Introduction

While the “self” and “body” seem immediately perceptible and comprehensible in their physicality, they are largely cultural constructs which change over time and space, thus requiring historical study. Their modern academic study began with classic essays by Marcel Mauss in the mid-1930s.Footnote ¹ The essay on the “category of the person/self” argued that this was at its simplest a universal category, as indicated by the possibility in all languages of referring to a self which was distinguished from others. At the next level, the self could be theorized as defined roles, obligations and rights pertaining to those roles, and an ethical character that together defined the nature of a person (personne), and which varied among cultures. The article also suggested (without always clearly distinguishing) an interiorized self (moi) defined by psychological states, relations to the cosmos, and spiritual relations to other such selves.Footnote ² Finally, it sketched a triumphalist account of the emergence of a unique Western theory of the person as first a philosophical-religious conception (articulated in Christianity’s theory of the soul), and ultimately a fundamental intellectual category (in modern thinking from Descartes’s cogito through Kant) underlying the emergence of an individualism that treated the self as a discreet monad existing wholly within the mind and detached from the body (Ryle’s “ghost in a machine”). This understanding was foundational to the modern world.Footnote ³ Several critical essays and case studies written to accompany the English translation of the essay trace the crucial initial step to the philosophy of Plato rather than Christianity. Others reject this evolutionary perspective, arguing instead that the diverse practices and theories that guided both the psychologically defined inner “self” (moi) and the exterior “person” (personne) shaped by rules and laws should be treated as episodes moving toward no clear conclusion. This latter position underlies the writing over the decades of numerous studies on the theory and practice of the “person” in diverse cultures, a discourse within which this work is situated.

Mauss’s essay on “techniques of the body” (written a year earlier and influenced by Marcel Granet’s discussions of “bodily techniques” in early China) argued that each society developed distinctive techniques for training the body, techniques which shaped both physical capacities and associated mental mechanisms adapted to their visions of social order. Thus, the body of the Greek citizen trained for the public agon was distinct from that of a monk in his cell, or that of a modern citizen alternating between a home and the site of paid labor. Whereas the purely physical and measurable body of modern science had no history, Mauss’s body conceived through its “modes of construction” was “thoroughly historicized and completely problematic.”Footnote ⁴

This model allowed the body to be approached from numerous disciplines – history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, art history, religion – and a vast array of perspectives. The three-volume collection Fragments for a History of the Human Body divided these perspectives under three rubrics. First, some employed a “vertical axis,” examining training of the body to facilitate its relation to divinities above or animals below. The former included exercises through which one approached a god spatially or came to resemble one physically, training to modify those features that prevented people from participating in the divine, or rites of healing through pilgrimage or exorcism.Footnote ⁵ For the latter, one developed aspects of the body that distinguished human beings from animals, or alternatively (as in the “Chart on Guiding and Pulling” [dao yin tu 導引徒] from Mawangdui that will be discussed later) imitated animals whose powers could extend human capacities. The second axis was “horizontal,” primarily the relations of “inside” and “outside,” often cultivating a soul or intelligence hidden within, or modulating the emotions, desires, and other sensations that emerged from the interior. The final rubric was “the classical distinction between organ and function,” which included using bodily organs or substances as metaphors for aspects of human society, or cultivating attributes that embodied the status or role of honored types.

The most wide-ranging study of theories of the person, self, and body in early in China is Lisa Raphals, A Tripartite Self: Body, Mind and Spirit in Early China.Footnote ⁶ This book surveys most early Chinese discussions of these topics, and presents the key modern studies. Its most important argument is to elaborate the contrast between philosophical texts, which tend to emphasize the heart-mind’s mastery over the body, and the texts on self-cultivation or medical treatment of the body which emphasize the key importance of the self’s substances (most importantly qi energies) and its “spirit” (shen 神, also translated “soul”). The former tends to produce dualistic models that oppose mind and body, while the latter produce the “tripartite self” (of the title), elaborating a corporeal view in which both body and mind consist of such vital substances as (in order of increasing refinement) qi, “essence” (jing 精), and spirit. The discussions in this book overlap with many of the texts studied here, so it deserves careful reading.

However, the single most useful elaboration of the interlinked ideas of self, person, and body in early China is probably David Hall and Roger Ames’s model of the “focus-field self,” which is expounded in several books and essays.Footnote ⁷ This theory is particularly valuable in that it not only offers insights into the full range of early Chinese ideas, but also (as I will discuss below) facilitates fruitful dialogue with some of the most important Western ideas about the relation of the self and the body. The idea of the “focus-field self” – which Ames elaborates primarily through Confucian and Daoist thinkers – views the person as a “focused” center embedded within an encompassing “field,” or rather fields, consisting of other people, places, and, ultimately, the cosmos. This person is defined by a range of roles which he or she enacts relationally with others: son of a father or mother, elder brother of a younger brother, a descendant of deceased ancestors, etc. The person defined by these roles, obligations, and rights (to cite the Maussian idea) exists only within and through these multiple relations, not only those to close kin, but in weakening fashion with more distant kin, fellow villagers, the state’s agents, and nonhumans. As emphasized more in the Daoist thinkers, any person also exists relationally as the focus of multiple fields formed with the creatures and objects within his or her ambit, and at the highest level with the cosmos viewed with the self as center. Likewise, things in the world can be understood through the multiple fields of which they form the focus/center, for example, the capital within the state, the court within the capital, the ruler within the court, etc. In all these fields radiating outward around a focus/center there is no absolute boundary between the selves and their “outside,” a fact that is as true of the body as of the person.Footnote ⁸

While the Ames/Hall model emphasizes the multiple and evolving relations within which the person emerges, Chinese thought elaborated a similar image through the idea of qi (氣), translated as “energy,” “vital breath,” “pneuma,” or “vapor.” This protean concept remains central to Chinese medicine, martial arts, strategy, calligraphy, and any form of dynamism. In the centuries covered in this essay it named a primal “stuff” or “configured energy” that constituted all entities, being common to inanimate matter, plants, animals, and people. This shared substrate meant that not only people and their environment shared common principles, but also that they acted directly upon one another through their qi, which thus provided a physical underpinning to the focus-field model. Consequently, the outer world could drive the feelings and actions of the embodied self, and that self could radiate outward to control other humans, and even aspects of the physical world.

The earliest known graphic form of the word qi appears in fourth century BCE bamboo strips found in Chu tombs. The graph consists of a phonetic element over one of two semantic signifiers indicating either “fire” or “heart,” suggesting dynamism associated with the mind or spirit. The Qin tended to confuse this graph with one indicating “a gift of food,” an in the Han it was commonly written with “cloud” or “vapor” over “grain.” Thus, by the late Warring States people seem to have associated it with the vapors rising from cooked grain. However, it was most closely linked to the idea of wind, which provided a model for its actions and served as a gloss or in synonym compounds. It was the substance of the desires and emotions that drove human actions, and in its more refined forms it also became the “essence” (jing) and “spirit” (shen) that were essential to human cogitation, reproduction, and interaction with spirits. It provided a central concept in philosophy, early healing arts, and textually constituted technical medicine for analyzing the construction both of the person and the body, and indeed for the overlapping of these two to form an embodied self.Footnote ⁹

With its permeable boundaries, mutual interactions, and interpenetration of bodily substances and mental processes, this “focus-field” person created by the movements of qi has been presented as distinctively Chinese, opposed to a Western self, defined by the radical separation of mind and body, and the clear definition of the measurable, physical body. However, this must be qualified. First, numerous German scholars have endorsed the qi-based model as a superior approach to the human body.Footnote ¹⁰ This is in part explained by the fact that the German language distinguishes the Latin-derived Körper, which indicates the measurable physical body or the corpse, from Leib, the subjective body of feelings, sensations, perceptions, and emotions, or broadly the person’s temperament. As an example of this distinction, Leibspeise indicates one’s favorite food. Leib matches well with the idea of a body defined through qi energies that link mental phenomena, physical organs, and surroundings.Footnote ¹¹

This has inspired phenomenologists to develop theories of a person constructed through the dynamism of the lived body, the back-and-forth between stimuli and responsive emotions, and the shaping impact of exterior “atmospheres.” Most important is Hermann Schmitz, whose “new phenomenology” produced a ten-volume study moving from immediate bodily experience, through the energetic interchanges between body and environment, to the construction of multiple spaces for such cultural phenomena as art, law, and the divine. His model of the body frequently appeals to the Homeric world, where people experienced emotions as invading, external powers, and which were distributed through many sites within the body (rather than confined within the mind). The model, and related theories of objective external “atmospheres” created by crowd sentiments, the moods produced by seasons or times of day, and the emotional impacts of architectural spaces, has all aroused interest in the idea of qi with its interchange between body, mind, and environment. Thus, the Chinese ideas facilitate Western theorizations of the person, the body, and health as being simultaneously physical, mental, and social phenomena.Footnote ¹²

A second development in modern Western thought supporting study of the Chinese models are theories from the cognitive sciences that deny the mind’s separation from the body, or the idea that reason can be independent of perception, movement, and ambient moods. Such writers argue that thinking is done with the body (or, in the case of spiders, with the web) as much as with the mind. Theories of “body thinking” again reject the mythicizing view of Chinese ideas as produced by a great “other,” instead bringing theories of the embodied self in both traditions into dialogue.Footnote ¹³

Cultivating the Embodied Self through Philosophy

Cultivating an embodied self to attain a correct, healthy person emerged as a topic in China (as it had in Europe) in the philosophical texts of the fourth century BCE.Footnote ¹⁴,Footnote ¹⁵ One major form of this was the articulation of ritual performances (li 禮) as a model for human, bodily action. The clearest expressions of such ideas were speeches attributed to speakers in the Zuo zhuan, a historical work from this time. Some speeches in this text argued that the roles that defined the self directed the body’s qi. Thus, the head of the Jin ruler’s kitchen explained that food drove the body’s energies, which filled the ruler’s fixed resolve (zhi 志) and fixed his speech for making commands.Footnote ¹⁶ This idea that controlling bodily qi was crucial to performing social roles also figured in military texts, where energies drove troops to fight and intensified their resolve.Footnote ¹⁷ Roel Sterckx has extensively analyzed the relationship of cooking and sacrifice to self-cultivation, morality, and sagehood.Footnote ¹⁸

