy and enthusiasm for this project.

Authors Note

A n oral tradition is an evolving body of knowledge and wisdom. It is influenced by the quality of consciousness of the speaker and the listener, and by the ethos of the time.

The risk of putting an oral tradition to the page is that it will be pointed to as fact, that it will stop evolving and potentially become only a collection of dry, lifeless concepts. My teacher Dr. Jeffrey C. Yuen, eighty-eighth-generation lineage holder of the Jade Purity school of Daoism, frequently reminds his students that he reserves the right to contradict himself, changing the information he presents depending on the context of the lecture.

This work is a distillation of knowledge that I personally received from Dr. Yuen. To claim authorship for such material would be hubris. I have, nevertheless, worked diligently to incorporate this knowledge into my own life experience. My hope is that the reading of this text will serve as a basis to inspire personal transformation and further exploration of the vast repository of ancient Chinese medical knowledge, and that the process will prove as meaningful and valuable to the reader as it has been for me.

Stone Medicine is offered as my humble and respectful digestion of Dr. Yuens teaching.

Preface

S tone Medicine uses the rocks and minerals naturally created by the Earth for healing purposes. These substances have long offered their qualities to humanity. They have been used as raw materials to make the practical tools needed for survival and as precious adornments to denote the spiritual and secular leaders of a tribal group. We have no records that provide us with details of how our earliest ancestors might have used stones as medicine, but we know that they were used as tools in shamanic traditions to empower and heal members of the community.

The technological needs of Stone Age people were fulfilled almost exclusively by stones. Bones and shells were certainly elements of their toolbox, but the weight and durability of stones made them superior for the essential tasks these early people performed. We can imagine that as the ancient people worked with their stones, relying on their intuition and ingenuity to discover that the edge of a knapped obsidian blade was extremely sharp (and we now know that it has a cleaner, sharper edge than high-quality surgical steel), or that when flint was struck with a stone containing pyrite it gave off sparks to make fire, they must have also discovered other useful properties. Whatever their experience with their stone technology, it was transmitted down through the centuries from generation to generation, offering an ever-expanding base of knowledge. The wealth of knowledge and experience acquired in this way would have been a part of the world in which the earliest health practitioners began experimenting with stones, and the minerals they contain, to use as tools in healing.

This book has as its source a series of classes taught by Jeffrey C. Yuen in 2006 and 2007 on utilizing stones for healing based on classical Chinese medical principles. Dr. Yuen is the eighty-eighth-generation lineage holder of the Jade Purity school of Daoism, Yu Qing Pai. This school, which dates to the Han dynasty (206 BCE220 CE), is one of two outgrowths of the original school of Daoism, Shang Qing, which had its roots in the high antiquity of ancient China. Other members of Dr. Yuens lineage include Sun Simiao (581682 CE, considered a god of Chinese medicine) and Gehong (283343 CE, most well known for his contributions to alchemy, both internal and external, which will be discussed in greater detail in a later section). Dr. Yuen teaches from the oral tradition of his lineage as well as from the classics of Chinese medicine, which he mastered as a child under the guidance of his adoptive grandfather, the Daoist priest Yu Wen, eighty-seventh-generation lineage holder of Jade Purity.

The information included in this book is drawn from Dr. Yuens oral tradition; his own clinical experience; Shen Nongs Ben Cao (Divine Farmers Materia Medica), the earliest documented materia medica (and itself an oral tradition ultimately compiled before 220 CE); and the writings of Li Shizhen, the great naturalist and physician of the Ming dynasty (13681644 CE), whose Compendium of Materia Medica listed 1,892 medicinal substances, including 355 entries for minerals.