State, Cosmos, and Body
in the Last Three Centuries B.C.

N. Sivin
For Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
94.8.25

This essay examines the explicit connections between the cosmos, the body, and the state in China up to the end of the first century B.C. It asks what structure underlies these connections, and concludes that the word "connections" may be misleading. In China ideas of Nature,¹

state, and the body were so interdependent that they are best considered a single complex.

Most of the patterns identified below would not have been perceptible ten years ago. The first broad critical revision of dates for classical texts in a generation has just been completed. The breakthroughs of A. C. Graham and a number of younger scholars, mostly in dissertations finished in the past five years, have transformed our understanding of how early books took shape. We now understand the need to date and evaluate many of them chapter by chapter. My argument draws on these recent studies for dates without recapitulating their arguments in detail.²

Nature, Body, State as Inventions

The conventional wisdom in the history of science sees Nature and the body as physical objects of knowledge. That view is essential to the enterprise of physical science, but has often hindered analysis of its history. History, unlike science, is not the study of physical things, but of how human beings conceive them. From this point of view Nature, state, and body are products of the ordering imagination, and are formed and reshaped by practice. They are very different sorts of artifacts than one finds elsewhere.

There is no reason to believe that the physical constitution of China changed measurably in the last three centuries B.C. The change in the course of the Yellow River in A.D. 11 was a great human catastrophe, but physiographically it was a minor and temporary rearrangement of the map. The occasional "new star," ominous though it might have been, did not significantly rearrange the astronomers' sky. But in that period the universe by fits and starts became a cosmos, that is, an orderly and harmonious system.

This transformation happened not because scientists discovered the laws of celestial motions. Mathematical astronomy did not transcend rudimentary calendar-making (day count and solar and lunar phenomena) until the end of the second century B.C.³ The cosmos changed when the political order changed fundamentally. According to the Ch'in chronology, the centralized imperial state was formally inaugurated in 221 B.C., but it was invented over a span of time that began about 255, when the Chou kingship was abolished, and ended when Han rule was finally consolidated near the end of the second century.

In the third century B.C., as the process of invention got under way, intellectuals bound the structure of heaven and earth, and that of the human body, to that of the state. This was not unprecedented in China, but now the links were made systematic and tight. In every instance their creators were preoccupied with political authority and its effective use. As a result, macrocosm and microcosms became a single manifold, a set of mutually resonant systems of which the emperor was indispensable mediator. This was true even of medicine, as I will show below.

The link was a great deal more than a simple causal relationship. Cosmology was not a mere reflection of politics. Cosmos, body, and state were shaped in a single process, as a result of changing circumstances that the new ideas in turn shaped. In order to trace this unitary origin it is necessary to set aside not only the reductionism of conventional social history, which ignores the shaping force of ideas, but also the history of philosophy's lack of concern with the role of society and politics in intellectual change.

State. That the state was an invention is scarcely a new insight. China differs from the Greek world primarily in that the state was so rarely reinvented. The functions of the central government changed greatly over the two millennia that the empire lasted, as did the size of its dominions, the technology and effective span of its control, its budget, the relations of emperor and officials, and the character of the elites from whom civil servants were drawn. In the mind's eye throughout history, the state remained nevertheless an unchanging authority, to which the experiences of one or two thousand years earlier were directly applicable. Neither of the two revolutions that began and ended the history of imperial China interrupted this sense of continuity.

In sources long predating the First Emperor one reads again and again of the need for what was envisioned since the early Chou as single leadership. "Son of Heaven" and "The One Man" are ancient titles.⁴ The notion of a constitution, much less that of plural constitutions, was never even the subject of speculation; the idea of an organized political opposition, however loyal, was anathematized every time there was the slightest hint that officials might join to criticize the regime. One looks in vain for attempts to design alternative political and social forms. The only examples of the latter that spring to mind are Taoist and Buddhist religious communities; despite the reluctance of their leaders to challenge authority, they were sometimes persecuted and always menaced.

Philosophers, regardless of the despair with which they sometimes viewed their age, agreed on the need for orthodoxy. They disagreed on what that orthodoxy ought to be, but their proposals, however various and however critical of individual officials, were meant to support, not to undermine, the current structure of power.⁵ Self-conscious programs of structural reform, such as the initiatives of Fan Chung-yen and Wang An-shih in the eleventh century, tended to depend on imperial enthusiasm, and thus to be short-lived and ultimately fruitless. The state's success in discouraging its own reimagination was no doubt a key to its longevity.

In the last three centuries B.C. a unified and centralized political order arose for the first time. Because for some time it was not at all clear that the new unity would endure, the state sought support from intellectuals who could argue for its legitimacy and permanence. By a hundred years into the Han, thinkers normally aimed to become officials. Those who spoke in the name of the monarch learned to portray cosmic order and imperial power as images of each other. They thus reinvented the state as a microcosm, resonating with the rhythms of the cosmos. Their ideology presented the arts of civilization, the good society, and the good life as imperial benefactions.

Even before the Ch'in state finished wiping out its rivals, the foundations for this new doctrine were being laid. In the Springs and Autumns of Lü Pu-wei (Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, ca. 239 B.C.), yin-yang theory had already become the order driving the universe. Lü's epochal book and its early Han successors provided a model for order that depended on maintaining hierarchical distinctions of authority―between those above and those below―and maintaining the unity of the state. _The book transforms the soon-to-be emperor from a conqueror to a lifegiver, to the maintainer of the only order that can survive. This order is durable because it is not arbitrary but based on heaven, the eternal standard. Dissidence or disobedience, contrary to that standard, is bound to fail.

Nature.

Gradually the desire to tame portents made it essential to know which phenomena were predictable. By the end of the second century B.C., predictability largely defined regularity.

The belief that irregularities were warnings motivated the evolution of astrology, which interpreted the unpredictable, and mathematical astronomy, which attempted to expand the domain of prediction. From the Han on a corps of technical experts, entrenched in a large civil service, used standardized procedures to study sky and earth for omens joyous and baneful.

Exactly when the notion of the Mandate of Heaven emerged will remain puzzling until what were traditionally held to be archaic texts can be more reliably dated. The Mandate signaled a momentous change. The continued approval of heaven, not merely descent from a dynastic founder, justified kingship. The first doctrines of the Mandate, if indeed they are as old as the early Chou, did not incorporate astrology as an early warning system. The new astral rationale became preponderant after power had effectively gravitated into the hands of the potentates, the most ambitious of whom, as time passed, saw themselves eminently qualified to become hegemon or even to succeed the Chou king.

As a result of this political reorientation toward the sky, general patterns began to emerge that in the Han made the celestial motions part of the resonant system of heaven and earth. The emergence of the new patterns was not a matter of filling a void. Confucius and Mencius, humanists in the strict sense, had not given the world outside human society a place in their ideals of the good life. Hsun-tzu (early or mid third century B.C.), who in early China was widely considered Confucius's preeminent successor, was a humanist in the same sense. He tried to separate the human realm from that of heaven and earth:

The course of heaven is constant. It does not continue because of [good kings like] Yao, nor is it abandoned because of [bad kings like] Chieh. If you respond to [this regularity] with good government, good fortune results. If you respond to it with disorder, misfortune results. If you strengthen what is fundamental [i.e., agriculture] and consume with moderation, heaven cannot impoverish [your state]. If you anticipate the needs of your people, mobilizing them at the proper times, heaven cannot inflict disease on it. If you practice the Way without wavering, heaven cannot visit calamities [on it]. Flood or drought cannot cause [your people] to starve; extremes of heat and cold cannot make them ill; apparitions cannot curse them. . . .

What comes about without being made to happen, what we get without seeking it, we call the work of heaven. This being so, no matter how deep [his understanding, the sage] does not ponder it. No matter how great his abilities, he does not apply them to it. No matter how refined [his perception], he does not investigate it. This we call not competing with heaven in one's work.

