There are many gems in the Chinese pharmacopoeia that are hidden in plain view. One of the best ways to grasp these hidden gems is by systematically deconstructing the entire pharmacopoeia and going through a process of discovering how this extraordinary material can organically reassemble itself into different forms.

The Min Jie Formulary Companion series is a systematic deconstruction of the Chinese pharmacopoeia based on Category, Taste, Temperature, Territory, Internal Relationships and Number. The first series, of which this is the second part, focuses on the deconstruction and reconstruction of category. This volume focuses on the deconstruction and reconstruction of taste by category.

The Min Jie Formulary Companion is useful precisely because the Chinese pharmacopoeia is so gigantic and detailed. This enormity can prevent us from getting to the core of what we seek in the intensity of the clinical moment.

The structure of The Min Jie Formulary Companion may break some taboos in the world of traditional Chinese medicine, but putting our pharmacopoeia into a series of new, systematic and coherent forms helps us to locate what we need in that critical clinical moment. It also helps us to make meaningful comparisons between herbs in our process of differentiation when we’re prescribing. Moreover, it helps us to make connections between herbs and their functions that we might never arrive at without physically seeing them arranged in a variety of ways. Beyond that, novel organization patterns also help us to undergo a more systematic process of assessing, diagnosing, treating and prescribing with our patients.

The current popular structure of the Chinese pharmacopoeia has a definite systemic coherence. Yet it’s so complex and esoteric that very few practitioners truly understand or appreciate how it was designed, even though they might use it every working day. One of the main purposes of these deconstructions is to begin to bring to light many of the invisible secrets that are built into the organization of the Chinese pharmacopoeia. It’s been my experience that this process can help us to value and respect this information more completely, and ultimately become better practitioners of our medicine.