The idea that the body’s energies drive the fulfilment of social roles is also articulated by Zichan, a leading minister in Zheng state. He argues that rituals provide models for all human actions, guiding the body’s qi to produce fixed resolve.Footnote ¹⁹ The idea that rituals are the basis of life and fundamental to human existence recurs throughout the Zuo zhuan, which links these to the body and its qi.Footnote ²⁰ Thus one speaker argues that ritual is essential to becoming a “complete human” (cheng ren 成人), others state that it is the trunk of the body/self (shen), and others use failings in ritual as a sign predicting imminent death, sometimes linking ritual and death through the embodied nature of the former. Other passages argue that ritual protected the body, or that it was the “carriage” of government which protected the body.Footnote ²¹

Speakers also argued that only through ritual can the ruler value his own body, which is necessary to his caring for the state, or that the ruler’s valuing his body is essential to protecting his people.Footnote ²² These ideas resemble those later attributed to followers of Yang Zhu, who argued that only one who placed supreme value on his own body, not allowing it to be harmed in any way, was qualified to rule a state. This idea, cited in the Mencius and elaborated in the Western Han Huainanzi, was given its fullest expression in the third-century BCE text, Springs and Autumns of Master Lü.Footnote ²³ The idea that ritual underpinned human society through educating the embodied self was also developed in the third-century BCE Xunzi.Footnote ²⁴

Another text that discussed the embodied self in the fourth century BCE was the Mencius. Probably most influential was its account of the “four sprouts” in the heart/mind that underlay the development of the primary moral virtues. These four sprouts, which were fundamental to the Mencius’s argument that human nature was good, were placed in parallel to the four limbs, thus treating the heart/mind as part of the physical body. Other passages treat the heart/mind in the same way, paralleling mental problems to a crooked finger, or claiming that the mind’s virtues radiated from the countenance and invigorated the limbs.Footnote ²⁵ This embodied heart/mind also figured in a division of the body into higher and lower parts, with the heart/mind ruling over the limbs and the stomach. This in turn justified the social hierarchy in which those who worked with their minds ruled those who worked with their physical strength.Footnote ²⁶

One final meditation on the body is Mencius’s discourse on his “flood-like [hao ran 浩然] qi.” After discussing attaining a heart/mind that did not become agitated, Mencius argued that his flood-like qi if properly nourished could fill the cosmos, but that it must be fed with moral virtues. The “fixed intent” is the commander of the qi, which fills the body, while moral errors lead to an unease that starves the body’s energies.Footnote ²⁷ This argument thus uses the same categories as the Zuo zhuan, but it reverses the order of priority in making intent superior to qi.

In the same century, the poem “Inner Training” (nei ye 內業), which is included in the Guanzi, developed a model of purifying the embodied self as a center from which cultivated energies could be projected through the cosmos.Footnote ²⁸ This expounds transforming the entire person, beginning with correctly placing the body, working through the sense organs to the mind, and culminating in the gathering of refined energies that transformed the body and radiated outward. The primary dangers were the sense organs, emotions, desires, and worries which disturbed the heart/mind’s tranquility. The text refers to political attainments such as ruling the myriad things, imposing tasks upon others, ordering the world, and making it submit not through punishments and rewards but through the flow of bodily energies from a stabilized mind. However, such considerations remain marginal to the text, which emphasizes self-perfection.Footnote ²⁹

This poem was influential, as demonstrated by citations and elaborations in other texts, including the Mencius. Most importantly, it was adapted into political discussions in the chapters “Techniques of the Heart/Mind” (xin shu shang and xia, 新書上下) that were also included in the Guanzi. The latter of these chapters, sometimes described as a commentary on the “Inner Training,” follows quotations from the poem with accounts of how the sage rules all things, how the peace of his heart/mind produces order and peace in the state, how the people are restrained not through his anger and punishments but because he follows the Way from its origins, how his transformed body carries Heaven and embodies the Earth, and how his completed heart/mind illumines and comprehends the entire world.Footnote ³⁰

“Techniques of the Heart/Mind I” is not so thoroughly mapped onto the “Inner Training,” but it adopts passages from it, and it begins with the argument that if the ruler strays from the Way, due to being possessed by emotions or sense impressions, then his subordinates will fail. It also argues that the ruler will hold to his position if he attains self-control through quiescence, and that the Great Way will achieve peace although it cannot be spoken. Like the Mawangdui corpus associated with the Yellow Emperor (see below), it states that laws emerged from this Way.Footnote ³¹ The “Inner Training” resembled the Laozi, except that the latter became more focused on political matters among many adherents, and this political shift of contemplative self-perfecting was highlighted in the Han Feizi, as will be discussed in the following paragraphs.Footnote ³²

The idea that self-cultivation was essential to the ruler was not limited to texts linked to the “Inner Training.” The Xunzi, while offering “ritual” as an alternative to bio-spiritual practices as a “technique of the body,” argued in its later chapters that disturbances aroused by emotions and desires had to be mastered so that the ruler could perform his roles. Notably, the method of attaining such mastery is also referred to as the “techniques of the heart/mind.” The discussion of mental self-mastery in the chapter “Eliminating Blockage” states:

This is followed by a list of past rulers who failed because some obsession blocked their ability to perceive and respond to the actual situation. In this chapter, the “techniques of the heart/mind” refers to a mental control that eliminates desires and dislikes, removing the distinctions that create fixation. Only the sage escapes such blockages:

Through controlling his mental responses and transcending all the distinctions by which people carve up the world before falling into preferences for one side, the sage makes correct judgments.

Elsewhere the Xunzi offers another version of a technique of the heart/mind. It begins with a rubric: “the technique of regulating the vital energies and nourishing the heart/mind” (zhi qi yang xin zhi shu 治氣養心之術), which echoes the chapters in the Guanzi. After listing therapies for defects of temperament and thought – most associated with intemperate or violent responses, or guile in calculations – it concludes:

Here the technique of “nourishing” the heart/mind culminates in mastering one’s likes (and presumably dislikes), but it takes a “Confucian” turn by basing these on the guidance of ritual and a teacher. Another passage links nourishing the heart/mind with total concentration and sincerity (cheng 誠). This perfected inner state, the central virtue in the “Zhongyong” [中庸] chapter of the Li ji, achieves self-mastery where the true gentleman matches Heaven: silent but understood, never giving but regarded as generous, and never angry but held in awe. This mental state also allows him to “carefully preserve his solitude/concentration” (shen qi du 慎其獨), a capacity discussed in the “Wu xing pian” (五行篇) found at Mawangdui and Guodian. In these texts, it indicates an ability to escape the dominance of sense impressions and concern for externals, creating a virtuous power that makes one a match for Heaven.Footnote ³⁶

This text (whose earlier version comes from a tomb that probably dates to the early third century BCE) again elaborates the embodied self as central to moral discourse and sagehood. As discussed by Mark Csikszentmihalyi, the “Wu xing pian” responded to critiques of the hypocritical and self-serving nature of the ru program of ritual and learning by elaborating a theory of the motivations for good action, and of its physical manifestations in the fleshly body. This theory distinguishes actions which “take form internally,” and hence are “virtuous” (de 德), from those which do not and are merely objectively “good” (shan 善). It elaborates the sequence of mental states – beginning with “worry” (you 憂) and “longing” (si 思), and ending with “delight [in virtue]” (le 樂) – which make possible the modes of thinking – “focusing on essentials” (jing 景), “attention to long-term consequences” (chang 長), and “directness” (jing 徑) – that culminate in the virtues.

The text also stresses that this process entails training the senses in visual and aural moral differentiations, so that one becomes “clear-sighted” (ming 明) in perceiving the Way, and “sharp-eared” (cong 聰) in hearing it, and thus wise enough to recognize its worth. Finally, this internally generated virtuous wisdom manifests itself in a “jade coloration” (yu se 玉色) and a “jade tone” (yin 音) which make one’s perfected virtues both visible and audible to others sufficiently self-cultivated to recognize it. This ultimate level – where the virtues, the senses, and the body all achieve perfection – is sagehood.Footnote ³⁷

The text is related to the Mencius (as well as the “Zhongyong”), sharing the idea that the virtues are aspects of an integrated person in whom the sprouting virtues grow along with the physical limbs, and the cultivated moral character shines through the flesh. This cultivation of an embodied self also relies on practicing rituals, thus developing ideas from the Zuo zhuan. As Csikszentmilhayi argues, this “material virtue” tradition that linked physiological changes to the impact of moral motivations was also “facilitated by interactions with burgeoning technical disciplines of medicine and physiognomy,” an interplay whose further developments will be discussed later in this essay.Footnote ³⁸

At the end of the Warring States, the Han Feizi incorporated this idea of a distinctive regime for self-transformation into a program for creating the ideal ruler. The beginning of “The Way of the Ruler” (zhu dao 主道), a lengthy rhyming passage patterned on the Dao de jing, follows a passage describing the cosmic Way, to which the ruler must assimilate himself:

This echoes stanza 19 of the received Laozi, and follows it in arguing that the ruler must through self-cultivation eliminate personal ideas, sentiments, and desires. Still and empty, he allows things, above all his officials, to fulfil their roles.Footnote ⁴⁰ Applied to things, this allows each object to assume its proper place; applied to people, it lets them reveal their true capacities and desires, forcing them to serve the ruler or face elimination.

Remaining hidden and mysterious, the ruler causes his subordinates to devote themselves to proposing and carrying out ideas. As they compete in presenting ideas, he sees with all the eyes in the empire, hears with its ears, and thinks with the minds of the sages without himself being a sage. Thus, the text incorporates the same model as the “Wu xing pian,” where perfecting eyes and ears, here through political mastery, enables the emergence of a sage.Footnote ⁴¹ The theme of the ruler’s being hidden, which became fundamental to the spatial order of Chinese politics, figures throughout this discussion.Footnote ⁴²

Subsequent chapters reiterate many themes from the “Way of the Ruler,” while adding new emphases. “Brandishing Authority,” which again is largely in verse like the Laozi, precedes its discussion of the ruler remaining hidden and still by describing the sensual and emotional attractions from which he must first free himself.Footnote ⁴³ This conquering of sensual desires to keep the body’s energies intact is the first step to establishing the empty and undisturbed interior of the ruler at the center of all things. This echoes not only the Laozi (as emphasized later in the Han Feizi’s commentary), but also the texts related to “Inner Training” which emphasized establishing a still center from which the ruler’s influence radiated through the world.