Hsun-tzu's heaven, like Confucius's, is at times reminiscent of the willful old high god of the Chou. Unlike that of his predecessors, Hsun-tzu's heaven goes its own way, oblivious to what the ruler does. Nothing in Hsun-tzu's animadversions indicates that at the time others were applying ideas of resonance to natural philosophy. He divided the cosmic from the human to argue against relying on omens and divination.⁷

Heaven and earth composed a system of meaning, like the Nature that the Greeks invented. The language of the Chinese system was at first highly diverse, but gradually it settled on the concept of yin and yang, and, eventually, that of the Five Phases, both of them greatly elaborated.⁸ The cosmological concepts also articulated the meanings of body and state. Heaven thus became more than a source of warnings. As a macrocosm it became, among other things, a basis for policy-making. It offered a pattern for every aspect of social organization and personal conduct, a point that calls for elaboration.

Body. In every time and place the interior of the living human body has been a work of the imagination, fashioned from social ideals as well as from physical data. Every culture constructed it of a different combination of cognitive ingredients. The classical European body was primarily built of structures, organs, tissues, and liquid humours. What were in classical times holistic discussions became in the nineteenth century anatomical, and in this century increasingly chemical (including gaseous) and cellular.

The early Chinese body was composed mainly of vaguely defined bones and flesh traversed by circulation tracts.⁹

Through these tracts vital fluids (not necessarily liquid) circulate between the limbs, the head, and an ensemble of systems in the center of the body that controls metabolic and other spontaneous vital processes. It would be more exact to call them ensembles of functions rather than systems. Most but not all of the circulation tracts were associated with and named after vaguely described viscera. Exactly what their physical correlates are or precisely where they are located did not mandate diligent exploration. As discussed in medical doctrine, they are not so much anatomical features as offices in the central bureaucracy of the body. The point of discourse about these somatic "posts" (kuan) and what they are "in charge" of (chu) was not to describe the incumbents, but to specify their duties. A typical example is the passage from the Inner Canon below.¹⁰

The Chinese were quite aware of skin, bones, sinews, and guts, but it would be misleading to call their interest anatomical. Early medical writings perfunctorily attempted to provide basic information about these parts and to describe their proper functions.¹¹ But authors did not give priority to improving knowledge of physical structures. On the whole organs and tissues figured in medical doctrines as mere correlates of the body's systems of functions, mainly useful in diagnosis and, of course, in various schemata that align parts of the body with physical features of the macrocosm (see, for instance, p. ). They were, in short, peripheral to the doctrines that underlay practice, just as the exact process that turned chyme to chyle to blood was not a matter for close inquiry in Galen.¹²

Because classical Chinese medicine was not based on an anatomical system, structures did not matter. Unlike European medicine, that of China has remained largely (but was never entirely) holistic.¹³ The Chinese lack of interest in structure was tied to the fact that surgery was rare, so rare that only one pre-Sung dissection (that of A.D. 16) is known. But which was cause and which effect is unclear. From at least the third century B.C., official autopsies were required when foul play was suspected. However (if later evidence applies), artisans of low social standing, not physicians, opened the corpses, so medical learning did not benefit from this common practice. But one cannot assume that frequent medical dissections would inevitably have deepened anatomical understanding. If directed by functional questions, opening the body just as likely would have led to a new range of functional answers, just as Aristotle's quest for formal and final causes determined what his dissections showed him.¹⁴

Finally, in China the boundaries of the body were different than in Greece. The terms normally used for the body, shen and t'i, cover a great deal more than Greek term soma, which clearly denotes the physical. Shen includes the individual personality, and may refer in a general way to the person rather than to the body. It may also refer (and still does) to juridical identity (as in shen-fen). T'i refers to the concrete physical body, its limbs, or the physical form generally. It also can mean "embodiment," and may refer to an individual's personification of something―for instance, a judgment that an immortal embodies the Way (t'i tao). Ch'ü comes closer to the scope of the European notion of body, but ling ch'ü implies the person, and ch'ü was not a common word. The only term for the body that has nothing to do with the person seen whole, hsing, literally means "shape." It often refers to the body's outline rather than to its physical identity.

It is not surprising that the European mind-body dichotomy (among a great many other mental habits) seems exotic to East Asians. The idea that "body" is a subset of "person" is a reasonable corollary of the unity of mind and body in Chinese thought. When Chinese wanted to be specific about a physical body or, for that matter, its bony frame, they had no trouble doing so. The authors of the Chuang-tzu, for instance, use hsing-t'i for the first, and hsing-hai and hsing-ch'ü for the second.¹⁵

The body was not only an ensemble of functions, but a microcosm. The Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor is explicit: "The subject of discourse, briefly put, is the free travel and inward and outward movement of the divine ch'i. It is not skin, flesh, sinews and bones."¹⁶

As we have seen, the body was defined not by what sets it apart but by its intimate, dynamic relation with its environment. This was certainly true in medical contexts: "Covered over by heaven, borne up by earth, among the myriad things none is more noble than man. Man is given life by the ch'i of heaven and earth, and grows to maturity following the norms of the four seasons. Whether sovereign or common fellow, everyone desires to keep his body intact. But the disorders to which the body is subject are too many for anyone to know them all."¹⁷

In the body as in the political world, dysfunction is disorder.

Since the body is a dynamic system interacting with the cosmos, the permeability of its boundaries was an important issue in medicine. The ch'i that permeates the universe permeates the body as well: "Since ancient times [it has been understood that] penetration by [the ch'i of] heaven is the basis of life, which depends on [the universal ch'i of] yin and yang. The ch'i [of everything] in the midst of heaven and earth and in the six directions, from the nine provinces and nine body orifices to the five visceral systems and the twelve joints, is penetrated by the ch'i of heaven."¹⁸

To sustain life, the body can be neither completely open nor completely closed. Food and ch'i must enter without admitting agents of disease; wastes must be excreted without allowing the body's vitalities to leak out. This is not a matter of conscious control but of spontaneous vital processes, all the more so because the normal route by which sources of disorder enter is not the bodily orifices but the pores of the skin over the whole surface of the body. This understanding has important consequences for both prevention and therapy. Regimen pays close attention to the tightness of the pores (and of the orifices as well). The most common remedy when agents of febrile disorders have just entered the body is using a sudorific to flush them back out the pores with perspiration. As in the humoral medicine of the West, the Chinese physician tried to keep healthy fluids in and force unhealthy substances out.

Because the circulation is fundamental not only to the body's growth but to its maintenance, its failure is a major determinant of disease. Somatic blockages are parallelled by failures of circulation in Nature and the state, as we will see below (p. ).

The physiological processes on which medical doctrines focus are largely metabolic.¹⁹

As we have seen, however, life is maintained not merely by the internal circulation of ch'i, but by a continuous dynamic interchange between body and cosmos. Shared vital rhythms make the body correspond to heaven and earth, and keep them in accord.

The Invention of Microcosms

The classics recognized by the Han government affirm that the state was tied to the cosmos at the very beginning of the Chou dynasty. The "Great Plan" ("Hung fan"), a chapter in the Book of Documents, sets out a broad array of correspondences. It includes many numerical categories, mostly fivefold, including five processes called wu hsing (the term that later came to designate the Five Phases). It speaks of "the year, the month, the day, the stars and constellations, and the calendaric calculations" as "the five regulators." It is much concerned with divination and celestial portents. Each type of omen in the sky is socially segregated: "The king watches the Year Star [for portents]. Ministers and officials watch the moon. The Leader of the Army watches the sun. . . . The common people watch the stars."

The explicit purpose of the "Great Plan" is to guide the king and to support his authority with the elaborate, ordered array of correspondences that heaven originally granted King Yü of the Hsia. For this reason the document is greatly concerned with rooting out opposition: "Whenever among their many people there are no depraved factions, and no rival powers [among your] men, it is precisely because the great [kings] have created the standard."²⁰

The "Great Plan's" first sentence explicitly dates its compilation to the year 1099 B.C.²¹

The document goes on to record a claim that it was direct revealed by heaven long before that. Since the eleventh century A.D. both accounts have been challenged repeatedly. Only recently has the Sinological rank and file rejected them; a date has not yet been firmly established. Nylan's comprehensive critical reevaluation suggests a date between the early fourth and mid third century B.C. The chapter represents a late stage in the prehistory of correspondence theory.

