Brenda Hood often reminds me “Chinese concepts, especially classical Chinese concepts, are big and multidimensional. They are extremely dependent on context and while shades of meaning often cross over, they can be quite different and be more or less encompassing of ideas depending on actual context.”

Which is why I’m always questioning myself when wrestling ancient Chinese ideas. What’s more, it will seem culture itself is constantly rewriting history to fit the current zeitgeist. So words and ideas, they shape-shift through time.

In this episode we discuss 意 Yi, commonly translated as Meaning or Significance, and also as Intention.

Intention gets talked about a lot in our trade, but for me over the course of time, I feel less and less clear just what Intention is, and how it relates to my clinical work. I’ve got some questions about it, and was delighted to sit down with Stephen Boyington, Leslie de Vries and Volker Scheid to see if they could thrown some light on what for me has increasingly become a murky term.

Listen into this both scholarly and practical discussion on 意, Yi as it relations to medicine and how the doctors, poets and calligraphers over the centuries have puzzled over this as well.