The idea that mental tranquility leads to physical completeness and culminates in political power is given its clearest expression in the chapter “Explaining Laozi [jie lao 解老]”:

By purging all mental activity, both emotional and intellectual, the ruler preserves his body’s energetic resources, which in turn form the power that allows him to command the world from his own center. The theme of the ruler stilling all mental activity to keep body and spirit intact, and thereby command all, recurs throughout this chapter. This perfection of the ruler’s embodied self also results in his superior health and extended longevity. The common people, in contrast, are dominated by desires and feelings, which wastes their energies and destroys their bodies.Footnote ⁴⁵

This chapter concludes with a lengthy passage on appropriate responses to objects, emotional mastery, a perfected body, and political power:

The sage’s ability to escape emotional responses to objects leads to bodily perfection, a regulated household, flourishing villages, and finally a perfected world. This extension of virtuous power follows in reverse the same series as the opening of the “Da xue” [大學).Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, the self in both these texts creates its power and expands its reach through the relationships that define the person within the field-focus model.

The opposition between emotion, which binds people to particular commitments, and the objective standards of the common good is also read into the cosmic patterns for proper government in “Great Principles [大體 da ti].” First invoking Heaven, Earth, the four seasons, and natural phenomena as models, it enumerates the necessity of law, techniques of administration, rewards and punishments, and objective standards, and concludes:

Here the ruler is modeled on the “Great Man” described in the Zhuangzi, suppressing his personal sentiments and concerns in imitating Heaven and implementing a pure, objective law applied to all things. This provides another version of the fusion of the Way and law-based administration in the perfected person of the ideal ruler.

In addition to accounts of the “Great Man,” the Zhuangzi offered several other versions of perfected selves. First, later chapters invoked a theory of self-transformation by a ruler wielding “techniques of the heart/mind” like those in the Guanzi and Xunzi:

This portrays contemporary political and social practices as inadequate, offering instead an idealized ruler whose mastery of the “techniques of the heart/mind” allows his accumulation of mental energies.

Chapter 12 of the Zhuangzi likewise describes the true ruler as one who identifies himself with the Way, accumulating inner power that allows him to command the world.Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, chapter 13 describes the mind of the sage ruler as being still so that like water or a mirror it reflects all things, and then discusses the ruler who matches perfectly with Heaven and Earth:

This, and the next two chapters of the Zhuangzi, sketch other visions of ruling through mastery of the cosmic Way, including citing the vitalizing energy of the ruler’s “techniques of the heart/mind” that brings life to the rules and regulations that define government.Footnote ⁵²

A later passage also elaborates a model of the man who becomes ruler of the world through mental self-mastery:

Here the traditional epithet of the Zhou king indicates a unique relation to Heaven achieved through perfecting internal serenity.

In addition to these discussions of the ruler as a self-perfected being, the Zhuangzi also describes humble people who through total concentration and immersion in their surroundings attain mastery of one skill. These figures, whom A. C. Graham names “craftsmen,” exemplify an ideal of personhood defined by spontaneously responding to events with an unmatched skill that would be undermined by recourse to thought. These people include carpenters, swimmers, boatmen, cicada-catchers, and most famously Cook Ding who carves innumerable oxen without dulling his blade because he perceives with his spirit (shen) rather than his eyes, and Wheelwright Bian who has a magically efficacious art of crafting a wheel.Footnote ⁵⁴

A final form of self-perfected persons in the Zhuangzi are those who can concentrate their spirit into a trance-like state that leaves mind and body completely void and empty (with a mind being like “ash” and a body like “wood”). One example is the aforementioned cicada-catcher, while others attain this state through “sitting and forgetting” (zuo wang 坐忘).Footnote ⁵⁵ Finally, some people are explicitly called “perfected people” (zhi ren 至人, sometimes the “perfected people of antiquity”). They are sometimes placed in a hierarchy with the “true people” (zhen ren 真人), the “spirit people” (shen ren 神人), and the “sages” (sheng ren 聖人), usually in that order, indicating declining levels of attainment in self-cultivation. A recurring formula describing the perfected people indicates that their mastery of themselves and the world is such that fires will not burn them, freezing weather chill them, nor anything frighten them.Footnote ⁵⁶ Some can ride clouds and mists to soar freely above the world, which along with the references to spirit trances suggests that ideas in this text were derived from the model of meditation sketched in “Inner Training” and linked to the cult of xian immortals that emerged in this period.Footnote ⁵⁷

In addition to these discussions of the perfected self in the Zhuangzi itself, the grave-robbed text purchased by the Shanghai museum “All Things Flow into Form [fan wu liu xing 凡物流形], which traces how the ideal ruler cultivates an inner purity that leads to enlightenment, self-possession, and world mastery. As Kuan-yun Huang has shown, this text has passages that echo or develop many discussions in the received literature, most notably the Zhuangzi.Footnote ⁵⁸

These visions of the perfected self in late Warring States texts such as the Han Feizi and the Zhuangzi carried forward into the Huainanzi in the early Western Han. This syncretic text combined diverse intellectual traditions, but it drew its structuring ideas from, and most frequently cited, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. It used these earlier texts to elaborate ideas about the ideal ruler, the perfection of the human body through the purity of its qi, and the nature of sages and perfected people. These themes are most explicitly combined in its chapter 7, the “Quintessential Spirit” (jing shen 精神).Footnote ⁵⁹ This chapter recapitulates the cosmogonical account of the Laozi (already elaborated in ch. 1 of the Huainanzi) and then argues that human beings are exalted above other creatures because their qi contains the quintessential spirit, the loftiest form of qi. Following an account of the human embryo taking shape and being born, it describes the “orbs” (zang 藏) within which the bodily qi circulates and explains how the human body is a microcosm of Heaven and Earth.Footnote ⁶⁰

This account of the body’s origins leads to a discussion of how superior people, through holding to stillness and eliminating all passions and desires for external objects, can conserve spirit illumination (shen ming), perfect their senses, and become a purified spirit. The rest of the chapter develops these ideas, contrasting sages or Perfected People with common people who remain trapped by customs and desires, and waste their bodily energies pursuing wealth and honor. It cites images from the Zhuangzi, including how the perfected attain a body “like withered wood” and a “mind like dead ashes”; how they are not harmed by fire, water, or fear; how they do not dream; and how they attain potency (de) that gives them world mastery through “techniques of the heart/mind.” Near its end the chapter denounces the Confucians and other superficial scholars of its time who devote themselves to studying the Zhou classics and to strenuously suppressing their desires. Finally, it mocks those who practiced “guiding and pulling” exercises that often entailed imitating animals, accusing them of cultivating their bodies rather than their minds, and those who blindly pursued extending life through moxibustion and acupuncture.Footnote ⁶¹ This shows how the various styles of cultivating the embodied self had begun to engage in polemics by early empires.

Nourishing the Embodied Self through Hygienic Culture

In the same period that the philosophical masters increasingly focused on perfecting the body and its energies, masters of specialized disciplines did likewise. The most important of these were healers (yi 醫), who as will be discussed below gradually came to be defined as masters of a technical discipline that rigorously theorized a newly medicalized body, but several other types of specialists also discussed perfecting the embodied self. Among the earliest texts citing such men was the Zuo zhuan.

The Zuo zhuan contains anecdotes which portray conflicts in explaining the cause of a ruler’s disease between technical specialists – diviners and a healer – and a philosophically inclined political actor and generalist, Zichan. In one story diviners sought the name of a spirit that caused the ruler’s illness (see below) and obtained two names that they did not recognize. Zichan explained that they were the spirits of a star and a river, which could not cause a ruler’s illness. Instead, this was due to his wastefully dispersing his qi energies, so they become blocked and thereby weakened his body. He also argued that the disease resulted from his having women of his own surname in the harem.Footnote ⁶² The ruler rewarded Zichan, but summoned a healer from Qin for a second opinion. The latter offered a variation of Zichan’s explanation, suggesting that the disease resulted from sexual excess, and elaborated his diagnosis with an account of qi as a cosmic force that produced the four seasons, as well as such phenomena as wind, rain, dark, and light. The ruler praised Zichan as a “true gentleman broadly versed in things,” and doubled his parting gift, while a minister praised the healer as “a fine healer.”Footnote ⁶³ Both figures are praised, but the distinction between them is clear.

The earlier story of using divination to identify the spirits who caused a disease – and establishing what sacrifice should be offered to that spirit to make it desist – continued a practice observed in the Shang oracle inscriptions of assigning the causes of disease to invasive powers and treating them with sacrifice or exorcism. The endurance into the late fourth century BCE of this pattern of diagnosing and treating diseases is also demonstrated by contents of the tomb of Shao Tuo, a high official of Chu state who was buried in 316. His tomb contained a record of turtle and milfoil divinations performed on his behalf, and the last six dealt with attempts to identify the spirit(s) causing his heart problems, and the ritual procedures to assuage them.Footnote ⁶⁴ These records and related documents in the tomb reveal how the conduct of the Chu elite, and their understanding of the protection and cultivation of their bodies, depended on guidance from spiritual technicians. From other tombs we know that at this time diagnosis and therapy were increasingly shaped by theories of yin and yang, and of hemerological calendars that derived diagnosis and treatment from “almanacs” of auspicious and inauspicious days. However, the Lü shi chun qiu states that the old pattern, which it criticized, was still the most common well into the third century BCE.Footnote ⁶⁵

Although the Baoshan tomb suggests conservatism in explaining diseases and their treatment, it also had new features which were part of a transformation of the understanding of the dead and their relation to the living. Constance Cook has used the texts and material remains in the tomb to work out how illness and death were viewed as steps in a spiritual journey from one realm to another.Footnote ⁶⁶ This journey expresses new ideas about the nature of death, for it invokes evolving naturalistic laws based on a ritual calendar that cites the directions, the seasons, and the emerging systems of cosmic phases of elements and energies. In this process the grave became a liminal space from which the deceased departed toward the northwest to join a bureaucratically structured community. In addition to the divination records, the texts included an inventory of goods in the tomb which was read as a part of a ceremony of separating the dead from the living. Thus, this funerary ritual aimed at the creation and conveyance of a new type of post-mortem being who no longer settled into the collective status of ancestors defined by their place in the lineage.

