An Introduction to Traditional Chinese Concepts about how the Cosmos Functions.
Science? Pseudoscience? Mysticism? Or just really cool philosophical ponderings by a bunch of old Chinese guys long ago?
Greetings,
I decided to experiment with releasing this at a new time of day this week. Please let me know what you think, if you have an opinion.
This week’s piece is longer than I like them to be, but it really did not seem to lend itself to be chopped into two or more parts. And it’s heavy stuff, but it’s also the kind of information that is extremely difficult to find, especially written for an audience of educated lay-people. And trying to write about heavy and difficult to find information about Chinese and Asian history in a way that educated lay people such as yourselves can understand it is definitely one of my goals with this sub-stack.
Traditional Chinese intellectual thought, Chinese proto=scientific thought, and its applied applications and their pragmatic effectiveness and social value is one of my interests, and my hope is that this piece will provide background for other pieces where I share thought on feng shui, Chinese medical beliefs, cosmology, calendrics, martial arts, and more.
This was originally written as a chapter for a book that I have been working on. It’s one of several books that I am working on slowly that involve Asian studies and history, but it’s a long way from being completed. It could, I admit, use some editing, but ss always, if you wish to see these projects continue please provide feedback, share this piece on social media or with friends, and consider purchasing a paid subscription.
Next week, I hope to return to a few topics each issue as I have been doing lately.
Feng shui compasses from the author’s collection. Please feel free to send us photos of your own feng shui compasses so we can all compare. Seriously, one way to gain a better famliarity with the systemic correspondences that Chinese philosophers and intellectuals have considered important is to purchase a feng shui compass and try to learn how to read it. I hope to write a piece on feng shui some day.
Chinese civilization is old, sophisticated, and highly literate. It also has a long and respected tradition of speculative philosophy. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Chinese wrote about the nature of reality long before the days of Christ. They also sought to find patterns and systems of behavior in the world around them. Therefore, since ancient times, not only have on the nature of reality become part of Chinese intellectual culture, but ideas on how things interacted in systematic ways also became part of these writings. Yet these ideas are widely misunderstood.
Some consider them to be science or even pseudo-science, pseudo-science referring to something that while definitely not science, has several of the trappings and in many ways the appearance of science. However, Chinese civilization is a civilization that did not develop the scientific method (even if many Chinese have become accomplished scientists in modern times). Therefore, most distinctly Chinese traditions and ideas originated before science and the scientific method were discovered or developed, and they originated in a civilization that did not have science or the scientific method. Therefore, when the scholars of ancient China discussed and thought about these ideas, they did so in a sophisticated but non-scientific manner. Specifically, they did not take these ideas and test their validity in a controlled manner using experimental models and techniques. They did not formally propose and then test these ideas as hypotheses, and they did not modify or discard them when experimental evidence indicated problems with the ideas. And it would be unrealistic to expect this, as this way of doing things did not exist anywhere in the world when most of these ideas were developed.
The bulk of these ideas originated almost two millennia, sometimes much longer, before the birth of Sir Isaac Newton, often credited as the founding father of modern physics, and in a period when Newton’s ancestors were forest dwelling pagans who painted themselves blue to scare the Roman legionnaires as they jumped out of the bushes and threw spears at them. Science and the scientific method simply did not exist in ancient times.
Therefore, whatever the Chinese were doing when they created the concepts underlying things like feng shui, traditional Chinese Medicine, or the I Ching was not science, and these complex practices and their underlying belief systems were not created using the scientific method. However, the underlying ideas of these applied arts were, nevertheless, intellectually sophisticated and interesting. They could easily be described as “proto-scientific,” meaning they were intellectual precursors to scientific thought and theories, although some, desperate to put mysticism in their lives, might describe them as “mystical,” something that doesn’t strike me as quite right either, but some of these ideas and the attempts to apply them for practical use, have definitely entered the global realm of “New Age” or alternative thought.
It is best, in my opinion, to view these ideas as pre-scientific or proto-scientific, the work of people without the scientific method who were trying to understand and describe the underpinnings of the world around them and doing so long ago, way long ago. It’s my opinion that these ideas were probably at least on a par with the Ancient Greek concepts such as the four fundamental elements of Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. I also believe that their history, application, and usage are extremely interesting in their own right. I believe this despite a strong belief in the importance of science and the scientific method, and a belief that few who understand these traditional Chinese ideas would deny that that they are no more scientific than the before mentioned Ancient Greek theory of the Four Fundamental Elements. They are interesting ideas and an important and probably under-discussed part of the intellectual heritage of mankind.