For information about the early stages one must examine the anecdotes of divination and medical therapy dated from the late eighth century B.C. in the Tso tradition of interpretation of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Tso chuan). These accounts use a great variety of links between nature and the state, including numerical categories of many kinds, to explain the meanings of omens and the causes of disease. Such explanations in later writings gradually settled upon yin and yang as they became abstract concepts, and later interwove with them correspondences based on the Five Phases. Both categories came to distinguish complementary aspects of the universal ch'i. A detailed consensus on the Five Phases had not yet formed by the first century B.C.; texts near that time do not agree on the phase to which each of the yin visceral systems of function should be assigned. Nor were the two ways of categorizing processes integrated before then.²²

Basic questions about the universe and the body were not worked out as abstract problems of natural philosophy. The understanding of heaven and earth and its relation to humanity did not evolve autonomously, but in close connection with the definition of the state and rulership, in fact in the same documents and regularly in the same passages. As Tung Chung-shu put it in the late second century B.C.: "The king models himself on heaven. He models himself on its seasons and consummates them. He models himself on its commands and circulates them among all men. He models himself on its constant categories and uses them when initiating affairs. He models himself on its Way and thereby makes order emerge. He models himself on its will and thus commits [his realm] to benevolence."²³

The institutions of the empire, in other words, were defined by defining the order of heaven and earth.

Macrocosm-Microcosm Relations

A few examples of resonant connections, some of them numerological, tell us about Chinese views of parallel universes, large and small. First is part of a chapter from the Inner Canon. The original versions of this book were probably assembled in the first century B.C. This long enumeration, as two excerpts will show, carries to an extreme what was by that time a well-established type of correlation. In one dialogue, when the Yellow Emperor inquired of Po-kao, "I would like to hear how the limbs and joints of the body correspond to heaven and earth," Po-kao replied:

. . . In the year there are 365 days; human beings have 365 joints. On the earth there are high mountains; human beings have shoulders and knees. On the earth there are deep valleys; human beings have armpits and hollows in back of their knees.²⁴

On the earth there are twelve cardinal watercourses; human beings have twelve cardinal circulation tracts.²⁵

In the earth there are veins of water; human beings have defensive ch'i.²⁶

On the earth there are wild grasses; human beings have body hair. On the earth there are daylight and darkness; human beings have their [times for] lying down and getting up. In heaven are the stars set out in constellations; human beings have their teeth. On the earth there are little hills; human beings have their minor joints. On the earth there are boulders on the mountains; human beings have their prominent bones. On the earth there are groves and forests; human beings have their sinews.²⁷

On the earth there are towns and villages in which people gather; human beings have their bulges of [or thickened] flesh. In the year there are twelve months; human beings have their twelve major joints. On the earth there are seasons when no vegetation grows; some human beings are childless. These are the correspondences between human beings and heaven and earth.

In a second colloquy, when the Yellow Emperor asked, "How are [heaven and earth] matched in the circulation vessels?," Ch'i-po replied, "The first day [of the ten-day week] is in charge of the immature yang vessels of the left hand. The sixth day is in charge of the immature yang vessels of the right hand." The enumeration continues for the ten days and ten of the twelve circulation branches connected with the hands. The subject as usual is not structure or location but who (in this case what day) is "in charge." Ch'i-po then itemizes the subdivisions of yin and yang, and warns against using acupuncture on those circulation branches in which human ch'i is concentrated in each season. The passage resumes as follows:

The Yellow Emperor said: "According to the [correspondence doctrine of the] Five Phases, the eastern quarter, the first two of the ten stems [used to count days in the week], and the phase Wood rule over spring. Spring [is associated with] the color of the blue sky and is in charge of the liver functions. The liver functions are those of the attenuated yin tracts connected with the feet. But now you claim that the first stem [corresponds to] the immature yang tract connected with the left hand, which does not tally with these regular relationships. Why is that?"

Ch'i-po said: "These are the yin and yang [correspondences] of heaven and earth, not the sequential changes of the four seasons and the Five Phases. Now yin and yang are names without physical form. 'They can be enumerated ten ways, separated a hundred ways, distributed a thousand ways, deduced a myriad ways' refers to this."²⁸

This chapter begins with what appear to be static physical correlates, only a portion of which I cite here. It also mentions day and night and the twelve months, which indicates that the authors are looking not only for things but also for aspects of change. The second excerpt is entirely spatio-temporal, correlating days of the ten-day week, and the ten "celestial stems" used to count them, with branches of the ch'i circulation system. The parallel, apparent to any Han reader, is between the round of days in the macrocosm and the circulation system in the somatic microcosm. The only mention of therapy in this passage, the warning about acupuncture, calls attention not to physical technique but to the need to know the seasonal cycle that governs the concentration of human ch'i in the circulation tracts. The final paragraph makes it clear that this set of direction-season-stem-tract correspondences in time and space does not rule out quite different associations between stems and tracts. In other networks of meaning other yin-yang linkages hold.

The next two examples of relations between the cosmos and the body are perhaps two centuries earlier, and are more general. They come from Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu. They are not particularly early in the history of microcosmic correspondences, but rather exhibit their full development in philosophical writing.

Human beings have 360 joints, nine body openings, and five yin and six yang systems of function. In the flesh tightness is desirable; in the blood vessels (hsueh mai) free flow is desirable; in the sinews and bones solidity is desirable; in the operations of the heart and mind harmony is desirable; in the essential ch'i regular motion is desirable. When [these desiderata] are realized, illness has nowhere to abide, and there is nothing from which pathology can develop. When illness lasts and pathology develops, it is because the essential ch'i has become static.

Analogously, water when stagnant becomes foul; a tree when [the circulation of its ch'i is] stagnant becomes worm-eaten; grasses when [the circulation of their ch'i is] stagnant become withered.²⁹ States too have their stases. When the ruler's virtue does not flow freely [i.e., when he is out of touch with his subjects], and the wishes of his people do not reach him, this is the stasis of a state. When the stasis of a state abides for a long time, a hundred pathologies arise in concert, and a myriad catastrophes swarm in. The cruelty of those above and those below toward each other arises from this. The reason that the sage kings valued heroic retainers and faithful ministers is that they dared to speak directly, breaking through such stases.³⁰

Except for the conventional numerological associations in the first sentence, a precursor of the elaborate parallels in the excerpt from the Divine Pivot (as discussed above), this quotation is devoted to dynamic relationships. Its correspondences are not merely bilateral; they include body, cosmos, and state. They accept the basic medical equation of normal, unhindered circulation with health. A blocked or static circulation due to dysfunction leads to pain or susceptibility to disease. This equation, transferred to the sphere of monarchy, implies that rulers who want their polities to be as sound as a healthy body and a normally functioning Nature should listen to their best-informed and frankest advisors.

The next excerpt comes from what is perhaps the most eloquent classical statement of cyclical cosmology:

The way of heaven is round; the way of earth is square. The sage kings took this as their model, basing on it [the distinction between] above and below. How do we explain the roundness of heaven? The essential ch'i alternately rises and falls,³¹

completing a cycle and beginning again, delayed by nothing; that is why we speak of the way of heaven as round. How do we explain the squareness of earth? The ten thousand things are distinct in category and shape. Each has its separate responsibility (fen-chih), and cannot carry out that of another; that is why one speaks of the way of earth as square. When the ruler grasps the round and his ministers keep to the square, so that round and square are not interchanged, his state prospers. . . .

The One is most exalted of all.³² No one knows its source. No one knows its incipient form (tuan). No one knows its beginning. No one knows its end. Still the myriad things take it as their progenitor. The sage kings took it as their model in order to perfect their natures, to settle their vital forces, and to form their commands.³³

A command issues from the ruler's mouth. Those in official positions receive it and carry it out, never resting day or night. It moves unimpeded all the way down. It permeates the people's hearts and propagates to the four quarters [of the realm]. Completing the circle, it reverts to the place of the ruler. That is the Round Way.

