Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has become the representative of traditional medicine and cul-ture, has caught the attention among people from various fields. Metaphor thinking, which exists in TCM language, has attracted multidisciplinary experts and scholars from the field of TCM study, linguistics and philosophy. This ar-ticle was aimed to collect and analyze previous study results on TCM metaphor, in order to find out the study value and explanation methods on TCM language and TCM theories. At present, there were metaphor studies in TCM in-cluding macroscopic studies based on rhetoric and cognitive linguistics, medium-scopic researches on basic TCM theories, etiology and pathogenesis, as well as microscopic studies of TCM classics language and terminology. Sys-tematic multidisciplinary studies of metaphor in TCM based on corpora will be the future study direction.