Many students studying Korean Medicine have difficulties in understanding the basic concepts of it. That is because the whole paradigm of the ancient Eastern world, where it all started, is different from today's conventional society. One cannot understand how an ill liver can bring on lacklustre eyes, like a Chinese cannot understand Portuguese. The ABC's of ancient Eastern philosophy are appearance and change. Eum Yang and the five functions come after we learn about appearance and change, so they are the building bricks of the higher concepts.

The original terms for appearance and change are Xiang(象) and Shu(數). They mean elephant and number. In ancient China people used ivory carvings of elephants to symbolize and image. What Xiang means in Medicine is image, and from here on will be called appearance. Why Shu is interpreted as change is well explained in the following translation of one of Dr. Park Chan Guk (Hamsoa Clinic)'s excerpts from his book Special Lectures on Korean Medicine.

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Man start noticing matters from the moment he is born. He feels joy, sorrow, and hunger, and he knows his mother. But the fact that the child recognizes his surroundings does not mean he knows the properties of them. Young puppies do not fear tigers. Grown dogs fear tigers from the appearance of the beast. But young puppies do not know the fearfulness because they don't see the terrible image. Then what is appearance? Is it nature, or nurture?

Seeing from puppies that do not fear a tiger, it must be the result of nurture. The experience doesn't even have to be of a fearsome encounter with a tiger. Her experience of being stung by a bee or fighting a cat might have accumulated into creating the fearsome appearance of tigers to the mother dog. Therefore, the appearance comes from viewing the present by experiences from the past. That is why dogs fear even the drawing of the tiger. In terms of conventional Medicine, reflexes can be an example.

However, it is irrational to say that one knows exactly the present just by taking in the situation. The brief moment of present exists only because there is past and future. A present without a future is meaningless. Our lives are achieved in the present, but the background is the future. Like drawing a picture on a piece of white paper, men paint their own lives on a piece of paper that is the future. The problem is so that they want to see how that piece of paper looks like. It is an instinctive desire of our race to know the future of our lives.

We can assume from the continuity of time that the future will change like in the past, and in that assumption, we can make out an order and theory from observing and analyzing changes.

Then what is change? In Eastern philosophy numbers are ways of describing a situation most simply. Drawing three cows when counting them is called arithmetic, and it is the easiest, fastest way to describing a situation. This usage of numbers is called change. Initially an order of numbers was used to grasp the meaning of an individual event, but it progressed into being used to express abstract matters as well.

Finally we can see the situation evolving thus: at first man started counting individual tangible things, but slowly started measuring quantity in numbers, and later even time, space and energy are understood in numbers. Man did not stop there and spoke of changes in matter in the language of numbers, in other words orders. It is only possible after learning that changes occur repeatedly in a regular period, and even these repeated events have a set rule to happen by. Periodic changes are observed in the repeat of day and night and the fact that we never miss a season in the four seasons.

Man observes an order in his birth, growth, disease and death. From these recognitions man express periodic changes simply in numbers.

The concepts of appearance and change are made by man to learn an object's situation or transformation easily. But they alone can hardly analyze and prophet exactly. A set law is required to use appearance and change. That is why man sought after a more exact and meaningful logic. That is what we call Eum Yang and the five functions.