These features of this and related Chu tombs from the same period are further elaborated in Lai Guolong’s Excavating the Afterlife.Footnote ⁶⁷ He works out changes that characterized mortuary ritual in the late Warring States, most notably this shift from merging the deceased with collective, benevolent ancestors to creating or transforming an individual who moved in a controlled process through the realm of the dead. Second, the spirits invoked in the divinations as potential causes of his illness are no longer primarily ancestors, as in the Shang, but nature deities or people who died without ancestors, died violently, or drowned. These spirits, whom Lai calls “the dead who would not be ancestors,” suggest the violence and social instability that marked the Warring States, but they are also a key step in the transition in the period toward the belief that the dead were dangerous spirits, and that funerary ritual served primarily to separate them from the living. The idea that violent death was a bad death that blocked becoming an ancestor, the elaboration of more detailed models of the body and the soul within funerary ritual, and the emergence of a more detailed afterlife for the deceased all contributed to a new focus in funerary ritual on forming a distinctive, posthumous self.Footnote ⁶⁸

In addition to this use of mortuary ritual to create and guide a new type of self through its posthumous existence, discoveries from the late Warring States and the early Han have also revealed many medical theories and procedures that greatly differ from the later physician-centered world of the Huangdi neijing (see below). Most important is the collection of medical manuscripts found in tomb 3 at Mawangdui, as well as related documents found in a tomb dating to the same period at Zhangjiashan.Footnote ⁶⁹ These texts, conventionally treated as examples of the “nourishing life” (養生 yang sheng) theories of the late Warring States, include discussions of bodily vessel channels (脈 mai) and their qi energies, recipes for drugs and exorcisms, breath cultivation, sexual techniques, and dietetics. As Donald Harper has argued, the placement of these texts in tombs, and the nature of their contents, suggest that they circulated among educated members of the elite who were not trained physicians, but rather amateurs who hoped to improve their own bodies and extend their life spans. Only the texts on channels and therapy through moxibustion (in contrast to the later Huangdi neijing, acupuncture is never mentioned) assume the work of a physician, and only one mentions students receiving instruction from a master.Footnote ⁷⁰

This suggests a world in the late fourth through the first century BCE where ideas about therapies for body and spirit could be divided into four currents. First, there was the philosophical tradition stemming from “Inner Training” in which the meditative production of a perfected mind and body led to the inward gathering and then outward projection of refined energies or spirit to create social order. Second, the Zhuangzi referred to ideas, linked to the xian cult in the third century, for creating an ethereal spirit-body which could soar through the Heavens. Third, there were the techniques described in the texts from Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan in which elite men used hygienic techniques of breathing, stretching, sexual cultivation, and recipes to improve their health and extend longevity. Finally, as will be discussed below, there were methods for diagnosis and therapy, in part derived from religion and magic but increasingly based on theories of nature, through which trained physicians could diagnose and treat their patients. Below, I briefly sketch the hygienic practices for self-treating elite men. Following Harper, I place the discussion under four rubrics – breath cultivation, exercises, sexual cultivation, and dietetics – while noting that these four all focus on the ingestion and circulation of fresher qi energies.Footnote ⁷¹

The earliest reference to a breathing exercise to extend life appears in a set of nine rhyming, trisyllabic phrases placed under the rubric “circulating qi” (xing qi 行氣) on a dodecagonal block of jade probably carved in the late fourth or early third century BCE.Footnote ⁷² In using verse, presumably to be recited as an epitome of more detailed instructions received from a master, it hints at influence from the “Inner Training” or the Laozi, but does not provide enough detail to be studied in isolation. However, it argues that qi should first flow downward and, after transformation, return upward, anticipating the later “Model of the Vessels [mai fa 脈法]” from Mawangdui.Footnote ⁷³

In contrast with the jade, the Mawangdui texts on breathing exercises, especially “Eliminating Grain and Consuming Qi [que gu shi qi却穀食氣]” and sections from the “Ten Questions [shi wen 十問],” give more detailed instructions, although sometimes in a metaphorical language.Footnote ⁷⁴ The purpose of this esoteric style is uncertain, but it might render the act more spiritual or give it a cosmic aspect. The texts also espouse a regimen of breathing exercises that vary through the seasons and are mapped onto the time of day, most commonly entailing expelling old energies at night and inhaling new ones in the morning. Other sections describe how the ingested energies can be directed to designated spots in the body, such as the chest or the four extremities. The discussion in the first of the “Ten Questions” presents a lengthy process of compressing and transmuting the inhaled qi energies, then spreading them to the flesh, skin, and tips of the hair, all as a preliminary to eating.

The second major aspect, exercises, is generally discussed under the rubric of “pulling” (yin 引) or “guiding and pulling” (dao yin 導引). The latter term apparently refers to both “breathing” (dao as guiding the qi) and exercise, and accounts of exercise routines in the Book of Exercises (yin shu) from Zhangjiashan almost all discuss how the breath is to be associated with the physical exercises.Footnote ⁷⁵ In contrast with exercise routines in the early West, which aimed at developing a large, articulated musculature, these exercises were intended to maximize flexibility and the movement of qi through the body. This contrast reflects a significant distinction in how the structures of the body were articulated in the two cultures.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Exercises begins with a series of routines associated sequentially with spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and others follow the time of day. It includes both accounts of individual exercises, for example, “pulling yin,” which is basically a toe-touch, with more elaborate sequences to achieve specific purposes, such as treating a stipulated ailment. It concludes with a list of exercises identified by what part of the body or physiological function they benefit.Footnote ⁷⁷

In addition to dealing with breathing, some of the exercise routines also incorporate dietetics as a means of ingesting qi. Thus the exercise named “increasing yin energies” (yi yin qi 益陰氣) stipulates that it cannot be performed at the end of the month (when the yin is at its peak), describes a posture to be assumed, and then prescribes:

This exercise, which is mapped onto the time of the month, entails physical stretching, breathing cultivation (entailed in the “utmost” inhalation of the grain’s qi), and eating. Several other exercises also prescribe “pulling the buttocks” (yin kao 引尻), that is, constricting the anus.Footnote ⁷⁹ This would propel qi energies that were being forcefully compressed in the lesser abdomen, and was a frequent aspect of sexual cultivation exercises.

Before discussing such exercises, we should note that the Mawangdui texts include one with forty-four drawings of daoyin exercises. Unfortunately, their captions are largely lost and the drawings depict only static poses which thus exclude the dynamic series described in the Zhangjiashan Exercises Book.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, many of the titles of the illustrations indicate that the exercises entailed animal imitation, such as the “bear ramble,” and this also figures in the Exercises Book.Footnote ⁸¹ Clearly animals exemplified distinctive types of force or energy, so that imitating them could improve people’s bodies. This resembles texts on longevity that advocated imitating the breathing of turtles or other long-lived creatures. Two discussions of the sage’s model for cultivating sex also list animal imitations.Footnote ⁸²

Sexual cultivation was the focus of two Mawangdui texts, and references to it were scattered through others, especially the recipe books on “nurturing life” and “various cures.”Footnote ⁸³ The two texts that focused on sexual cultivation rely on elements of verse, with extensive rhymed passages, as well as frequent metaphors and phonetic echoes that provide esoteric terms for parts of the female body, or map that body onto world geography. Thus, they exhibit lingering influences of the philosophical writings on perfecting the self, such as “Inner Training,” the Laozi, and the Han Feizi, which also used verse to suggest the loftiness of the subject and to facilitate memorization.Footnote ⁸⁴ While one passage warns of the dangers of excessive lust, which the sage avoided through establishing models for intercourse (which elsewhere include animal imitations), the Mawangdui texts differ from the most common discussions of sex. These warn against excessive sexual activity (like the physician and Zichan in the Zuo zhuan), use intercourse as a metaphor for key human relations such as that between the ruler and his ministers, or (in later times) treat intercourse as a vampiric combat where each party seeks to extract the other’s energies through inducing an orgasm while oneself refraining.Footnote ⁸⁵

To summarize their teachings, the texts treat sexual cultivation as a means of generating energies and essence (jing) which create a lighter, more refined body that approaches the condition of a spirit (shen). Although some passages discuss the woman’s pleasure (in “conjoining yin and yang” she must achieve orgasm), indicate that she can physically benefit, and stipulate that the man must not “control,” the focus is on him. The texts break down the act of sex, which it labels the “Way of play/enjoyment” (xi dao 戲道), into a series of steps: foreplay, sexual positions, signs of female arousal, the art of using the penis, and the culminating moment of female orgasm. There is some discussion of avoiding premature ejaculation, but it is unclear whether the male should ideally achieve an orgasm. The sequence is also numerically analyzed: “ten positions” that could be assumed (identified as shi 勢, a military-political term for “fluid power of circumstances,” most of which entail animal imitation), “five signs” of a woman’s approaching climax, “ten movements” to be made by the penis, and “nine manners” to thrust it. In the account of the “ten movements” of the penis, each step is marked by a bodily transformation resembling those attained in meditation: the eyes and ears becoming perceptive, the voice becoming brilliant, the skin glowing, the muscles growing strong, and ultimately attaining the ideal state of “spirit illumination” (shen ming).Footnote ⁸⁶

While the sexual chapters do not discuss the questions of frequency or the number of partners, one section in “Recipes for Nurturing Life [yang sheng fang 養生方]” discusses substances that could be eaten that allowed a man to have sex with multiple partners.Footnote ⁸⁷ Several modern scholars have also suggested that the emphasis in the sexual-cultivation texts on stroking or pressing zones of the body that produced distant responses could well have provided a model for the idea of a body structured by channels where therapy by moxibustion or acupuncture likewise influenced at a distance.Footnote ⁸⁸