As the command goes round,³⁴ it makes possible what is impossible³⁵ and makes good what is not good, so that nothing impedes it. That nothing impedes it is because the Way of the ruler penetrates. Thus the command is what the ruler makes his life, and what determines his moral character and security.³⁶

In this chapter the cosmic Way mandates that the responsibilities of ruler and officials be strictly separated. The monarch's security depends on this. His obligation as the embodiment of heaven is to cultivate himself so that his commands will be sage and therefore potent. He avoids interfering with his officials. Their duty is to make the verbal embodiment of his will circulate throughout the realm and then back to the court―exactly as vital ch'i circulates through the human body. The minute division of the civil service into posts with distinct responsibilities (fen-chih) is no more artificial than the ruler's sagehood; the same term is used in the passage to signal that the myriad things are equally distinguished by their posts in the cosmic order.

From Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu on, one treatise after another declares that the emperor's spiritual responsibilities must be strictly segregated from the administrative tasks of his subordinates. One may read this as an attempt to legitimate the ruler's supreme power and protect it from interference by the elite. But this is obviously not the whole story. A great motif of all these writings was that the monarch should take qualified advisors seriously. Further, these books urged rulers to accept limitations on their power that was otherwise limited by no constitution and contested by no counterbalancing institution. This ideal of the new central state was too complex to be pigeonholed as either capitulation or resistance. As Sarah Queen put it when discussing Tung Chung-shu, who set in place a greatly overhauled Confucian orthodoxy that incorporated all these themes, Tung's position was "complex and contradictory. Although he criticized Emperor Wu's policies on numerous occasions . . . He did not use his great moral authority to curb the inherent power of the throne. Though he labored to establish a text-based theology that would limit the emperor's powers, he also drew upon the Confucian texts to sanction and amplify the ruler's revered position as a 'cosmic pivot,' responsible for aligning the human realm with the moral patterns of the cosmos."³⁷

The examples I have cited show that government depends on patterns that must be learned from the cosmos and the body, and that the functional systems of the body make up a bureaucracy. To complete the three-cornered schema, since the state is a little cosmos, the cosmos must be a civil service writ large. This is clear enough from the first of the astronomical treatises in the Standard Histories, which is in fact entitled "The Book of Celestial Offices" (T'ien kuan shu). It enumerates the visible asterisms, each a department staffed by stars. The area round the pole star, for instance, is the Central Palace. The list begins with "the constellation of the Celestial Pole, the brightest star of which is the permanent abode of the god Grand Unity [who corresponds to the emperor]. The three stars next to it are the Three Lords [the ruler's paramount advisors], although some identify them as his sons. Curving behind it there are four stars. The large star at the end is the Principal Consort; the other three belong to the rear palace. The twelve stars that surround [all of these], framing and defending them, are the officials who protect the palace. All of these make up the Purple Palace Precinct."³⁸

How far do all these sources take us toward a definition of the macrocosm-microcosm relationship? They tell us how it works, but not what makes it work.

Han readers hardly required an answer to this question, since these links are natural in an organic, cyclic universe, all the parts of which unceasingly interact. For the Treatise on Rites and Music of the Han History, the cosmic functions of the state are grounded in the experience of the individual: "Within the person is the ch'i of heaven and earth, yin and yang, and the emotions of satisfaction and anger, sorrow and happiness. heaven endows the person's nature but is unable to regulate it. The sage is able to regulate it on [heaven's] behalf, but is unable to get rid of it. He thus emulates heaven and earth to institute rites and music, which puts him in touch with the gods, establishes proper human relationships, corrects the emotions and the nature, and regulates all things."³⁹

That the state's functions are so grounded, of course, prompts the ruler to exert authority through ritual over the personal experience of his subjects.

Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu finally explained what aligns macrocosm and microcosms. Building on earlier notions of resonant stimulus, it elaborates the notion of "stimulus and response" (kan-ying).

The issue is in the first instance political. Tsou Yen, around the beginning of the third century, had set out a theory of history based on the idea that a set of Five Powers (wu te), which follow each other in what was later called the mutual conquest order of the Five Phases, governed the succession of dynasties: "Each virtue carries out its activity according to what it conquers."⁴⁰

Following Tsou's observation that each dynasty acts according to one of the Powers, following the mutual conquest sequence, Lü took a further step and predicted that the Fire of Chou (the phase to which it corresponds) would be succeeded by a dynasty embodying Water. The new dynasty, completing the cycle of the Five Powers, would eventually be succeeded by another, beginning a new cycle, that corresponds to Earth.

Lü went further in explaining that the succession is due to resonant response: "[Things of the same] category are certain to attract each other; when their ch'i is the same they are in harmony; when sounds are matched they resonate." Instances from Nature testify that political success is not a matter of fate but of knowing about and acting on categorical response. "As for where good and bad fortune come from, the masses take it to be destiny; how can they know where it originates?"⁴¹

The political and somatic microcosms resonate in harmony with the macrocosm because the ensemble of dynamic processes circulate ch'i (the activator and―in modern terms―material basis of change) throughout all three. The influence runs not only downward but upward, and between state and body as well. This is a relationship of correspondence, in which individual features and activities correspond point by point. The three domains may be said to mirror each other, but that metaphor was not regularly used for their relation.

The Character of Microcosms

Since the thinkers who invented the two microcosms simultaneously created the macrocosm, let us examine several salient characteristics of the aggregate.

Dynamic. The linkages between Nature and the state go far beyond categories and influences. A relatively systematic pre-Han schema, that of the "Monthly Ordinances" (yueh ling), is found in the Springs and Autumns of Lü Pu-wei (ca. 239).⁴²

It prescribes rites for the emperor and certain of his high officials to bring the operations of the state each month into alignment with the seasonal cycles. For instance, after a long list of associations―ranging from religious offerings to carriages, robes, jewelry, and food―to be adopted for the second month of summer, we are told: "This month [contains] the solstice of the longest day. Yin and yang are in struggle, and what lives is divided from what dies. . . . All the officials are quiescent, and punishments are not among their duties."⁴³ Even quiescence is one of the many activities of government.

In the Inner Canon, linkages of the body and the macrocosm are as dynamic as those of Lü for the state and Nature. To take only one example, when the moon is full, then hsueh and ch'i [i.e., the yin and yang vitalities] function smoothly; but when the moon wanes, human hsueh and ch'i follow suit. Human effort can affect the consequences of this relationship. The resonance of the body with natural process is an ideal toward which man must strive; ignoring it brings on disease.⁴⁴

Judith Farquhar writes of the classical cosmos, on which the modernized version of Chinese medicine still depends, as "a transforming world." "When the 'ontological ground' of effects is a state of constant transformation, when there is no European metaphysic requiring fixity of material essence as a criterion of 'reality,' it is patterns in and of time and space, rather than material structures and mechanical functions, that must be perceived. And for this profoundly temporal project, applied in medicine, yinyang is a clarifying model."⁴⁵

Social. There was a strict relationship between the hierarchic orders of Nature and society. The appropriateness of and need for clearly defined roles became a regular theme from Confucius on, but Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu took a new look at it:

Undertaking rule requires first determining hierarchic divisions: ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife. When ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife, all six, keep to their roles (wei), those below do not overstep their limits and those above do not act unreasonably. Metal and Wood have different responsibilities; Water and Fire differ in what they do; yin and yang are not the same, but [all] are as one in their benefit to the people. Thus difference is a way of securing sameness; sameness endangers difference. The demarcation between sameness and difference corresponds to the distinction between noble and lowly, the significance of senior and junior. This was a matter of concern to the former kings, a guideline in imposing order on disorder.⁴⁶

Although this passage conventionally emphasizes intimate relationships, it also takes as fundamental "the distinction between noble and lowly." Where it sets a precedent is in grounding these old ideas in cosmology, and in reaffirming this need from the viewpoint of what one might call state security―a stance that hardly would have occurred to Confucius.