The exact age of these concepts is a bit difficult to pinpoint, and varies from concept to concept but, as “a rule of thumb” (remember this phrase, I’ll come back to it), most of them probably originated around 200 BCE but were claimed to be much older even when first originated. [1] Some, such as those used in the early Chinese calendar, are much older. They were often incorporated into applied arts such as feng shui and Traditional Chinese Medicine as well as Chinese astrology and many others.
They were used in this way for at least two reasons, first they were part of the intellectual milieu of that time and place, and therefore to use them was socially impressive, but, secondly, they were perceived as useful. If they were seen as useful, there was a perceived practical value in using them and a belief that their use would lead to the achievement of better results and better communication of concepts and assessments among educated intellectuals of that society in medicine, landscaping, or architecture or what have you.
This traditional Chinese, intellectual view of the world involved a few components.
Qi, Systemic Correspondences, and Li.
There are many aspects that characterize “Traditional Chinese Medicine.” Three of the most important are qi, li, and systems of correspondence.
Qi / 氣 ( Chi )
“Qi,” pronounced “chee” to rhyme with “tea,” is one of the fundamental concepts of the this ancient Chinese conceptualization of reality. “Qi” also spelled as “chi” and pronounced as “ki” in both Korean and Japanese, is a life force that permeates not just all living things but all things in general and whose flow and ebb and characteristics are quite important in maintaining good health or vitality. [2]
While the origins of the concept are a bit murky, and some consider it closely linked with the concept of “wind” or “air” or “respiration” and others with the concept of “energy,” it also has elements of the classic “ectoplasm” as seen in the film Ghost Busters. It is, according to this conceptualization of the world, not just the force that keeps living beings alive, but it can also, for instance, permeate soil and thereby facilitate the growth of crops and other plants. Many martial artists have believed and continue to believe that by focusing chi, one can improve the power of a technique. Some go so far as to believe that certain people can radiate or shoot chi from their bodies and do things that in another context would be described as magic. If one does enough research and digs into enough things, then the exact permutations and limitations and effects of qi can seem quite varied, and it is largely because of this that few if any informed people would consider it “science”and that I began questioning its existence.
Nevertheless, it is an important and fundamental part of Chinese and East Asian conceptions of how the world works, both traditionally and today.
Unschuld places the date of origin for the concept of Qi / 氣 ( Chi ) around the third century BC drawing links with ancient ideas of demonic emanations that caused illness as well as the effects of wind on people’s health. ( Unschuld, p. 67-71)
Li / 理 (Li)
As for the concept of Li / 理 (Li), this is a definite outlier as it originated in the 12th Century AD, almost 1,500 years after the other concepts discussed here, but since some include it when discussing traditional Chinese beliefs about cosmology, it seems worthwhile to give it at least a brief mention. At the risk of simplifying greatly, Li was what caused things to take the proper shape, structure, and form. Basically, and as this is something that was discussed in great detail by Chinese philosophers over the centuries, and therefore someone will tell me I left something out no matter what I write, I am just going to say that “objects,” both living and unliving, animate and inanimate, have a property called “li,” and li is what causes the chi to take the proper form and become the correct object with the correct form, shape, and structure, instead of something else.
The concept basically grew out of philosophical attempts by medieval Chinese philosophers and intellectuals to better integrate Confucian and Buddhist cosmologies. See Needham, p.565-579, Unschuld mentions the concept in passing on page 196, and, and I hate to say this, there is Wikipedia. (See Li (neo-Confucianism) - Wikipedia or Zhu Xi - Wikipedia for more.
If you start to dig into it, then you will soon uncover a lot of interesting ideas on the origins of matter and life and things in the universe as believed by many literate Chinese from that time on. It’s really cool stuff and seems quite mystical. However, it’s worth mentioning that the people who developed it in the 13th Century AD did not really see it as “mystical,” nor did they see it as “science.” They just saw it as offering an explanation for why things seemed to be the way they were. (which, yes, is the first step in doing science, but the next step in doing science is to test such ideas or explanations, and, since the scientific method had not been invented yet, no one went on to that step. It was more like “Hey, I have an idea. What do you think?” and “Hey, thanks. That really does look like a good idea. Thanks for sharing. I am going to share it with people too. They will probably be as impressed with it as I am.”
Which is a fine thing to do with a cool idea, but it’s not science.