As for dietetics, the recipe chapters describe drugs, beverages, and foods that can supplement the diet and prepare for exercises or meals, and they do not stipulate the ascetic program of grain elimination. They do, however, describe many plants and other natural substances, as well as the methods of processing them, including magical incantations.Footnote ⁸⁹ There are formulae in “Recipes for Nurturing Life” for treating inability to achieve erections (sometimes due to age), increasing the size or pliancy of the erect penis, stimulating the man’s sexual excitement, increasing the woman’s sexual desire, removing the woman’s body hairs, treating genital swelling, or facilitating sexual intercourse.Footnote ⁹⁰ Sexual treatments are also scattered through the “Recipes for Various Cures [za liao fang 雜療方].”Footnote ⁹¹

Other texts on recipes, for example, “Recipes for Fifty-two Ailments [wushier bing fang 五十二病方],” aim at treating diseases and pains or working magic for such ends as eliminating marital hostility, seducing a noble, dispelling bad dreams, preventing mothers-in-law and wives from fighting, stopping infants from crying, and winning lawsuits [“Recipes for Various Charms”].Footnote ⁹² Given the celebration of the skilled physician’s ability to foresee and forestall diseases before they are even perceived by the patient, this emphasis on treating diseases that have already developed and on dealing with existing failures in sexual performance suggests that recipes are in some way secondary or inferior to the interlinked program of breathing, exercise, and controlled sex traced out above. The “Discussion of the Supreme Way Under Heaven” supports this idea in stating that if the man “impulsively” (ji 疾, which as a noun means “illness”) has sex without proper preparation and control, he will fall ill from disordered qi and consequent “inner fevers.” These must then be treated with medicine, moxibustion, and diet to “bolster his exterior” (fu qi wai 輔其外).Footnote ⁹³ Using medicine and dietetics to treat an “exterior” that has fallen ill due to an “interior” disturbed by failure in self-control demonstrates the relative status of the two approaches to bodily health.

A final set of medical texts from Mawangdui, and a related example from Zhangjiashan, provide an early account of the vessels through which qi moved as a new model of the body, theory of illness, and form of therapy.Footnote ⁹⁴ The model of the body where qi and blood flow through channels was first mentioned in a text on water (probably fourth century BCE) preserved in the Guanzi: “Water is blood and vapor of the earth, like what flows through the muscles and vessels.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The Mawangdui texts have developed a more detailed model which traces eleven yin and yang channels, primarily along the legs and arms.Footnote ⁹⁶ The origins of this idea of vessels running through the body is uncertain, although blood vessels are an obvious model, and the above passage suggests that muscles might also have contributed, as do body-earth correspondences, with vessels acting like streams. The fact that stroking and pressing in sexual foreplay elicited physical responses at a distance may also have supported the idea. While this model moved towards that expounded later in the Yellow Emperor corpus (with identical names for many channels), it differs in having only eleven vessels (rather than twelve), in not linking the vessels into a body-wide circulatory system, and in arguing that the yin energies in the yin vessels are identified with death. This last point has been invoked to explain why a black lacquer figurine discovered in Mianyang, Sichuan in 1993 traces the lines of the vessels in red, but omits the yin vessels, thus suggesting a perfected body.Footnote ⁹⁷

In addition to indicating an emergent model of the body, the texts on vessels also present a new idea of disease. Earlier accounts of the origins of disease, as in Shang divination records and the Baoshan texts, identified ailments as spirits attacking the body, and therapy consisted of identifying the attackers to be able to assuage or exorcise them. In the vessel texts, health depended on maintaining the proper flow of blood and qi, and diseases were explained as some functional failure, such as flowing in the wrong direction or stagnating. Consequently, therapy consisted in restoring harmony and proper flow within the body, which is itself the cause of the disease and indeed the disease itself.Footnote ⁹⁸ Harper, citing earlier works by Paul Unschuld, distinguishes these two models as “ontological” (disease as a thing) and “functional” or “physiological” (disease as a disturbance in correct action).Footnote ⁹⁹ Whereas most diseases in the recipes texts, particularly the “Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments,” are still externally caused, the vessel texts explain diseases through failed or improper energy flows.

This shift in explaining the origins of ailments also changed how they were named and classified. Whereas the “ontological” diseases were named for the outside entity that produced them, accounts of diseases due to vessels largely named them through their location. In the Mawangdui texts this consists largely of speaking of pain (or numbness or cold) located in certain parts of the body. The “Vessel Book [mai shu 脈書]” found at Zhangjiashan is even more systematic, listing possible locations for ailments and giving each ailment a name depending on that location.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A later passage in the same text, which has no parallel in the Mawangdui texts, divides the body into “six constituents” – bones, muscles, blood, vessels, flesh, and qi – describes the type of pain produced by ailments in each constituent, and argues that the entire body would collapse through failure to identify these pains. This extends the signaling function of pain that figures in all the vessel texts into a more general theory of pain as the chief identifier of disease.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It also suggests that part of the motivation for shifting toward the new model was that it established a hierarchy of bodily constituents moving from the heaviest and most solid to the lightest and most ethereal. Recalling that exercises and diet served largely to produce lighter and more refined substances (from qi to jing to shen or shenming) within the body, and that the “Inner Training” sought to empty the body to draw in refined substances, we can see a model in which treating diseases was a lower stage in a more general transformation of the body into a refined and ethereal being. The lacquered figurine from Mianyang also suggests this model of bodily transformation.Footnote ¹⁰²

The vessel texts’ model for treating diseases also indicates this shift toward combining therapy with seeking bodily perfection. Whereas the “ontological” diseases were treated with sacrifices, exorcisms, or ingesting recipe concoctions, the vessel texts base their treatments, which aim to restore proper flow of qi, on cauterization (or other means of applying heat) and lancing. The former was the preferred method, while the latter (still largely used for draining pus) was regarded as potentially dangerous and only used as a last resort. As Yamada Keiji has argued, the idea of applying heat, which would affect the condition of the qi within the vessels, predated the full-blown development of vessel-based therapy, and contributed to its elaboration.Footnote ¹⁰³

If cauterization failed to work, then the physician could resort to using a lancing-stone (bian 砭) to cut open a vessel at the elbow or knee to drain the qi, as modelled on draining pus. Stone itself had magical properties and was associated with the pursuit of the perfected body noted above. Moreover, the vivifying power of jade may have encouraged choosing it as the material substrate for the early inscription on circulating qi.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Nevertheless, such stones are most important as the immediate ancestor of the metal needles which began to be employed in the Han to perform acupuncture.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

One last cache of documents from the early Han, roughly contemporaneous with the texts from Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan, that sheds light on the transition from magical medicine and self-guided “nourishing life” to the physiological, acupuncture-based medicine of the Yellow Emperor corpus was the cases attributed to Chunyu Yi preserved in the Shi ji.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This man is described as master of the great granary of Qi, and was best known for a story in which his arrest led his daughter to appeal to the emperor to be made a female slave in his place, who was so moved that he decided to abolish mutilating punishments in 167 BCE. In that same year he summoned Chunyu Yi to court to ask why he treated ailments, and whom he had successfully treated (or accurately predicted the death, if they were beyond treatment). In response he described how he learned to diagnose and treat ailments, discussed twenty-five of his cases, and responded to eight official queries, in one of these more comprehensively narrating his studies.

While scholars have shown that there are anachronisms in some of his accounts, and argued that the twenty-five cases were probably conflated by Sima Qian from several documents, they do follow a standard pattern and evince a consistent approach to medicine.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ To the extent that the cases were not forged by Sima Qian, an idea that no scholars endorse, this multiplicity of voices makes them even more valuable as evidence on ideas about healing that circulated among officials in the first century BCE. This also suggests that there were many men, like those buried at Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan, who were not professional physicians (to the extent that such a role existed at this time) but devoted time to studying healing. This idea is supported by materials cited by Miranda Brown, which show how diverse officials, military officers, an architect, and other people in this period treated various ailments.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Chunyu Yi’s account of his studies and cases indicates several things about treating disease in this period. First, as noted above, they show that diverse officials and other members of the elite had mastered sophisticated medical practices. In addition to the men from whom Chunyu Yi learned the arts of diagnosis and treating ailments, and the other implicit authors of cases, Yi lists several ordinary city dwellers, a couple officials, and even two Grand Physicians (tai yi 太醫) from a royal court who studied with him. He also lists the texts which he taught them, the length of their studies, and their degree of mastery.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This indicates some continuity with the medical culture suggested in the early Han tombs.

Second, the authors of the cases roughly agree on practice: privileging as the primary forms of diagnosis reading pulses as supplemented by examining the complexion, making predictions about the course of the disease, preferably treating them with a hot decoction, and resorting to stronger drugs and acupuncture or moxibustion as a last resort. Moreover, they follow a standard mode of presenting the case, which as Miranda Brown has suggested may be patterned on conventions in writing up legal cases. In each case they begin with an account of the background circumstances, including the title or status of the patient, their place of registration and name, and finally how the potential healer encountered them. They then provide a prognosis, usually after testing the pulse, describe how the ailment arose, and predict its course. Third, they often receive confirmation from the patient, who narrates a story that matches the healer’s account of origins. Finally, they explain what characteristics of the pulse or the patient’s complexion elicited their account of the disease’s origins and course.

Third, a notable feature of his accounts of his studies (and to some degree of his teaching) is that they entail receiving esoteric texts from a master (Yang Qing or Gongsun Guang) who recognized Yi’s remarkable character, selected him as heir to his texts, imposed a vow to never reveal the texts to others, either gave him the texts or orally presented them for transcription, and finally gave him lengthy instructions in using their teachings.Footnote ¹¹⁰ These themes of recognizing worth, disclosing efficacious texts, and imposing a vow of secrecy also figure in tales of the revelation of military texts, and scriptures in later religious Daoism. However, while emphasizing the transmission from a master, Chunyu Yi also insists that he does not know from whom Yang Qing received his texts, and the formulae from Gongsun Guang are simply described as “transmitted from ancient times,” with no names of transmitters. Thus, there was no attempt to claim authority through establishing a medical lineage based on textual transmission. Indeed, the two men are described simply as the heads of wealthy households who studied these arts out of personal interest, without seeking to treat people.

Finally, in many cases the author refers to either a named medical practitioner or a collective “throng of healers” (zhong yi 眾醫) who invariably misdiagnose the case and often prescribe damaging therapies.Footnote ¹¹¹ These recurring polemics, along with accounts of other texts on diagnosis and formulae which prove to be worthless, indicates a world marked by considerable competition between healers. It might also carry forward the tensions suggested in the Zuo zhuan’s account of medical attendant He and Zichan, in which the specialist and the learned official figure as rivals.