Moral. Resonance implies that the morality of the human domain be one with that of the cosmos. As Ch'un-ch'iu fan lu (ca. 156/130) puts it:

Below, man causes the myriad things to reach maturity and, above, forms a triad with heaven and earth. Therefore, as a result of human order or disorder, dynamic or quiescent ch'i, compliant or contrary ch'i will detract from or add to the transforming power of yin and yang, affecting all within the four seas. . . . When the world is well ordered and the people are at peace, when the will of the ruler is settled and the ch'i [that energizes political order] is rectified, the transforming power of heaven and earth operates in a state of perfection and among the myriad things only the finest are produced. But when the world is in disorder and the people are perverse, when the will of the ruler is depraved and the [ordering] ch'i is contrary, the transforming power of heaven and earth is impaired and calamities arise.

In stressing the integrity of macrocosm and microcosms, philosophers trace familiar human virtues or social norms to cosmic norms. Another chapter of the same book derives filial piety from the order in which the Five Phases succeed one another in normal processes (i. e., those that serve as norms). After enumerating the Phases and their seasonal correlates, the text goes on "thus what the father creates the son matures," just as the Fire that corresponds to summer completes the work of the Wood that corresponds to spring, and so on. "Whatever the father does his son accepts, continuing to carry it out, not daring refuse to realize the father's intention. This is the Way of acting as a human being. Thus the five types of action [enumerated earlier by which the son continues the processes his father begins, called wu hsing or "five activities"] are the Five Phases (wu hsing). . . . Looking at it in this way, the son's accepting the father's instructions is the Way of heaven. The saying that 'filial piety is the warp-thread of heaven [and earth]' refers to this."⁴⁷

In this dialogue Tung Chung-shu has been asked why yin and yang meet not only at the summer solstice but at the winter solstice. This seems inappropriate because the characteristic activity (ch'i) of midwinter is associated with death, not with the lifegiving activities of yin and yang. His answer examines the relations between yin-yang and the corresponding four of the Five Phases:

When Metal, Wood, Water, and Fire each carries out its function in conformity with yin and yang, [the phase and the corresponding yin or yang state] constitute a single power that combines their efficacy. In actuality it is not a matter of yin-yang alone. Yin and yang exert themselves in compliance [with the phases, which govern the seasons] to aid in their functions. Thus immature yang acts in conformity with Wood to aid in the lifegiving activities of spring [and similarly for summer and autumn]. . . . Mature yin acts in conformity with Water to aid in the life-suspending activities of winter.

Although yin joins its ch'i with that of Water when they meet in winter, they are not actually the same. Only Water is involved in death. Yin has nothing to do with it. Therefore when yin and yang reach conjunction in midwinter, this is not a matter of death.

The emotion (chih) [associated with] spring is love; with summer, happiness; with fall, severity; and with winter, sadness. Thus love combined with severity, happiness coexisting with sadness, are normal patterns of the four seasons [because they correspond to the two conjunctions of yin and yang]. The . . . of joy and anger,⁴⁸ the significance of sadness and happiness, is not only within people but in heaven [that is, the natural order].

[Analogously] the yang of spring and summer and the yin of autumn and winter are not only in heaven but within people. If people did not have the ch'i of spring within them, how could they be capable of altruistic love and tolerance for the masses? . . . If people did not have the ch'i of winter within them, how could they be capable of sadness in response to death and pity for those who mourn? If heaven did not contain the ch'i of joy, how could it be capable of warmth and lifegiving in spring? If heaven did not contain the ch'i of anger, how could it be capable of [cold] clarity and killing in winter? . . .

Thus when I say that not only are the functions of joy, anger, sadness, and happiness located in heaven, but are the ch'i of spring, autumn, winter and summer within people, I am referring to the conjunction of categorically similar things (lei).

This passage may seem to be purely concerned with individual psychology and its cosmic foundations, but the remainder of the chapter returns to the theme of yin and yang as the basis of official hierarchy, which is equally concerned with activities appropriate to each season: "The ones who do not take the yang position are the ministers and sons; those who take the yang position are the lords and fathers. The Lord of Men faces south because yang is his throne. That yang is noble and yin base is heaven's regulation."⁴⁹

Conclusion

The time has come to consider an obvious question: Why was it desirable to think of the state and the body as universes in miniature? This was, after all, only one of a great many ways in which Han Chinese might have thought of them.

As Sarah Queen has put it, "Nature was the physical expression of Heaven's will. By observing the operations of the yin and yang forces as they moved through the yearly cycles of the four seasons, the qualities of Heaven's will could be discovered."⁵⁰

By incorporating microcosmic ritual into the work of the court, the ruler identified heaven's will with his own.

The body became a microcosm because, as we have seen, the schema of forces and seasons made sense when applied to the individual person. When the specialist Yellow Emperor texts moved microcosmic medical doctrine out of the main stream of political philosophy in the first century B.C., the authors, physicians and presumably not officials, found quite relevant the symbology of empire already prominent in general writings. Thus we have the dialogues between the Yellow Emperor and his counselors, which make medicine simultaneously a way of setting the microcosm right and an imperial revelation. In all except a few, the Yellow Emperor is asking the questions one would expect of a disciple when he has just received a text from his teacher. The minister is at once a master initiating his disciple and a sage advisor counseling his sovereign. The fusion may be incomplete because this literature developed out of two literary traditions, one of advice to monarchs and the other of the transmission of wisdom texts. As for the latter, it is common in premedical classics as well that the kingly revelator is not the originator, but the transmitter of a doctrine received from heaven. In most of the Inner Canon, however, the ruler is the recipient.⁵¹

The literary form of these dialogues, however incompletely digested, is that of the Huang-Lao texts, associated with the Yellow Emperor, that were so influential in earlier Han thought. It reflects the political ideal in those texts of the emperor as man of knowledge concerned not with running a government but with embodying the link between the cosmic order and the individual. This image is so pervasive that in a passage on the correspondence of acupuncture loci to compass points and yin-yang orientations, the body on which the loci are traced is that of "the sage enthroned facing south," that is, the emperor.⁵²

The literary and ideological forms that physicians drew on gave their writings great prestige. Of course they could have chosen simple exposition devoid of metaphor; such writing is common among very early medical texts recently excavated. One can reasonably conclude that the authors of the Inner Canon were consciously striving to multiply levels of meaning. One motivation for doing so, of course, is a desire to be taken seriously by more than one's fellow physicians alone.⁵³

That made it desirable for one's understanding of the body and its processes to cast light on the state and on heaven and earth as well.

This was not the only way to make sense of body processes and their dysfunctions. It seemed a desirable one because by the first century the unity of body, state, and cosmos had already become a staple of philosophers. As political ideology, it was one of the consequential ideas of its time. It remained consequential to the last days of imperial China.

APPENDIX
Note on Comparative Method

This essay is the first fruit of a collaboration with G. E. R. Lloyd of the University of Cambridge in which, with a broad range of comparative questions in mind, we are reviewing the entire Chinese and Greek literatures of natural philosophy, science, and medicine up to about A.D. 200. Although only a few explicit references to Greek ideas appear in the analysis above, the method of approach to the Chinese evidence is largely inspired by the results of comparison.

Let me recapitulate some of the main themes of this study by showing how it reflects salient differences between macrocosm and microcosms in China and Greece. In order to do so concisely, I must shift to general patterns, setting aside the nuanced analyses, sensitive to variations in space and time, that my colleague and I have applied to the Greek and Chinese sources. One can always cavil at any generalization, but well-considered ones make it possible to separate significant differences from trivial ones.

1. The Greek and Chinese macrocosms as well as the political microcosms reflected political ideals. The Chinese ideal, during the anomic and violent period from the late Chou through the first phase of the Western Han, as well as the period of expansion and grandiose projects from the middle of the second century to the first quarter of the first, remained unifying and central. In the Warring States period the yearning for a stable order was overriding; from the Ch'in on, union seemed a feasible goal. In other circumstances Chinese no doubt might have invented governmental forms other than the centralized empire, but as events fell out, they did not. In a social system that valued civil service above every other career, philosophers who wanted to be politically engaged―or simply respectable―understood the dangers of proposing alternatives to the current dispensation of power.

Given the diversity of Greek states, constitutions, and political tastes, the cosmos might be seen as a single order, a balance of opposed powers, or a state of strife. There was no shared ideal to build on, and no hope of a consensus.

