Tales from the Practice of Medicine: Ganlan Water – Water Raised up a Thousand Times

The water that has been raised up a thousand times is called Ganlan water in Chinese medicine. They say it was invented by a great doctor in the Ming Dynasty named Zhongjing Zhang. In the book of Chinese medicine, Jin Kui Yao Lue, there is a prescription that decocts poria, cassia twigs, licorice, and jujube. The prescription is for curing bentun qi. Bentun qi is not a serious illness. The symptom is that gas rushes up from the belly to the throat. This prescription needs to be decocted in Ganlan water. Because the water has the characteristic of rising up since it has been raised up a thousand times, it can lead the medicine to go up. From the perspective of modern science, water which has been thrown upward a thousand times is nothing but water containing more oxygen.

I heard a story about an old man who was dying. His son called on a very experienced Chinese medicine doctor. The doctor said that the disease was difficult to cure. The son kneeled down and asked the doctor to save his father’s life. The doctor was moved by the young man’s filial piety, so he wrote a prescription and said the prescription must be decocted with water that had been raised up a thousand times. The doctor put a big vat of water beside the old man’s bed. The son used the water ladle to repeat raising up the water in front of his father. His father was deeply moved because his son stayed up the whole night to raise up the water in order to cure the father’s illness. After the old man took the decoction, he got well very soon.

From this case, we can see that Ganlan water was not the key to curing the old man’s illness, neither was the oxygen in the water. It was because of the son’s filial piety. The ancients thought highly of filial piety. They regarded it as a virtue that human beings should have. A sincere and kind heart really can change one’s environment. Japanese scientists did research and found that when a person’s heart was purely kind, his voice could make the formation of water crystals very beautiful. The scientists used this method to purify water that was impossible to purify using any modern technology.

As the society has developed to the present day, virtue is no longer what people think highly of. Bad thoughts are everywhere and pollute people starting from childhood. As the society becomes increasingly wicked, more and more modern diseases emerge. Although the modern medical scientific establishment invests a lot of money to do research, they can’t find the cures for these modern diseases. Nevertheless, in the group of people who practice Falun Gong, those whose hearts were polluted before became sincere and kind and their various diseases which neither Western medicine nor Chinese medicine could do anything about were cured through practicing Falun Gong. These facts demonstrate that only when people assimilate to Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance can their minds be rectified and the society become better.