Healing the Embodied Self in the Yellow Emperor Corpus

The above account traced out a period from the late Warring States through the first century of the Western Han when diverse hygienic practices served to perfect and extend the body’s powers, while assorted techniques of diagnosis and therapy were textually transmitted and studied by members of the elite, including government and military officials. Some of these texts were esoterically revealed in teacher-disciple transmissions, but this did not constitute medical lineages, they were not restricted to medical specialists or professional healers, and there was no overarching concept of “healing” (yi 醫) as a field of study. As argued by Miranda Brown, it seems that the definition of “medicine” as a coherent and independent discipline with a defined body of openly transmitted texts was first worked out by Liu Xiang (and his son Liu Xin) at the end of the Western Han. As bibliographer of the imperial text collection and leader of the classicizing movement that revived many early texts (such as the Zuo zhuan) or restored major texts that had fallen into disorder through inattention (like the Xunzi), he reorganized the textual field of early imperial China, thereby constituting several new intellectual disciplines. His son reworked Liu Xiang’s preliminary catalogue into the Seven Summaries (qi lüe 七略) which was largely followed in Ban Gu’s “Monograph on the Arts and Letters [yi wen zhi 藝文志]” in his Book of the Han.Footnote ¹¹²

The Lius’ project was based on the idea (as in the Renaissance and Reformation in early modern Europe) that one reached the truth by returning to the classical works themselves, abandoning the centuries of orally transmitted commentary that defined the teachings of court-appointed erudites. In this they participated in a broader movement in which scholars and writers – Yang Xiong, Huan Tan, Ban Gu, Wang Chong, and lesser authors – described the early sages from Fu Xi to Confucius as universal intellects and passionate authors. This was contrasted with the imperial erudites who focused on a single interpretation of a single text, thereby radically distorting the text itself and losing hope of achieving understanding.Footnote ¹¹³

As part of this project of returning to the classic texts, Liu Xiang and Liu Xin collected and restored earlier texts on diagnosis and therapy, and in their bibliographic catalogue drew disparate therapies together under the rubric of yi. Although they still placed drug formulae, sexual arts, and techniques of immortality into separate categories, these were then grouped as “methods and techniques” (fang ji 方技). They accompanied these with the earliest surviving list of exemplary healers, thus creating a proto-history of the new discipline of medicine.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This exemplifies the common pattern that when a discipline or mode of thought first emerges, people construct an imagined genealogy in which received names are recognized as early exemplars of the new practice. However, it is important to note that while Brown correctly posits this catalogue as a crucial step in constituting medicine as an intellectual and textual field, it is still a subset of a broader field of “methods and techniques” that protect, restore, and improve the body. It would take some centuries for the first two subcategories – medicine and formulae – to become a purely “medical” realm, while the sexual arts and techniques of immortality became aspects of religious Daoism.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Before proceeding, we should note that this emergence of the categorized book collection, effectively a library although a tightly closed one, marks a set of major developments in the relation between men and texts. First, it shows that the amount of written material was too great to be mastered by any individual or single group. Second, it demonstrates the existence of an organization, here the imperial state and elements of the classicist scholars, who were committed to collecting and organizing the works of numerous previously isolated groups. Third, it is the product of a world where works are seen as traces of a vanished or vanishing era (in this case the era of the sages that ended with Confucius) that must be maintained through scholarly activity. Fourth, it marks an explicit claim of the overarching organization that sponsors the library to eliminate or absorb “esoteric” texts which had been the exclusive property of a self-selected group of masters formed through a process of mutual recognition and protracted training, a process that deliberately excluded the wider scholarly world. Finally, in the process of organizing the entirety of the texts that they could find, bibliographers (like the Lius) grouped previously disparate texts into new categories and disciplines, such as the overarching category of “methods and techniques” and sub-category of “medical classics,” placing all these categories into a comprehensive “knowledge tree” that would be visible to anyone who had sufficient time and resources to achieve the necessary literacy.Footnote ¹¹⁶

As an example of the creation of such new disciplines within a knowledge tree, the Lius categorization of medicine is significant. Most important, the category under which it was grouped was explicitly defined as “methods and techniques.” The catalogue of the Lius and Ban Gu carried forward the tensions that we observed in the story of the Attendant He and Zichan, and in the polemics of Chunyu Yuyi against named physicians or an anonymous crowd of healers whose arts could not match his own text-based diagnoses and formulae. These stories pitted a more generalized intellect tied into the political and philosophical order against the limited specialization of someone who was a master of only one art. In the same way, the Lius hierarchized their textual universe, placing on top the encompassing mental skills embodied in the classics and the philosophers (whose texts were arranged by the Lius themselves), to be followed by the inferior mental specializations of the military treatises, calendrics and astronomy, and finally the “methods and techniques” of perfecting the body (with each field assigned to a specialized official, although the Lius doubtless participated).Footnote ¹¹⁷

However, while a discipline of technical medicine emerged in the re-working of the textual realm, at this point there were no texts with named authors or attributions to any recent author. Thus the most prestigious category, that of the “medical classics” (yi jing 醫經), consisted only of the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic and Outer Classic, Bian Que’s Inner Classic and Outer Classic (attributed to the mythic early physician whose “biography” precedes that of Chunyu Yi in the Shi ji), Mr. Bai’s Inner Classic and Outer Classic, and the cryptic Assisting Chapters (pang pian 旁篇). The texts in the other categories have names that indicate their contents or attributions to such ancient, mythic figures as the Yellow Emperor, Shen Nong, and Bian Que. Despite the new prestige that such texts gained in the Lius classification, they remained collective works by anonymous authors. Not until the late Eastern Han and the century immediately after the Han did medical books appear with named authors who appended “postfaces” (xu 序) to explain and justify the work.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Consequently, the one surviving work which may provide insights into the development from the first century BCE to the late Eastern Han of ideas about body models, diagnosis, and therapy (focusing on acupuncture) is the Huangdi neijing. This title appears in the Han imperial catalogue under the yi jing rubric, although it is preserved only in its medieval recensions: the Suwen 素問, the Lingshu 靈樞, and the Taisu 太素.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As discussed by Unschuld, it seems that these works began to be assembled in the late Western Han and continued to develop through numerous hands over a long time. As the works drew together diverse texts and ideas, passed through multiple hands, and were doubtless jumbled and then reassembled in the centuries between the Eastern Han and the Tang, they are sometimes self-contradictory. A more systematic work on the uses of yin/yang and the Five Phases to articulate a medicine of systematic correspondences was compiled in the first or second century CE to reduce the confusion. This work, entitled the Classic of Difficult Issues [nanjing 難經], thus provides a more rigorous formulation of medical theory and practice in the Eastern Han, but the loss of the contradictions and tensions from the other recensions reduces the insights that it offers into the full range of medicine in the period.Footnote ¹²⁰

Thus, the Suwen and Lingshu compiled diverse texts and fragments written between the second century BCE and the second century CE, some perhaps related to recently excavated texts, with some additions being made in the subsequent centuries. This process depended upon the simultaneous emergence of a “community of literati and literary patrons who collected, disseminated, and made use of the texts,” as exemplified in the bibliographic treatise of the Book of the Han. This treatise also notably omits many of the titles that have been recently excavated, demonstrating that it aimed at being comprehensive only in the sense of collecting all texts approved by the classicizing literati acting as agents of the state order.Footnote ¹²¹ In this way the simultaneous processes of textualization, systematization, synthesis, and dissemination underlay the creation of medicine as a technical discipline articulated in freely circulating (within the extreme physical limits of the period) texts by those expert in their interpretation and employment. This circulation of texts became fundamental to the new type of healer who was emerging, just as in Reformation Germany municipal physicians devoted themselves to book collecting and anatomical experimentation even as they battled to replace apothecaries as the model practitioners of medicine.Footnote ¹²²

One interesting feature of the Yellow Emperor corpus is that it either set the model for or adopted the Lius’ categorization of the emergent field of medicine as a “technique” or an “art.” Both the Suwen and the Lingshu describe what their healers do as a shu 術, which was largely synonymous with the term ji used in the imperial catalogue for the arts of healing or improving the embodied self.Footnote ¹²³ They also describe healers as “craftsmen” (gong 工), assimilating their art to those of other skillful practitioners who provided for people’s needs.Footnote ¹²⁴ While the term seemingly indicates a lower social status, resembling that of a manual worker, the authors were also using the adjectival sense of gong as “skillful” or “expert,” as indicated in a passage where the use of gong to indicate a healer is the lowest of a hierarchical series rising from the ordinary practitioner to the “skillful” (qiao 巧), the “spirit-like” (shen), and ultimately the “sage” (sheng). Moreover, elsewhere gong is placed above the “crude” or “incompetent” (cu 粗).Footnote ¹²⁵ In other lists the skillful gong still figures below the “enlightened” (ming) and the “spirit-like” (shen).Footnote ¹²⁶ These comparative hierarchies show that the new-style physicians placed themselves among the elite intellects.

Describing the highest form of healer as a sage, which recurs throughout the texts, also draws them into the realm of philosophers and rulers, thus reinforcing the elevation of status indicated by constituting healing as a textual category. This claim to sagehood also maps onto, and indeed justifies, the use of the early imperial state as a central metaphor for the human body, with the organs that stored the different forms of energetic substances being identified as “palaces” and “depots,” and the overarching structure of the body with its vessels along which energies moved following the way material resources of the empire moved along the river systems and roads.Footnote ¹²⁷

This emergence of a practice of medicine based on the circulation of theoretical and technical texts entailed the gradual suppression (without elimination, as all earlier practices continued) of the range of healers who had thrived in the early Han. It shifted away from multiple patient-centered, curative traditions to a scientifically grounded, technical practice which privileged the theoretical knowledge of the physician, basing itself on models of the cosmos and numerology to claim superiority over the limited practices of earlier healers. Even more significantly, these new-style healers, who were the model “persons” created in the new texts, asserted their authority over the people who had previously developed and healed their own bodies, but were now reduced to the level of a patient whose body could be understood and healed only by the physician.

