Abstract: Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) has the characteristics of multi-component, multi-target and overall action. Network pharmacology has similar characteristics with TCM. Therefore, it is a trend to choose network pharmacology technology to study the material foundation and molecular mechanism of TCM. Network pharmacology technology can help researchers focus on the proteins, genes, and pathways, and become a common screening tool for researchers to conduct research. This paper mainly introduces the common research methods, commonly used databases and tools of network pharmacology, summarizes the material foundation and molecular mechanism of TCM, the properties theory, the toxic mechanism of TCM, the challenges and prospects of network pharmacology in the application of TCM, in order to provide a certain reference for the subsequent research of network pharmacology in TCM.