Abstract: Professor LIU Yaxian strongly emphasized that the academic research of Chinese medicine should pay attention to methods, and be “good at thinking” and “out of the box”(taking innovation out of the frame of the original work). Recently, he guided authors to focus on the Pi Wei Lun. When learning from LI Dongyuan's academic research, he proposed to expand thinking channels to gather “streams” into “rivers”. This article gives examples of LI Dongyuan's “Congquan”, WANG Haogu's “Paizhi”, “reading must look at the opposite”, “reading must understand the opposite”, and “reading must collect the data” among the ten reading principles in Wu Yi Hui Jiang, and shows professor LIU Yaxian's thinking about reading: what, why, how and what should we do as one of the methods in academic research.

Key words: professor LIU Yaxian, academic research of Yishui school, expand thinking channels, combining “streams” into “rivers”, “Congquan”, “Paizhi”, medical case