Premodern Intercultural Communication by Reanalyzing the Phrase “Da Yi Jing Cheng (大医精诚)”

Abstract

Culture is fluid, not static. When one culture meets and blends with another, Western academic circles tend to use cultural hybridity to express a mixed state of culture. By reanalyzing the classic texts in relation to “Da Yi Jing Cheng (大医精诚)”, tracing the evolution of traditional medical ethics in history, and combining the knowledge of cultural hybridity, this paper suggests that cultural hybridity is not applicable to the discussion on the phenomenon of intercultural communication in the era before the rise of national states and modernity. A new discourse is needed to express intercultural integration, one that breaks through Western values and embodies the characteristics of Asian civilization. Civilization exchange and mutual learning can become the ideal model of intercultural communication under the background of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.