Metaphor is a basic cognitive thinking mode of human beings to recognize unfamiliar and unknown “target domains” through familiar and known “source domains”，which plays an important role in the innovation of natural and social sciences.Metaphor is everywhere in natural language.The concepts and theories of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) are based on metaphor cognition by projecting astronomy，geography，social fields，and other source domains to the target domain，the human body.With the rapid development of modern medicine，contemporary TCM faces many unprecedented or unrealized human life phenomena and clinical problems.The phenomena need to be explained and the problems need to be solved，both of which require theoretical innovation.The attributes of analogy and innovation contained in metaphor and the cognitive characteristics of metaphor in TCM together determine the fact that modern theoretical innovation of TCM still needs metaphor as an important mode of scientific exploration and interpretation methodology.