The Story of Wei Li, Ph.D. — First Formal Disciple of Dr. Wu Mingjie's Fengyang Daoist Chinese Medicine: From Scientist to Chinese Medicine Practitioner
Wei Li (Wei Li, Ph.D.) is the first formally initiated disciple in the thirty-nine years of Dr. Wu Mingjie's medical practice, and a rare inheritor spanning both modern life sciences and the Fengyang Daoist Chinese medicine system. He earned his bachelor's degree from Ocean University of China, his master's degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and then went to the United States for further study, where he received a Ph.D. in Biology from Tufts University. Having worked for many years in life-science research in both China and the United States, he is a research scholar trained rigorously in modern scientific method.
Life Turning Point: Encountering Fengyang Daoist Medicine on the Research Path
Years spent in the laboratory gave him a thorough command of modern biology, cellular mechanisms, and human physiology. Yet he gradually came to see the limits of the modern scientific framework when it comes to regulating the whole person—body and mind together. Through a chance meeting he got to know Dr. Wu Mingjie, the Chinese-American TCM doctor and twentieth-generation transmitter of the Fengyang lineage, and was introduced to the Fengyang Daoist Chinese medicine system tracing back seventeen hundred years to Dong Feng. He was deeply moved by its holistic view of health and healing, captured in the phrases "medicine and the Dao share the same origin" and "seventy percent nourishment, thirty percent treatment." Rather than treating Chinese medicine as a traditional empiricism opposed to modern science, he set out to build a bridge: to use modern scientific thinking to understand and verify traditional Daoist medicine, and to use the holistic perspective of Fengyang Daoist medicine to fill the gaps in the modern healthcare system.
Entering the Lineage: Passing the Torch
On November 13, 2024, at the Sanyuanli campus of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Dr. Wu Mingjie held his inaugural discipleship ceremony. Witnessed by elders including Professor Xiao Xinhe, Wei Li formally performed the apprenticeship rite and became the first initiated disciple of Fengyang Daoist Chinese medicine, entering the third-generation transmission line descending from Grand Master Deng Tietao, and beginning the path of a scientist's transformation into a Chinese medicine practitioner.
Since his initiation he has studied the complete Fengyang Daoist system under Dr. Wu: herbal medicine pattern differentiation, Fengyang Tui Na, qigong, Taiji, gua sha and cupping, and classical wellness protocols; he also continues to study the Fengyang Taiji Eight Forms and the ancient formulas handed down from Dong Feng, such as Liu Bao San.
Today: Practicing in New England at the Intersection of East and West
Today Wei Li runs wellness clinics in the New England region of the United States—in Natick, Maynard, and Palmer, Massachusetts—and serves concurrently as Secretary-General of the China-U.S. Chan Culture Exchange Association.