Indeed, the first chapter of the Suwen in its present form insists on the need to abandon the diverse earlier regimes of nourishing and perfecting the self through the hygienic practices of exercise, sex, and diet, arguing through quotations from earlier historians and philosophers.Footnote ¹²⁸ The Yellow Emperor, after following a magical path to adulthood (largely copied from the Shi ji’s account), asks Qi Bo why people in antiquity had lived more than one hundred years while remaining mobile, vigorous, and strong, while people of the present day are already disintegrating by the age of fifty. Qi Bo replies, in a passage borrowing phrases and ideas from the Huainanzi, that people in antiquity patterned their actions on the cycles of yin and yang, ate and drank in moderation, were regular in sleeping, and eschewed pointless activities, so their bodies (xing 形) and spirits (shen) remained joined. In contrast to these ideal beings in the distant past, the people of the present day regularly drink wine, behave badly, have sex while drunk, (echoing cases of Chunyu Yi) and thereby exhaust their body’s energies.Footnote ¹²⁹

Qi Bo then describes the sages of high antiquity who taught their people how to avoid harmful winds, abide in quiet, conserve their qi, have few desires, and eschew strong feelings. The people enjoyed their simple food and clothing, avoided all disturbing emotions, and did not envy those of higher status. After a lengthy, numerologically structured account of human maturation and decline, Qi Bo explains how those who have the Way can “repel old age” (que lao 却老), preserve their physical form, and still produce children at the age of one hundred. The chapter concludes with the Yellow Emperor describing how in high antiquity the “true people” (zhen ren) through imitating yin and yang and proper breathing could preserve their spirit and keep muscles and flesh united. This is followed by a sequence of decline adapted from the Zhuangzi from the “perfected people” (zhi ren) through the sages, and finally the worthy, who were able to live in harmony with the seasons, accumulate essential energies, still cravings and emotions, and thus to live out shorter life spans which still reaching one hundred. This chapter thus begins the book with an account of earlier times when people extended their lives by imitating nature and practicing hygienic therapies, but radically opposing this to the present day when the ability to keep body and spirit intact by self-mastery and exercise had been lost through a long process of decline.

Over its vast expanse, and without achieving consistency, the Huangdi neijing elaborates versions of the categories used by Harper to analyze the Mawangdui materials: a model of the body, a theory of disease, and types of therapy. As for the first, its model of the body developed a more systematic version of earlier vessel texts, moving from an idea of the vessels as unlinked channels where qi connected upper parts to lower ones, to a vision of a single connected system where qi circulated throughout the body. In its general omission of alternative therapies and modes of self-cultivation, it also posited a body where the moving qi was the single, crucial element and the channels the decisive constituents of the person. While the texts do not define what qi is, they agree that it is airy, light, constantly in motion, and essential for maintaining life. As discussed in the sections on theories of the person elaborated by the philosophers, this emphasis on the body as consisting of, or a container for, qi (and its more refined forms as “essence” [jing] and “spirit” [shen)) patterned the self on a social model in which the more refined and mobile elements corresponded to the elites who wielded their minds, as opposed to the coarser, physical limbs and muscles that matched the laboring masses.Footnote ¹³⁰ In the context of medicine, knowing the body as qi entailed a set of propositions about the patient as a person, about his relation to the doctor, and about the capacities of the doctor to know him or her.

The relations of the types of qi and the person took several forms. First, as Unschuld elaborates, the organs of the human body are defined as “depots” or “containers” of more dynamic substances, and ranked hierarchically according to the substance that they contain. This locating of substances also leads to observations on the links between inner organs and the exterior, secondary parts of the body, for example, skin, sinews, flesh, and bone. While the individual chapters do not agree on all these questions, and sometimes even contradict themselves, the hierarchical sequencing of moving substances, storage depots, and exterior parts remains consistent. This pattern maps the body onto the state, thus developing ideas about health within the context of establishing a political order, and facilitates the claims of those for whom the practice of medicine was identified with participating in the textual universe established through the state.Footnote ¹³¹

The model of a body as structured through the movement and storage of qi also facilitated linking medical ideas to the theories of yin and yang and the Five Phases, which had become fundamental to theorizing different realms by mapping them onto each other through numerology. Perhaps even more important, the definition of the body through qi facilitated articulating ideas about the links between the individual person and the cosmos. Thus chapter 3 of the Suwen is entitled “Discourse on How the Qi of Life Penetrates to Heaven [sheng qi tong tian lun 生氣通天論]” and elaborates a theory in which the body had to fuse its energies with those of Heaven and Earth through following the time of day, time of year, and point in history. Such fusion also hinged on correctly employing various factors structured according to yin and yang, or grouped into sets of five, for example, emotions, flavors, and seasons, to guide the body and its conduct.Footnote ¹³² This blurring of the boundaries between the self and the cosmos was an enduring feature of the qi discourse, as discussed in the first section.

A third significant feature of defining the body through its qi (and the more refined substances) was to facilitate understanding self and body through emphasizing the role of emotions. As early as passages attributed to Confucius, blood and qi were regarded as driving energies which manifested themselves in emotions and passions, qi being conflated with human violence and bellicosity. Moreover, late Warring States philosophers devoted considerable attention to a self-mastery that focused on control of emotions.Footnote ¹³³ As Shigehisa Kuriyama has discussed, in Eastern Han medical literature the reading of qi in the vessels was conflated with these ideas, so that increasingly the art of reading pulses became not just a means of diagnosing diseases, but also a way to recognize a person’s character. Thus, the physical state of the body and the nature of the person’s character fused both in the observation of emotions, the dynamic interface between what we would view as body and mind, and in the pulses which were the fluid manifestation of these energies. Emotions also provided a meeting ground between what the new-style physicians observed in their patients and what they perceived in themselves. As Kuriyama argues, “The deepest certainties about qi were rooted in knowledge that people had of the body because they were, themselves bodies.” This qi which defined the self was both external, in the perceptions of pulses and the face’s color, and internal in the physician’s perceptions of his own experiences.Footnote ¹³⁴

While the early philosophers had primarily viewed emotions as a destructive force that drained the body’s energies or trapped the mind in improper responses, most references to emotions in the Yellow Emperor corpus treat them as symptoms of internal conditions. A preponderance of these treat feelings as conditions that the doctor must observe to deduce problems with the qi, whether blockages, reversals, or other failings. They are also cited, though less frequently, to allow the physician to judge the progress of a therapy. Finally, sometimes the physician uses the emotional condition of his patient to decide that certain therapies are too dangerous. In some cases, emotions are also more traditionally cited as the cause of ailments, but these are not frequent. In short, the internal state of the patient has become primarily an objective condition which the doctor observes to guide his diagnoses and therapy, rather than something subjective that the patient himself observes and seeks to master through the powers of an intellect developed in hygienic exercises.

This approach to the emotions also helps explain another innovation in the Yellow Emperor corpus. Earlier texts had discussed the hierarchy of organs in the body, and the division of labor between them, often employing the metaphor of the state with the heart/mind assigned the role of ruler. Such earlier metaphors focused on the dangers posed by the senses which figured in the role of ministers that had to be mastered by the ruler/mind, although the Mencius also used the idea of the mind as ruler to justify the political dominance of “those who toiled with their minds” over those who used physical strength. In the Yellow Emperor corpus, however, even in a rare case where the mind was described as ruler, this was due to its being the storehouse of the highest substances, and most lists of organs do not place them in a hierarchy.Footnote ¹³⁵

The most plausible explanation for this break with earlier practice is that the earlier metaphor of brain as ruler emerged from a model of an active intellect working to master its own self, both its mental and physical aspects, while the emergent model in the Neijing focused on the mind of the physician, reducing the patient to an object of therapy. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that while the texts refer to the mind of the patient only where its disorders shape diagnosis and therapy, they insist on the need for the physician to be focused and calm. Some passages even describe the healer observing and guiding the patient’s “will and thoughts” (zhi yi 志意), applying his “spirit illumination” (shen ming) to the person of the patient, or focusing and applying his “essential spirit” (jing shen) to the process of needling to restore order to the patient’s mind. One of the most striking accounts of the physician’s mental mastery taking charge of the patient is the advocacy of seeking “oneness” or “union” that is declared to be the highest form of healing and described as follows:

Having sealed themselves together in a dark room, the physician is urged to mentally unite with the patient to fully restore his “spirits,” which are the highest energetic or mental substance in accounts of the embodied self. This emphasis on the refined forms of qi as the medium through which the healer and the patient come together, and through which the former shapes the latter, are an extension of the idea discussed above in the “Introduction” that qi facilitates theorizing the convergence of people (as distinct foci) into a broader “field” or “atmosphere” where all of them achieve fuller personhood through membership in the group.Footnote ¹³⁷

This shift of focus from the embodied self to a therapist who guides a person as a patient also figures in one passage which transfers the hygienic self-cultivation practices advocated in the “nourishing life” tradition entirely to the person of the physician. This describes how there are five principles to proper needling of which ordinary people are all ignorant. These five are ordering the spirit (zhi shen 治神), nourishing the body, judging the reliability of drugs, preparing pointed stones, and mastering the diagnosis of blood and qi. This reiterates the program of the Mawangdui corpus, except that here it is entirely deployed as a preliminary to the doctor’s attaining the total self-mastery and concentration that enable him to properly needle the patient.Footnote ¹³⁸

As for the theories of disease in the Yellow Emperor corpus, they basically carry forward the categories of the earlier vessel texts, shifting emphasis to the “functional” or “physiological,” where disease is understood not as an invader but as a disturbance in the functioning of the body itself, in this case largely in the flow of qi. While ontological theories of disease as an invader still exist, the “invaders” are almost never “bugs” or “demons,” but instead environmental factors such as “wind” (the most common external source of disease), but also damp, cold, heat, or dryness. These new models of disease highlight the impact of focusing on qi as the primary substance in the body. The physiological diseases are attributed to poor lifestyle (as in many of Chunyu Yi’s cases), to actions undertaken at the inappropriate season, or to mental problems that induce bodily distress. Thus, while patients no longer play a major role in healing or improving their bodies, they often figure as a way of explaining the disease’s origins.Footnote ¹³⁹

Theories of treatment in the Yellow Emperor corpus, like theories of disease, largely inherited the ideas of the vessel literature found at Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan. Diagnosis was primarily based on taking pulses, still supplemented by examining the patient’s complexion. Therapy was dominated by acupuncture, and in the Lingshu discussions of needling supplanted all the other forms of therapy. The Suwen still occasionally discussed other forms, including bloodletting, using drugs, and applying heat.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ However, the move toward a model of the body based almost entirely on qi and its derivatives entailed the predominance of diagnoses and therapies that explicitly targeted such substances. Moreover, emphasizing the self-cultivation and mental mastery of the healer also led to focusing on his abilities to read pulses, discern the hidden messages of complexions, and to place and time the movement of the needles to properly guide the qi of his patient.