2. Chinese rulers maintained that the state was a microcosm to enlist the collaboration of a civil elite by building on symbols and rituals that the latter valued. As we have seen (p. ), rulers and officials collaborated in this alignment, and it bound both.

Greek kings occasionally used state-body analogies because in the classical city state they were reduced to honorific, symbolic, or priestly roles. They had to be persuasive when their claims to power did not happen to be backed by force. But their interests were on the whole irrelevant to the development of cosmic metaphors for the state. What shaped such metaphors was the confrontation between philosophers, who as a group had no voice in the decisions of power-holders. Because philosophers were not constrained by reasons of state, and because innovation bolstered their polemical positions, they launched a great range of definitions of the state as well as of the cosmos.

3. In Greece favoring one's private interest was acceptable; in China it was unthinkable.⁵⁴

Even the most rapacious Chinese officials mastered altruistic modes of justification. The unbridgeable gulf of power between the emperor and his civil servants encouraged another level of mendacity. The tension between the identities of the latter as tools of imperial control and as representatives of a hereditary elite with interests opposed to those of the ruler cannot be ignored, but in the historic record it is largely unacknowledged.

Different attitudes toward private interest are responsible for another contrast. Cosmology and astrology consistently have implications for the state in China, and for the individual in Greece.

4. Greeks, when they describe the state as a body politic, tend to view deviants as a sort of disease needing treatment, or to see doctors as models of expert authority that might be applicable to a rigorous science of government.

Chinese are not concerned with deviants in this connection. That is a bit unexpected, since the usual term for pathogen is hsieh, which also refers to heterodox thought (its root meaning is "unbalanced," as opposed to cheng, "upright, correct, orthodox"). The only deviants to whom the early sources apply hsieh as a medical metaphor are ministers guilty of misconduct. This may simply reflect the focus on the relations of the emperor and officialdom, which makes the views of civil servants matter.⁵⁵

Good physicians are indeed often likened to good imperial counselors, but such similes consistently stress the virtue of practitioners, not their expertise.⁵⁶

Anecdotists as well as medical authors take the expertise of examplary doctors for granted, which was never the case among Greeks. Chinese examples of virtue that involve doctors or ministers tend as usual to be about adherence to social norms.

5. Greek culture in the period concerning us encouraged disagreement and disputation in natural philosophy and science as in every other field; Chinese emphasized consensus.⁵⁷

This does not mean that Greeks never saw eye to eye and that Chinese always did. A very few early Chinese thinkers were consistently critical, and many carped at one time or another. Greek minds met on fundamentals often enough to make their early thought largely cumulative. Only in the Hellenistic period did the formation of schools devoted to the work of a charismatic predecessor lead a step further to shared doctrines; this was at least analogous to China's older text-based lineages as a foundation for the transmission of knowledge. But in the Greek schools, defense of these doctrines against attacks by outsiders remained a constant ferment.

The Hellenistic world was not, of course, Athens in the heyday of Plato. Intellectual, social and political authority had been realigned.⁵⁸

That is not to say that forms of technical discourse are simple products of social forces. The links, neither linear nor simple, are articulated within the manifold discussed earlier. What we see when we compare Han, Hellenic, and Hellenistic cultures are distinct ways of forming exclusive groups that drew on distinct social resources to fashion and maintain institutions.⁵⁹

6. Greeks, even when they agreed that some proposition was the case, seldom agreed on why or how. In China general agreement was more common. Even so, a consensus on broad principles does not imply that doctrines were standardized. To take an example from medicine, yin-yang, the Five Phases, and the Six Warps (liu ching) in the Inner Canon and later doctrinal works provided sophisticated alternative languages for describing changes in the somatic microcosm.

Medical scholars from the Han on tried to reconcile discrepant systems of correspondence. Followers of that classicist tradition, however, did not replace old systems with new ones, but added to them, producing increasingly comprehensive, complex schemata. In the absence of a single occupational or educational structure to settle on and enforce an authoritative synthesis, general agreement on the outlines of doctrine never extended to its fine details.

Nor can one assume that physicians wanted such agreement. Multiple explanations of the same phenomenon, often inconsistent, remained frequent in medical doctrine. Although a logician would condemn the system as lacking in rigor, Ch'i-po, as we have already seen, defended it as a fuller account, more adequate to the complexities of medical practice, than narrow consistency could yield (p. ). Chinese on the whole preferred to cascade levels of meaning rather than to seek a single cause ruling out all others.⁶⁰

The Chinese state could have imposed a unitary medical doctrine, but it did not do so; in the Greek city-states even rudimentary standardization was unattainable. In neither China nor the Greek world, despite the clear difference in the value they gave to agreement, could professional institutions of the modern kind have evolved to settle technical differences.

7. There is finally the question of rhetoric, which can never be separated from issues of status.

For Greeks, whatever other purposes it served, oral contention was a tool of competition. Lacking sinecures or even secure employment for Masters of Truth, fame and livelihood depended on debate. Argument tended to be face to face, and the public was expected to decide, just as the public decided in the assembly or at trials. These customs had no Chinese counterparts.

In China Possessors of the Way, with exceptions, expected to be supported by rulers―as "guests" in the late Chou courts and as officials in the Han. Their interlocutors were not fellow thinkers but their patrons, who expected advice but did not feel obliged to act on or even reply to it. This relationship hardly made for lively exchanges, and few are recorded. Disagreements with other philosophers (except on matters of state policy) were unimportant by comparison. Most philosophic disagreements were originally written, and were directed at dead or absent rivals.⁶¹

The text-based lineages referred to above ruled out internal disagreement except in affirmatively developing the ideas of intellectual ancestors. Masters often used argument among pupils as a teaching tool, but disciples did not lightly assume that their teacher was wrong. Chinese coteries, unlike Hellenistic philosophic schools, avoided publicly declaring war on other communities. Hostilities would be unproductive when teachers (not to mention parents) aspired above all to public employment for their pupils. Neither the esteem of all colleagues everywhere nor public celebrity could compensate for lack of access to appointments, and private work as a teacher was not a desirable end in itself.

Rivalry in the court for control of official appointments did occasionally lead to intense attacks on rivals. The issues were chosen for their political resonance, not for their conceptual interest. Thus a group of ju attempting in 140 B.C. to prohibit nominations of "legalists" for office charged that their ilk "threw the state administration into chaos." Tung Chung-shu pled successfully in 136 or 135 B.C. that diverse doctrines made unified policies and effective legislation impossible, so the "depraved teachings" of all Erudites save those who taught the Five Classics "should be wiped out."⁶²

Concrete circumstances made for great differences between the two cultures in what one said and how one said it. The conditions of livelihood partly explain why the discourse of Chinese natural philosophy, science, and medicine was non-confrontational, and why their practitioners accepted and contributed to the state's view of itself. This view, as we have seen, encompassed not merely the political microcosm, but the cosmos and the body. It constituted the manifold in which the three were united.