Systemic Correspondences
The second fundamental concept in this conceptualization of the cosmos, as referred to by Unschuld, is the use of many different systems of correspondence that were used in an attempt to identify, describe, predict, and sometimes control changes in the human body or nature. There are several of these and to make things even more confusing there are multiple translations for each one, as well as different Asian language terms for each and most of these can be written in different ways with Roman letters using different Romanization systems, as well as the parts of each. Here for the sake of simplicity (a relative term), we will stick with the Mandarin Chinese terms and use the traditional Chinese characters.
There are many of these, starting with Yin and Yang, the five phases (AKA “the five elements”), the eight trigrams or the “ba gua,” the ten stems, the twelve branches, the 60 part cycle of the 5 phases and the 12 branches that is used in traditional Chinese calendrics, and the 64 hexagrams that make up the I Jing (Yi Ching).
There is no simple way to describe all of these concepts, but they tended to try and explain and find patterns in the way things interacted and behave. This is an interesting contrast to the Greek idea of the four elements that seemed to focus on finding underlying structure and composition, rather than explaining how things interacted or behaved.
if you wish two places that do try to explain them, there are the Needham book and Stephen Feuchtwang’s Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy, both listed in the bibliography. Undoubtedly, there are others, although most tend to lean either towards the tough to wade through and comprehend academic texts side of things or the New Agey esoteric books of questionable accuracy or scholarship. I’m working on one myself, but it will be a while before I finish. In the meantime, subscribe to this publication, and I will try to write some pieces on these different correspondences and what they were and how they work.
Familiarity with these concepts was important for a pre-modern Chinese intellectual. Not only were they perceived as useful for understanding an event or describing it, but they if they were able to utilize and refer to these concepts, the more impressed their clients or peers would be.
When presented with these concepts, many modern skeptics will be quick to debunk and critique them, presenting examples where the systems don’t work as predicted. While they are, of course, welcome to do this, it needs to be mentioned that this has been done before, with one of the earliest examples of such debunking of the system coming from the Chinese philosopher Wang Chung in the first century AD. [3]
According to Joseph Needham, Wang wrote:
The sign yin corresponds to wood, and its proper animal is the tiger. Xu corresponds to Earth, and its proper animal is the dog. Chou and wei likewise correspond to Earth, chou having as animal the ox, and wei having the sheep. Now wood conquers earth, therefore the tiger overcomes the dog, ox, and sheep. Again, hai goes with water, its animal being the boar. Su goes with fire, having the serpent as its animal. Tzu also signifies water, its animal being the rat. Wu, conversely, goes with fire, and its animal manifestation is the horse. Now water conquers fire, therefore the boar devours the serpent, and horses, if they eat rats [are injured by] a swelling of their bellies. [So run the usual arguments.]
However, when we go into the matter more thoroughly, we find that in fact it very often happens that animals do not overpower one another as they ought to do on these theories. The horse is connected with wu (fire), the rat with tzu (water). If water really conquers fire [it would be much more convincing if] rats normally attacked horses and drove them away. Then the cock is connected with yu (metal) and the hare with mao (wood). If metal really conquers wood, why do cocks not devour hares?
[Needham, p. 156]
Which begs the question, if the Chinese have known for approximately two thousand years that these ideas do not work as described, why have they kept using them all that time? There are several reasons; first, like many skeptics today, Wang Chung, debunked something without offering an alternative. If you don’t offer people an alternative, often they will be slow to abandon a belief they have in the past found useful, even if you present them with strong arguments that the idea has problems.
Second, like many scientists of several fields today, the establishment and respected scholars of the time liked the ideas and had invested a great deal of time and reputation in studying and promoting the ideas and weren’t about to discard them completely simply because someone had shown that sometimes they did not work. And, thirdly, most importantly, even if they did not work all the time, they obviously worked some of the time, and therefore could easily be shown to be useful in at least some situations. As mentioned, the Chinese theory of the five phases was just one of several systems of symbolic correspondence and if one did not work in a given situation, scholars and the educated elite were expected to be familiar enough with the others to find one that did work.
