A "fire" As The Original Domain Of Conceptual Metaphor Cognitive System Of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Cognitive Science is one of the most popular areas of modern science. While, metaphor is a cognitive tool which interpreted the organization and establishment process of human concept system. To understand human thought you have to understand the formation of the metaphor concept that deeply concealed in human conceptual system. Embodied Cognition is a new cognitive paradigm emerged in the20th century, which emphasizes to put mental research in the background of interaction experience of the body and the environment. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) cognitive model is just such kind of interaction experience based on human body and the environment. TCM concepts contained a grand view of cognitive metaphor of human thought."Fire" is one of the most common phenomenon in nature, and has a significant symbolic feature in the eastern and western civilization."Fire" is one of the five elements of the basic theory of TCM concept at the same time. The concept connotation of "fire" in the Chinese medicine theory is very rich. Taking ’fire of the nature" as the source domain,"fire of human body" as the target domain, this study aimed to construct a metaphor cognitive system of the TCM concept of "fire" based on the background of modern cognitive science.This paper is mainly divided into the following four parts.The first part summarized the embodied experience of human thoughts and metaphorical of abstract concepts in the metaphor cognitive theory. The formation of TCM concept is similar with the western embodied science and metaphor cognition.The second part taking "fire" as the specific "image", studied the connotation of the concept of "fire" in TCM theory, from the perspective of nature, applying modern metaphor cognitive means.The third part is the focus of this paper. This part portrayed a conceptual metaphor cognitive system with "fire" as the original domain from the following four aspects:physiology, pathology, treatment principle and Zhang Zhong-jing’s thought of "Yang-qi". The cognition of the "fire of human body" is based on the experience of "fire of nature". The substance of the formation of "fire" in the TCM concept is a metaphorical mapping process from the "fire of nature" to the "fire of human body" Finally to the conclusion, human cognition comes from the embodied experience of the world. To introduce cognitive science to the research field is a kind of cleaning and combing process from the source of the traditional Chinese medicine theory.