² The best current datings for roughly seventy pre-Han and Han books are set out in Michael Loewe, Early Chinese Texts. A Bibliographical Guide (Early China Special Monograph Series, 2; Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993, publ. 1994). For fresh approaches to dating see, among others, A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao. Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), and earlier studies gathered in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990); David Keegan, "The 'Huang-ti nei-ching': The Structure of the Compilation; The Significance of the Structure," Ph.D. diss. (University of California at Berkeley, 1988); Sarah Queen, "From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the Spring and Autumn Annals according to Tung Chung-shu," Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 1991, revised version in press); Harold David Roth, The Textual History of the Huai-nan Tzu, AAS Monograph Series, 46 (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1992) and his other publications; and Carine Defoort, "A Focal Point of Sinological and Philosophical Unity: An Investigation into the Textual Unity of the Ho-Kuan-Tzu and its Contribution as a Philosophy of Unity," Ph.D. diss. (Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, 1993). I am grateful to all these authors for discussions of methodological issues, and to Marta Hanson and J. C. Feudtner for helpful suggestions.
³ The first system that predicted eclipses, planetary motions, and other complex phenomena was put into practice at the end of 105 B.C. See Sivin, Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathematical Astronomy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), pp. 15-19 and passim, and Christopher Cullen, "Motivations for Scientific Change in Ancient China: Emperor Wu and the Grand Inception Astronomical Reforms of 104 B.C.," Journal for the History of Astronomy 24 (1993): 185-203. Cullen sheds considerable light on non-astronomical motivations for the new system.
⁴ T'ien-tzu occurs earliest in the Ch'un-ch'iu for 582 B.C., and in Tso chuan for 721 B.C. I jen occurs in Mao shih, 260, stanza 4. References to primary sources for which editions are not specified are to texts in standard concordances (punctuated with slashes). References to the Standard Histories are to the Chung Hua Book Co. ed. (Beijing, 1974). "210-215" refers to the whole period; "210/215" means "at some time between 210 and 215."
⁵ Chuang-tzu (ca. 320 B.C.) was the last anarchist, if that title fits so apolitical a thinker. Needham finds another "radical anti-feudalist" in Pao Ching-yen, whom he dates provisionally in the early third century A.D., but a close look at the source prompts greater certainty than Needham's that "he may have been a character invented by Ko Hung"; see Science and Civilisation in China (17 vols. to date; Cambridge: At the University Press, 1954- ), 2: 434-36. For such a look see Sivin, "Taoism and Science," in Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections (forthcoming from Variorum, 1995).
⁶ In the Shang the ruler consulted his ancestors on the meaning of eclipses and other ominous phenomena. There are records of solar eclipses from the Shang, but none has been reliably dated; Xu Zhentao, Kevin K. C. Yau, and F. Richard Stephenson, "Astronomical Records on the Shang Dynasty Oracle Bones," Archæoastronomy 14 (1989): 561-72. On the problematic character of "astronomical" oracle texts see David N. Keightley, "On the Misuse of Ancient Chinese Inscriptions: An Astronomical Fantasy," History of Science 15 (1977): 267-72. Over ten thousand records from 776 B.C. on are listed in Chuang Wei-feng and Wang Li-hsing, eds., Chung-kuo ku-tai t'ien-hsiang chi-lu tsung chi, vol. 1 (Nanjing: Chiang-su k'o-hsueh chi-shu ch'u-pan-she, 1988).
⁷ Hsun-tzu, 11/17/12a-13a, modified from the translation in Burton Watson, Hsün-tzu. Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 79-80, and the excerpts in Graham, Disputers, p. 239. Chih, the word translated "work," ordinarily refers to a vocation, duty, or official position. The best exposition on t'ien in the Hsun-tzu is in Graham, pp. 238-44. Hsun-tzu's heaven is neither anthropomorphic nor impersonal.
⁸ On diverse concepts in Tso chuan, Graham nicely makes the point (Disputers, p. 70). I cannot accept, however, his narrow definition of "philosophy," which excludes not only early concepts of Nature used by court advisors but also resonance schemata from the late Warring States on.
⁹ On how these were envisioned see Sivin, Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China: A Partial Translation of Revised Outline of Chinese Medicine (1972), with an Introductory Study on Change in Present-day and Early Medicine, Science, Medicine and Technology in East Asia, 2 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1987), pp. 133-37.
¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 132-33, discusses bureaucratic metaphors used in this connection.
¹¹ See, for instance, the discussion in ibid., pp. 118-19.
¹² This is not to say that Galen was incurious about the answer, or that Chinese never looked for ways to integrate these elements into their account of the body. The focus of each system made the investigation of certain questions unprofitable, so that they, and discourse dependent on them, remained incidental.
¹³ The body's contents are described in detail in Sivin, Traditional Medicine, Chapters 2, 4. On non-holistic aspects of one of the Huang-ti nei ching texts see Martha Li Chiu, "Mind, Body and Illness in a Chinese Medical Tradition," Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 1986). By "classical" Chinese medicine I mean teachings prior to the influence of modern biomedicine, which was nugatory before 1880 and barely significant in the Republican period, but transformed traditional doctrine after 1950.
¹⁴ Yamada Keiji, "Anatometrics in Ancient China," Chinese Science 10 (1991): 39-52, has made a strong case that the dissection of A.D. 16 was the only one recorded prior to the eleventh century. He shows that this dissection was more quantitatively than descriptively oriented. On the ubiquity of autopsies in the Sung see Brian E. McKnight, The Washing away of Wrongs: Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth-century China, Science, Medicine, and Technology in East Asia, 1 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1981), and, for more fragmentary evidence concerning the Ch'in, A. F. P. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch'in Law. An Annotated Translation of the Ch'in Legal and Administrative Rules of the 3rd Century B.C., Discovered in Yun-meng Prefecture, Hu-pei Province, 1975, Sinica Leidensia, 17 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985). On Aristotle's dissections see G. E. R. Lloyd, "Alcmaeon and the early History of Dissection," in Methods and Problems in Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 164-93, esp. pp. 180-81.
¹⁵ Each occurs more than once in Chuang-tzu. See, for example, for the first 11/54, for the second 1/31, and for the third 11/65. Only the second occurs in the "Inner Chapters," generally considered the earliest stratum. Hai refers to the skeleton.
¹⁶ Huang-ti nei ching ling shu [hereafter LS], in Jen Ying-ch'iu, Huang-ti nei ching chang-chü so-yin (Beijing: Jen-min Wei-sheng Ch'u-pan-she, 1986; cited by p'ien, chang, and page), 1.6.265. "Divine ch'i" (shen ch'i) is the normal vitality of the body.
¹⁷ Huang-ti nei ching t'ai su (hereafter TS; in Kosoto Hiroshi, ed., Tôyô igaku zempon sôsho (Osaka: Tôyô igaku kenkyûkai, 1981; cited by chüan, p'ien, and page), 19.6.335. There is a parallel passage in Huang-ti nei ching su wen (hereafter SW; in Jen, cited by p'ien, chang, and page), 25.1.79.
¹⁸ TS, 3.2.107, parallel passage in SW, 3.1.12.
¹⁹ For details see Sivin, Traditional Medicine, pp. 95-99, 123-24, and 152-62.
²⁰ Shang shu, "Hung fan," 5, 8, 29, and 10; translations from Michael Nylan, The Shifting Center. The Original "Great Plan" and Later Readings, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 24 (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1992), pp. 20, 25. For a complete translation see Bernhard Karlgren, "The Book of Documents," BMFEA 22 (1950): 1-81. The Year Star is an invisible counter-rotating correlate of Jupiter. Wu hsing as it appears in this document has little to do with the later Five Phases. Graham translates the pre-Han sense as "Five Processes" on the ground that its meaning is entirely functional (Disputers, p. 326). There is indeed a basic shift of meaning and context, but the term remains functional.
²¹ The date varies according to which of several rival chronologies one uses.
²² Maruyama Masao, "Somon, Reisu ni okeru on'yô gogyô setsu no igi," Nihon tôyô igaku kaishi 13.1 (1962): 13-17, esp. p. 14, tabulates differences in these associations in the Kuan-tzu, SW, and two discrepant chapters of Huai-nan-tzu. The constituent texts of certain books prior to the first century such as Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu and Ch'un-ch'iu fan lu separately cite yin-yang and wu-hsing, but do not integrate them in a single system. On this problem in the latter book, see Queen. I will discuss the historical problem of integration in detail elsewhere.
²³ Ch'un-ch'iu fan lu (in Ch'un-chiu fan lu i cheng), 11: 9b; the meaning of the last sentence remains uncertain. I accept the recommendations of the editor Su Yü for reading this corrupt passage; he suggests that shih and chih are scribal errors for fa, and fa also appears instead of chih. See also Queen, pp. 326-27.