As Unschuld writes:
The physician then was free to choose among all these different patterns which were only indirectly compatible with one another in that all of them were based on the concepts of systematic correspondence. The individual patterns could not, in most cases, be reconciled with one another; some even appear to exclude others. But the “either/or” question that might be posed by a scientist used to deductive reasoning obviously did not concern a Chinese theoretician or practitioner who thought in terms of systematic correspondence. It cannot be stressed enough that this is one of the basic characteristics distinguishing traditional Chinese thought from modern Western science, and it is in this context that one should regard all those attempts as questionable and misleading that try to eliminate this distinctive feature of traditional Chinese thought by artificially isolating a coherent and –in the Western sense—consistent set of ideas and patterns from ancient Chinese sources. (Unschuld, p. 91)
In other words, despite having several elaborate and complex ideas intended to describe how the world works, the Chinese in pre-scientific times were not doing science, and one of the differences between their ideas and scientific theories is that few of that time and place obsessed over whether or not different ideas that were seen as useful and respected contradicted each other. A true scholar, of that time and place, would not focus on the problems he discovered when using one of the systems of correspondence, but instead a scholar would improve their own ability to select when to use which of the theories in a given situation. Although there is no single answer to the question of “why did the Chinese never develop the scientific method?” ( the so-called Needham question), [4] this is widely recognized as a major factor in not developing it. If any idea was seen as partially useful, at least in some situations, it was kept as something to be respected and applied, but only when useful, instead of being discarded and replaced.
Which, to conclude this portion of the essay, makes it easy to conclude that in pre-modern times, not only were traditional Chinese medicine and feng shui and related arts non-scientific in theory and practice, they were never intended to be scientific. How could they have been? They predated the development of science and no one who used them was making any effort to make them look or be scientific. They had no idea what science was as it hadn’t been invented yet and when it was developed, it was developed on the other side of the world.
The focus of a practitioner when treating a patient was on doing what could be done to heal them. Choices about how to do this were probably made not just based on teachings and books, but also on traditionally passed down folk treatments, intuition, choices made on numerology and magical thinking, with elements of both sophisticated religious ideas and concepts as well as folk religion thrown into the mix in a haphazard manner. It should be remembered that most health care providers in pre-modern China were not necessarily experts in the systems that they tried to practice and often lacked access to the more sophisticated ideas of their society and that few had access to all the ideas and writings of these medical practices that even a curious hobby research of today can acquire. They often lacked access to its books.
Therefore, it is safe to say that in pre-modern times, Traditional Chinese Medicine, like feng shui or Chinese astrology, was definitely not scientific, but it wasn’t very pseudo-scientific either, and any resemblance it had to either science or pseudo-science was largely coincidental.
However, in modern times in China, many things changed. With the expansion of the West, Colonialism, the perceived weakness of many Chinese traditions and institutions as they failed to stand up to the West and maintain China’s autonomy against foreign ideas, institutions, and people things changed in many ways. Respect for science increased.
And with this increased respect for science, not only was there an increased interest in “Western” science (a.k.a. actual science and the scientific theories of the time), but there was also an attempt to make the traditional ideas of China such as the traditional systems of correspondence, appear “more scientific.”
As the twentieth century arrived, and the nation grappled with practical and cultural efforts at modernization, a failed attempt at establishing a democratic republic, warlordism, and political chaos, and ultimately Communism, it also grappled with what to do with its ancient philosophies, its traditional medical practices, and other traditions that did not quite seem to fit the modern, scientifically accepted belief systems of the day. (Taylor, Lei)
One result of this was that while Chinese medical traditions and practices rooted in the three beliefs described, Qi, Li, and complex systems of correspondence, survived, they also changed. They became much more codified, structured, and unified, and with these, changes also more pseudoscientific. As the period following the Communist Revolution and the leadership of Mao was one of great and continuous change and upheaval, it follows that “Traditional Chinese Medicine” changed greatly as well.
