中邪 (I) (Mystery)

Last week I wrote about my friend Mary’s “heart attack” in the article前世有修. She took a week’s leave at her doctor’s request. She took all the physical checkups doctors asked her to, but couldn’t figure out what her problem was. One of the doctors diagnosed her as Ischemic Heart Disease. She took medicine but still felt very weak and sick. But it had a dramatic twist after she saw a doctor I recommended to her.

It is a Chinese herbal doctor who uses 氣功(qi4 gong), Qi gong, to cure patients. I recommended him because he successfully cured a friend of mine of his Facial palsy and I’ve watched how he works. He doesn’t need you to tell him your symptoms, but diagnoses without touching you. He stands about 4, 5 meters away from you and moves his hands and fingers a bit like playing a harp. That’s how he diagnoses you.

He cures patients with Chinese herbal medicine. To see him, you got to make an appointment one week before by phone. And if you do not start to call the clinic the moment it starts to take the reservations, in ten minutes it’s full. You got to wait another day.

I think since Mary’s illness was caused by a blood’s “congestion,” it might be good to try Qi gong. Luckily, she managed to see the doctor several days earlier than her appointment because someone had cancelled his appointment. She asked the clinic because she felt very ill.

I talked to her on the phone a couple of hours before she went to the doctor. I called her because I dreamed of her the night before and wanted to check about her. She sounded very sick and weak though she tried to pull herself together and act like she was optimistic.

A few hours later when I called her to ask what the doctor had said, she sounded very different from hours ago. She regained her energy and was back to the normal her. “The doctor said,” in a mysterious tone she said on the phone, “it was not a stroke, but中邪(zhong4 xie2).”

Such a term will not be used by any medical doctors. But some people believe that if you are taken, or “possessed” by some spirit, ghost, (or an unknown power?), it is called中邪. You may change into someone very different, acting in a weird or lunatic way, or become plagued by unknown disease or symptoms like Mary did. Sometimes we will jokingly call someone中邪 for his unusual behavior.

Sometimes people even turn into someone else, speaking a totally different language or acting as another person. We’ll call this 附身(fu4 shen), possessed by someone else’s spirit. In some Taoism temples, some 乩童(ji tong2), Jitong or Tongji, spirit medium, will play the role of a certain deity when he is taken by him to answer the followers’ questions.

The doctor told Mary that the evil power was very strong and stayed in her right arm. He asked her to stand with her arms open and tried to “chase out” the power for her from around 5 meters away. According to Mary, it took him about five to ten minutes to do the job. After that, he told Mary that the power had been gone from her limbs. And she did feel much better.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

氣功=气功