²⁴ The basis of these associations is prominent convex shapes for the yang features and concavities for the yin.
²⁵ This set of correspondences is greatly elaborated in TS, 5.4.25-40, parallel passage in LS, 12.1-4.311-13.
²⁶ Defensive ch'i (wei ch'i) flows round the perimeter of the body and protects it from invasion. TS, 5.1.1, instead of "veins of water" (ch'üan mai), has two characters, the first of which is only partly legible; the compound may be "the ch'i of rain" (yü ch'i).
²⁷ The sinews (chin, mo-chin) are the muscles, ligaments, and other fibrous tissues that operate the locomotive system of the body. This association probably refers to their gathered fibers.
²⁸ TS, 5.1.1-3, 6-10, parallel passage in LS, 71.2.446, 41.2-5.378-79. At the end these texts are quoting SW, 6.1.24, or a common source. The Inner Canon often quotes its predecessors, and sometimes names them. The point of Ch'i-po's reply is that because yin-yang and the Five Phases are abstractions and not concrete things, they can be interpreted on many levels.
²⁹ The translation of the last sentence is uncertain, for k'uei appears corrupt. None of the commentators offers a plausible reconstruction, nor can I.
³⁰ Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, in Chen Ch'i-yu, Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu chiao shih (Shanghai: Hsueh-lin ch'u-pan-she, 1984), ch. 20. lan 8.5.1373. We refer to the author of this book below as "Lü" for simplicity, but it is actually a compilation by Lü's clients. We do not accept the conventional opinion, however, that it is hopelessly eclectic; to the contrary, its major themes, several of which we discuss here, are consistently maintained.
³¹ This refers to the movements of the energies that correspond to the seasons. Round and square are conventional correlates of sky and earth as well as of their Ways. This metaphor may originate in the idea that locations in the sky are measured in degrees, a cyclic measure, and those on earth linearly according to the cardinal directions.
³² Here I follow Pi Juan in reading ch'i as che. The One is the ineffable aspect of the tao.
³³ I follow Pi, who cites old collations to read ch'üan for ling and sheng for cheng. The meaning of tuan is uncertain.
³⁴ Here yuan is used as a verb, so that ling yuan literally means "the order rounds." But in this context it also implies "as the order accords with the Round Way." Yuan also can mean "complete, perfect," further enriching the implication.
³⁵ The text at the same time means "makes the impermissible permissible."
³⁶ Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, 3. chi 3.5.171-73.
³⁷ Queen, Introduction, p. 6.
³⁸ Shih chi, ch. 27, translation from p. 1289. The principal consort is not the empress. The residence of all the imperial wives is called the rear palace. For a monograph on this chapter see Kao P'ing-tzu, Shih chi T'ien-kuan shu chin chu (Taipei: Chung-hua ts'ung-shu pien-shen wei-yuan-hui, 1965).
³⁹ Han shu, 21B.1027.
⁴⁰ A commentary in Shih chi, 28.1369, quotes a lost book of Tsou. In the surviving fragments there is no evidence that Tsou worked out the notion of resonant categories, a matter I take up in "The Myth of the Naturalists," in Medicine, Philosophy and Religion.
⁴¹ Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, 13. lan 1.2.678. Needham, 2: 281, translates an expanded version of the first Lü passage from Ch'un-ch'iu fan lu. An equally interesting later passage is Huai-nan-tzu (in Huai-nan hung lieh chi-chieh), 6.3a-4a, trans. Charles Le Blanc, Huai-nan tzu. Philosophical Synthesis in Early Han Thought. The Idea of Resonance (Kan-Ying). With a Translation and Analysis of Chapter Six (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1985), pp. 116-19. On the history of resonance theory, including a similar quotation from Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, see Needham 5.4: 305-23.
⁴² Whether the Lü version was copied from a lost earlier source is an open question. In any case one of its ingredients is an agricultural calendar with natural phenomena characteristic of each five-day period, essentially the schema in chüan 9, p'ien 52-53, of the I Chou shu (in Chou shu chi hsun chiao shih), which may be as early as the late fourth century or as late as the early first. Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu combines this calendar with seasonal prescriptions for the central government's business, as in Kuan-tzu (in Erh-shih-erh-tzu), 14. p'ien 40, and a detailed calendar of palace rituals. See also the second-century version in Huai-nan-tzu, ch. 5, translated in John S. Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought. Chapters Three, Four, and Five of the Huainanzi (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 217-57.
⁴³ Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, 5. chi 5.1.242. Yin and yang struggle because yang has reached its point of greatest intensity and yin its least. The phrase on the division of death and life is usually taken to be about the fact that deciduous plants begin dying in this month. Wang Nien-sun argues that the passage about officials is about the body and should be part of an account of the exemplary man's self-cultivation that we have omitted, but I find his explanation excessively ingenious.
⁴⁴ This summarizes TS, 28.5.28-9, parallel passage in LS, 79.2.474-5. On the last point see especially TS 27 and 2.1.18-19, paralleled in SW, 2.5.10-11.
⁴⁵ Judith Farquhar, Knowing Practice. The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 218-19.
⁴⁶ Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, 25. lun 5.5.1669.
⁴⁷ Ch'un-ch'iu fan lu, 17.81.7a-7b, 10.38.22a-22b. The translation of the first passage is modified from that in Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, 2 vols., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952-1953), 2:57. The last passage incorporates a play on the word wu hsing, which with a slight difference in pronunciation can have two distinct meanings. Sarah Queen has questioned the authenticity of the Five Phases chapters (p'ien 38, 42, 58-64).
⁴⁸ Huo, "catastrophe," is clearly corrupt. The original word must have been similar in meaning to "significance" in the next clause.
⁴⁹ Ch'un-ch'iu fan lu, 11.46.13a-14a. P'ien 46 is presumably authentic. The relationship between the Five Phases and the subdivisions of yin and yang continue in medicine. They are discussed in Sivin (see n. ), pp. 66-80.
⁵⁰ Queen, "From Chronicle to Canon."
⁵¹ For an example of a celestial revelation, see the remarks on the "Great Plan" above, p. . The Yellow Emperor is the respondent in only 13 of the 162 p'ien in SW and LS. On transmission in text-based lineages see Sivin, "Text and Experience in Classical Chinese Medicine," in Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions, ed. Don G. Bates (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
⁵² SW, 6.2.24, parallel in TS, 5.2.13.
⁵³ It is difficult to see how practical manuals of the sort excavated at Mawangdui in 1973 or later typified in the Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Disorders (Shang han tsa ping lun, A.D. 196/220) could have served this extra-medical purpose. Their technical terminology does not lack social and political resonances, but that was inescapable by the end of the Warring States.
⁵⁴ Counter-examples are rare. The one such dissident known to every student of philosophy is Yang Chu, largely because he has been so ceaselessly belabored. Graham has argued convincingly that he is no egoist, but simply argues for the value of private life and against the moralism of a society striving for orthodoxy (Disputers, pp. 53-64).
⁵⁵ Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, 17. lan 5.1.1029.
⁵⁶ . The locus classicus for the equation of the physician's virtue with that of the high minister is the anecdote about Fan Chung-yen in Neng kai chai man lu, **.
⁵⁷ Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities, Themes in the Social Sciences, 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapters 3-4, has documented this point.
⁵⁸ Lloyd, Methods and Problems, takes up the transition from Hellenic to Hellenistic natural philosophy in several essays. See also Shigeru Nakayama, Academic and Scientific Traditions in China, Japan, and the West, trans. Jerry Dusenberry (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984).
⁵⁹ . On the role of symbolic universes in legitimation of institutions, and vice versa, the primer is Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Penguin University Books (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), esp. pp. 110-46.
⁶⁰ . This should not be misunderstood to imply that the Chinese were more inclined to literary than to scientific modes of thought. Judgments of this kind have been asserted more than once on the basis of superficial analogies with modern science. Elaborate structures of analogy across many levels are common in recent systems theory. What is more important, the range of possibilities that have been realized in contemporary physical science is too far narrow to circumscribe the possibilities of physical theory in other times and places (even eighteenth-century Europe!).
⁶¹ Those who assume on the basis of European history that face-to-face debate is essential to the evolution of philosophy may prefer the hypothesis that such give-and-take was frequent but not recorded. No historian so far has provided evidence for it. This question of the forms of dispute and the role of debate requires thorough discussion elsewhere.
⁶² . Han shu, 6.156, 56.2523; discussed in Queen, esp. pp. 34-36, and Cullen, pp. 194-95.

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