This emphasis on diagnosis through the pulses and complexion, and on therapy through acupuncture (and to a lesser degree moxibustion) explains how the interfaces between the core of the body and the outer environment became the privileged zones for any understanding and modification of the self. Qi as the dynamic and determinative element in the body, and wind as the exterior substance that provided the medium for environmental influences and any external origins of disease, moved in and out through the porous boundaries of the skin, and the system of acupuncture meridians entailed that what Western medicine defines as “internal” organs were manipulable at the body’s surface. Both the earlier accounts that were incorporated into the new genealogy of medicine, and the Yellow Emperor corpus itself, described diseases that moved from the outside inward, growing more difficult to cure as they penetrated more deeply. Thus, the mastery of the physician, and his ability to help the patient, depended on recognizing the disease at its earliest stage, that is, at the level of the skin.Footnote ¹⁴¹

This aspect of the new theory of medicine thus emphasized the ability of the doctor to recognize the onset of diseases before they had become visible to lesser people, including the patient, and to predict the course of their development. The clearest articulation of this idea was not in the Yellow Emperor corpus, but in the writings of Hua Tuo (141–208 CE), who followed a discussion of the relation of pulses with qi, by stating, “The pulse is the first sign/presage of qi and blood.”Footnote ¹⁴² This assimilated the insistence on the importance of early recognition to the broader idea, which figured in numerous fields from military texts to yarrow divination, that anyone who could recognize a trend at its beginning could easily master it, while delay that allowed it to achieve full form would make it impossible to handle. In this way the art of the physician was again adapted to that of the philosopher or man of state (and as Miranda Brown has argued, the story of Bian Que and Lord Huan cast the “healer” in the role of the political adviser).

One final impact of the emergence of the model of the human body in vessel theory was that it was ungendered, so that most modern scholars date the emergence of any medical theorization of women’s bodies to the Tang and the Song. However, Robin Yates has shown that medicine for women can be dated back to the Han and the pre-Han, and in a recent article Li Yunxin has demonstrated that the healing traditions that preceded the Yellow Emperor corpus discussed women in numerous contexts.Footnote ¹⁴³ To summarize her article, the early texts on nourishing life and certain modes of healing discuss gendered patients, gendered medicines, gendered diseases (as the embodiment of yin and yang), gendered sexual partners, the female as mother, and gendered healers. In the technical medicine defined by the Yellow Emperor corpus, these distinctions tend to disappear. Li Yunxin hypothesizes that, within the limits of currently available texts, the emergent technical medicine largely suppressed many of these themes as part of its efforts to claim hegemony in the field of healing. Although the earlier methods of healing and self-cultivation were still practiced, they were dominated by the new science-based, textual medical field established in the Eastern Han. She also cites Robin Yates’s remarks on Zhang Ji’s detailed discussions in the Jin gui yao lüe of the mother’s medical problems that arise during pregnancy, speculating that this was associated with the rising attention to the mother as the center of the family in the Eastern Han elite.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

This reference to the Eastern Han elite also points back to the theme of ritual which, in the form of funerary rites, was crucial to self-definition among this group. Specifically, as discussed by K. E. Brashier, the stereotyped postmortem remembrance of these families’ dead was a process of pouring the newly deceased into prefabricated molds through which they became ancestors. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited and predetermined pool, their social identity was fixed through asserting their kinship relations to the living, they were described with set phrases from classical literature, and their identities were set as resembling a given cultural hero or sage official from antiquity.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This system of turning individual persons into creatures defined entirely by genealogical relations to the living (who in turn were bound to each other through their shared relation to the dead), and their participation in standardized social roles and virtues, marked the culmination in the late Han of classical mourning ritual as a means of creating selves within the networks of their kinship groups.

A final important late Eastern Han development in ideas about the embodied self was the appearance of the first technical medical texts identified as the work of named authors, specifically Hua Tuo and Zhang Ji. Particularly important were the works of Zhang Ji (ca. 150–219 CE), which currently survive as the Shang han lun [傷寒論 “On Cold Damage”] and the Jin gui yao lüe [金櫃要略 “Essential Prescriptions of the Golden Coffer”].Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Apart from being the work of a named, literati author, the Shang han lun became hugely influential in Chinese medicine because it was the first to combine the use of drug therapy with the theory of correspondences, and because it was one of the few works to focus on a single disease etiology. The “cold damage” of the title broadly indicates all externally contracted diseases, but narrowly refers to illnesses contracted through wind and cold.

The text was also influential because since the Song dynasty it has included a postface where Zhang states that he once had a family of over two hundred members, but most of these had died in a plague classified as “cold damage,” which motivated him to study medicine. After indicating his desire to rescue suffering people, his postface concludes by citing Confucius’s discussion of the levels of knowledge, and stating that his honoring the medical arts (fang shu 方術, literally “technical arts,” as in the Lius’ catalogue and the Yellow Emperor corpus) stems from following Confucius’s words. As Miranda Brown has demonstrated, this postface only appears in Song editions, and the numerous earlier references to Zhang Ji never mention his loss of most of his kin. She argues that this effort to identify the author as a devoted Confucian literatus seeking to save the people reflects the emergence in the Song of the ideal of the “Confucian doctor” who combined literary cultivation with a career as a professional healer.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While this took place long after the period covered in this essay, it is plausible that the Song doctors embraced as their model the first individual to whom a medical text could be assigned, specifically the text that first systematically expounded the drug therapy that dominated Chinese medicine through the centuries.

Conclusion: Therapies of the Self

Theories of cultivating a proper, embodied self emerged as a topic in East Asia in texts of the fourth century BCE, probably responding to the new political and social order of the Warring States, which demanded new ideals of personhood. Confucian texts elaborated theories of rituals that defined this new order, within which elite selves emerged through the roles in which they were embedded (and embodied). These rituals, whose overarching rubric was phonetically and graphically linked with the body, were also used to explain health or disease, and the attainment of full longevity or premature death. In the late Warring States, theoreticians of statecraft similarly theorized the state’s subjects as relational persons defined in family units, legal codes, and the associated hierarchy of titles.

Warring States writers also theorized the embodied self as a product of qi energies that transferred substance between the person and the surrounding world. The most influential example was the poem “Inner Training” which traced out a process from correct bodily placement through mental cultivation to a perfect tranquility that opened the self to beneficent spirits, allowing mental powers to radiate outward to dominate other people, and ultimately the world. This process, which became enmeshed in the Mencius’s theory of the body as the ground of all virtues, thus provided the basis for a theory of rule through mastery of the embodied self. Virtually every text from the late Warring States, as well as early Han examples, articulated versions of this theory, often labelled “techniques of the heart/mind” and aiming to create a “sage” or “great man” who was both the ideal person and model ruler.

The late Warring States also witnessed other new theories or practices for cultivating the self. Thus, in Chu tombs from the fourth and third centuries, people who died violently or prematurely (a significant category in this age of large-scale war) were no longer turned into anonymous ancestors, but instead were guided by ritual specialists to become post-mortem selves who undertook a journey to a bureaucratic realm of the dead in the far northwest. This followed the increasing insistence that funerary rituals served to permanently separate the dead from the living. Scattered anecdotes and arguments also spoke of specialists in the arts of the kitchen or healing who shaped a healthy body that enabled the person to perform designated roles.

However, the most important accounts from this period of perfecting the embodied self were texts from Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan which describe hygienic techniques to improve health and extend longevity. The placement of these texts in tombs, and the nature of their contents, suggest that they circulated among educated members of the elite who were not physicians, but rather amateurs hoping to improve their own bodies and extend their lives. The techniques included guided breathing, physical exercises, sexual cultivation, and dietetics or herbal formulae, all focused on ingesting and circulating fresher qi energies. Only texts on channels and moxibustion (unlike in the later Huangdi Neijing, acupuncture is never mentioned) assume the work of a physician, and only one of these mentions students instructed by a master. At the same time, the account in the Shi ji of Chunyu Yi’s healing practices shows how elite people received esoteric texts on diagnosing and treating the body. Excavated texts also demonstrate knowledge of healing by some officials and military officers, but there were no openly circulating works on medical theories.

Medicine was first established as an independent field of study with a defined body of publicly transmitted texts by Liu Xiang (and his son Liu Xin) at the end of the Western Han. In their catalogue of the imperial text collection, they identified medical texts as a subset of technical practices dealing with the body. This demonstrates the links between the creation of the imperial state and the definition of the arts for perfecting the embodied self as a technical, text-based discipline.

At the same time, and into the Eastern Han, unknown authors compiled a large corpus entitled the Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor, which elaborated new theories of the body, disease, and therapy. These texts reveal the emergence of a community of literati and patrons who collected, disseminated, and employed the texts that figured in the bibliographic treatise. This new discourse on the body shifted away from multiple patient-centered curative traditions to a scientifically grounded, technical practice which privileged the theoretical knowledge of the physician, and thereby claimed superiority over the limited practices of earlier healers. These new-style healers, men of literary attainments who were the model “persons” of the new texts, asserted their authority over people who had previously developed and healed their own bodies, but were now reduced to the level of a patient whose body could be understood and healed only by the physician. This new text-based definition of technical medicine and the healer culminated at the end of the Han dynasty with the appearance of the first texts on medical theory by named authors. In this way, the interlinked redefinitions of medicine and of the cultivation of a superior self through philosophy and literature (as idealized by the late Han elite) became another element of the new honoring of textual composition (which had celebrated the writing of history, philosophy, poetry, and literary essays as the highest forms of life) and the associated transformation of the elite in the Eastern Han and following centuries.Footnote ¹⁴⁸