Health Information

What is the Mission of Intangible Cultural Heritage Preservation?

Release Date:

2023-06-27 21:17

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has raged worldwide. Traditional Chinese medicine, drawing on its own theoretical foundations and clinical experience, has demonstrated notable efficacy in inhibiting the virus and enhancing patients’ immune resilience, thereby significantly boosting the global influence of TCM both domestically and internationally.

This serves as a reminder to strengthen our confidence, place greater emphasis on the inheritance and development of traditional Chinese medicine, actively promote TCM cultural knowledge worldwide, and enhance cultural self-assurance and national identity.

Intangible cultural heritage in the field of traditional medicine embodies a wealth of knowledge, concepts, and skills related to Chinese medicinal culture, continuously evolving and innovating with the passage of time. As the essence of national culture, it bears the mission of disseminating and popularizing traditional Chinese medical culture.

How can it be disseminated and popularized? The national-level intangible cultural heritage “Pingle Guo’s Orthopedic Manipulation Technique” holds that we should continuously deepen and promote it by adhering to the eight-character guiding principle of “awareness, identification, co-construction, and sharing.”

First and foremost is cognition. The general public’s understanding of traditional Chinese medical culture is often limited to knowing what it is without grasping why it is so; this leads to a narrow, partial view—like peering at a leopard through a bamboo tube—and makes people all too susceptible to being misled by certain so-called pseudoscientific forms of “Chinese medicine,” ultimately resulting in a lack of trust in TCM itself. What the intangible cultural heritage project of Pingle Guo’s Orthopedic Manipulation seeks to do is to illuminate the “roots and soul” of traditional Chinese medical culture: to convey the theories, techniques, and symbolic markers of TCM that have been accumulated through long-term practice, passed down from generation to generation, and possess either actual or potential value. In this way, the public can move from merely “knowing what it is” to “understanding why it is so,” thereby renewing their overall understanding of traditional Chinese medical culture.

Following awareness comes acceptance. Between awareness and acceptance lies a crucial link: practical utility. Once the general public has developed a clear and accurate understanding of traditional Chinese medicine culture, they will consciously engage in TCM-based health preservation through various channels and methods, integrating this cultural tradition into their daily lives. In the process, they will reap tangible benefits and experience transformative changes from the inside out. With such benefits in hand, acceptance becomes inevitable; and once acceptance is established, dissemination, recommendation, and promotion will occur naturally and organically.

Yet the profound transmission of culture is inseparable from “co-creation” and “shared benefits.”

Co-building means that practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and the general public jointly usher in a golden age of TCM-based health preservation. What TCM professionals need to do is to bring TCM out of its classical texts and academic confines and connect it more extensively and meaningfully with everyday life—through initiatives such as volunteer free clinics and forum lectures, through authoritative, effective, and cost-efficient health-promotion products, and through bone-nourishing exercises that enable the public to fully benefit, among other efforts.

And once co-building is established, sharing naturally follows. The ultimate goal of popularizing traditional Chinese medicine is precisely to share—to enable the public to enjoy a society in which health is the prevailing cultural norm, to embrace a life trajectory in which suboptimal health gradually gives way to optimal health, and to look forward to a future characterized by greater well-being and higher happiness levels.

It has roots, soul, and the spirit of the times; it reveals people, objects, and the underlying ethos. Through awareness, identification, co-creation, and shared benefits, the intangible cultural heritage of Pingle Guo’s Orthopedic Manipulation is advancing the popularization of traditional Chinese medicine culture along this very path.

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