To survive, Traditional Chinese Medicine had to become something that was not just connected with the past, not just something that was deemed useful in the present, but also something deemed acceptable to the Chinese Communist party as well. It also had to continue to be acceptable during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a period when citizens were encouraged to destroy remnants of the “feudal” culture of the past as well as things deemed to be superstition. During the Cultural Revolution not only were intellectuals and college professors forced to abandon their research and careers in order to move to the countryside and “learn from the peasants,” but foreign trained doctors of scientific, allopathic medicine (an ideologically suspect group under Communism) were sometimes encouraged to abandon their practice, stop treating patients with “Western” medicine but instead to study under a healer skilled in an approved style of “Traditional Chinese Medicine” and use that style of healing exclusively instead. (Taylor, 101) In other places, the two styles of healing were expected to function side by side. The ideology of the period had deemed them to be equally important, although obviously this assessment was not based in any scientific evidence or reasoning. (Again see Taylor, Lei )
When traditional Chinese healing arts made their way to the West, through the process of transmission, they underwent further change. It’s only natural that the authors of the early books that attempted to explain Traditional Chinese Medicine to the West wished to present it in a respectful way; they wished to explain its underlying theories in a cohesive, coherent way, and longed to present it as something useful that could fill in gaps in Western medicine and perhaps even Western culture and philosophy. Therefore, Western English language texts of the 1970s tended to describe Traditional Chinese Medicine as a unified system based on clearly described, coherent theories and ideas from which the healing modalities stemmed logically. Often when they did so, they included fanciful and exaggerated claims as to the age, coherency, systemization, and extent of unification of traditional Chinese medicine when they did. ( Unschuld, Taylor, Lei ) Taylor argues that it was through this process that a great deal of theory was imposed upon these traditional or perceived as traditional healing modalities (Taylor, p. 106-107) Thus much of the “pseudoscientification” of Traditional Chinese Medicine (sometimes abbreviated as TCM) came about as people from a scientifically oriented culture became enthused about its potential and tried to understand it until it made sense to them and then passed their interpretations along to others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrews, Bridie. The Making of Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960. Vancouver BC: UBC Press. 2014.
Feuchtwang, Stephan D. An Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy. Vithgania (Taipei, Taiwan: Southern Materials Center) 1974.
Huston, Peter. “China, Chi, and Chicanery – Examining Chinese Medicine and Chi Theory.” Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 19, No. 5. September / October 1995. https://skepticalinquirer.org/1995/09/china-chi-and-chicanery/
Lei, Sean Hsiang-lin. Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle Over China’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2014.
Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilization in China: Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Taipei, Taiwan: Caves Books, Ltd. Taiwan Edition) 1985. 1988.
Taylor, Kim. Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-63. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. 2005.
Unschuld, Paul U. Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (Taiwan Edition: Southern Materials Center) 1985.
NOTES
[1] According to Unschuld, p. 55-56, some of the first known mention of the concepts that became Yin and Yang appeared about the first millennium BC, with the more sophisticated and complete version that we know today appearing around the fourth century B.C. The I-Ching and its patterns grew out of this soon after.
Unschuld also credits the origin of the concept known as the “Wu Xing” in Mandarin or “the five phases,” more commonly yet misleadlngly also translated as the “five elements” to a philosopher named Zou Yan / 鄒衍 ( Tsou Yen) who lived from approximately 350-270 BC. (Unschuld, p58-59)
Unschuld places the date of origin for the concept of Qi / 氣 ( Chi ) around the third century BC drawing links with ancient ideas of demonic emanations that caused illness as well as the effects of wind on people’s health. ( Unschuld, p. 67-71)
As for the concept of Li / 理 (Li), this is a definite outlier as it originated in the 12th Century AD, almost 1,500 years after the other concepts here, and was basically grew out of philosophical attempts to better integrate Confucian and Buddhist cosmologies. See Needham, p.565-579, Unschuld mentions the concept in passing on page 196, and, and I hate to say this, there is Wikipedia. (See Li (neo-Confucianism) - Wikipedia or Zhu Xi - Wikipedia for more.
[2] I wrote about this long, long ago in an old Skeptical Inquirer article. It’s listed in the bibliography, and available on line. While there are things I would add or might say differently all these years later, and I think that sometimes belief in chi is useful in a metaphorical or inspirational way, I still stand by the basic ideas, concepts, and conclusions of this article.
[3] For those who wonder, yes, this is the same name as a 1980s new wave band. Interestingly, this is just coincidence as the British band, which was originally named “Huang Chung,” named themselves after the first note of the traditional Chinese musical scale, but altered the spelling when they became tired of having fans mispronounce their band’s name in various ways. Wang Chung (band) - Wikipedia
[4] Joseph Needham was a British scholar of the twentieth century whose life work was a mammoth, multi-volume series of reference books on the history of Chinese science and technology. One of the unifying themes of the work is seeking to answer the question of why, despite building a highly advanced culture with great technological accomplishments, did the Chinese never develop the scientific method like the West did. Because of this, some scholars refer to the question “Why did the Chinese never develop the scientific method?” as ‘the Needham question.” Of course, as would be expected among academics, this is a highly contentious issue, and many argue the question itself is innappropriate and ethnocentric and should not be asked in the first place. Recently, I wrote about Western Expansion and its lasting impact on global history. See Western Expansion and Colonialism - by Peter Huston (substack.com) The development of the scientific method and its application to developing better and more efficient technology was a major factor in why and how the West came to dominate the world.