speed up the transmutation of metals,
was determined by an original demarcation of a field of observation and experience, defined by imposition of the common natural philosophy [‘worldview’], and developed partly by working deductively through the various permutations of particular facts.28
One example of how all this played out in workaday research is the discovery, in the 1st century CE, that there is a close connection between the tides and the phases of the Moon. The spectacular alternation between ebb and flood in the Yangtse River delta and the waxing and waning of the Moon provided the observational data. What, so early in the history of thought, could bring an observer to correlate such seemingly unrelated empirical phenom- ena? The answer lies in Chinese scholars’ sensitization to coherence at so deep a level by a
39
background worldview according to which things form an organic fabric and events run in cycles.
Or take sympathetic resonance. On sounding a string or blowing a pipe, another string or pipe at some distance away may seemingly spontaneously begin to sound the same note. The phenomenon was used for the fine-tuning of bells. But practical usage was not all that was aimed for; the phenomenon was also to be explained. The concept ready to be invoked was ch’i, which was taken to blow through the pipe like some sort of cosmic wind or to help spread the sound produced by the string. Time and again the conception of mutual harmony in the fabric of nature assisted the senses in noticing such subtle phenomena. In- deed, with musical instruments all kinds of delicately different timbres were distinguished (‘timbre’ is everything in a musical note of given pitch and loudness that may still sound different, as with organ pipes in different stops). Here categorization took place according to the material of which the instruments were made but also to the eight directions of the wind (north, northwest, etc.). The underlying connection between the various timbres was once again conceived to be ruled by ch’i.
Or take the pursuit of alchemy. It was engaged in on a large scale and over many centu- ries, most often in a Taoist setting. It involved many practices, such as distillation, sublima- tion, and precipitation, that were in due time carried to high degrees of refinement. It also involved various beliefs, notably in the growth of metals in the earth and in the possibility of prolonging life or even achieving immortality. Unlike with other cosmic cycles captured by means of the trusted concepts of ch’i, yin-yang, and the five phases, in alchemical matura- tion or the achievement of longevity the cyclical course of events is in the end overcome:
Although the perfection of the elixir is the result of a repeated cyclical process, at each step of the treatment the intermediary product is not the same, but rather progressively exalted. Thus superimposed upon the cycle is a progressive upward tendency, which does not revert itself.29
With beliefs like these went an ease in moving between, on the one hand, numbers obtained from carefully weighing the various reactants and, on the other, numbers derived from pur- ported correspondences between the reactions examined and their proper places in the cos- mos. For instance, nothing but painstakingly precise measurement can have taught Chen Shao-Wei early in the 8th century that distillation of 16 ounces of high-quality cinnabar (mercury sulfide) yields between 13 and 14 ounces of mercury (the modern figure is 13.8). He also gave exact figures for the net yields of mercury from ores that contain cinnabar in varying degrees of purity. However, modern analysis shows that he derived those exact fig- ures, not or not primarily from observation, but rather from an a priori ordering of assumed degrees of maturation of the metal in the earth.
40 is a passage from an 11th-century Taoist tract that gives the flavor of these investigations and how they were reported. To elucidate its meaning, I quote next the straightforward paraphrase that the foremost student of these matters, Nathan Sivin, has appended to it (all parenthetical insertions are also his):
Jupiter is the Wood planet, the vital animus of the sun and the essential chi of Water. This animus is scarlet, because (it corresponds to) Fire. Fire gives birth to Wood. In response to the
chi of Mars (the Fire planet), cinnabar is born. Cinnabar holds within it the Yin chi of Wood,
and thus contains quicksilver. Quicksilver is called the Caerulean Dragon; and the Caerulean Dragon belongs to Wood (w–W–F).
... Mars is Fire, and the seminal essence of Fire. It receives the chi of the Wood planet (Jupi- ter) and also transmits the animus of the sun. Its flowing seminal essence enters Earth (or the earth) and gives birth to cinnabar. The animus (of cinnabar) belongs to Fire and so it is born out of Wood. Since within it there is Yin, it gives birth to mercury. Fire gives birth to Earth. Earth contains the Balanced Yang, and gives birth to realgar, the sapidity of which is sweet. (W-F-E).
We can ... reduce ... the text to a straightforward assertion: ‘There exists the genetically related binary system mercury/cinnabar, of which mercury, corresponding to Wood, is the young (i.e., immature) Yang phase and cinnabar, corresponding to Fire, is the mature Yang phase.’30
Note that the invocation of the names of the planets does not signify any idea of an influence exerted by them upon the growth of metals in the earth or upon anything else – they are associated with the five phases by way of symbols only.
Speaking now more generally, the planets and their irregular trajectories did not in the Chinese view have the same prominent place that the Greeks assigned to them. This came to the fore in particular during two major efforts initiated by the imperial court to reform the calendar. Every year the emperor would issue a calendar, a kind of almanac which listed significant future events:
Successfully predicting a phenomenon fitted it into the dynamic cosmic and social order that the emperor maintained on behalf of his people. Unpredictable phenomena and failed predic- tions were either good or bad omens. Each challenged the established order, and each had a meaning. Bad omens warned that the emperor’s mediating virtue, which maintained concord between the cosmic and political orders, was deficient. Good portents generally signalled, and approved, a step in a new direction. Successfully predicting celestial events neutralized their ominousness, preserving the charisma of the ruling dynasty.
41 ceremonies that asserted the emperor’s authority, as the ancient motto put it, to ‘grant the
seasons’.
Granting the seasons involved ongoing technical refinement or at least the semblance there- of: “Astronomical reinforcement of the Mandate of Heaven called forth endless attempts to improve constants.”31 Solar and lunar phenomena far more than planetary ones held impli-
cations for the calendar. It was not until c. 1075, with the appearance at court of a learned man by the name of Shen Kua, that an interest arose in including planetary trajectories in a large-scale reform of the season-granting system. Shen Kua (1031–1095) rose to high office on the coattails of a major reformer. He was appointed by a young emperor out to enhance his power and authority by means of a far-reaching tax reform and a bold military effort to chase invading nomads back beyond the Great Wall. Shen Kua took an active part in getting the appropriate measures executed, but he also made detailed plans for a major overhaul of the season-granting system in current operation.
Shen Kua’s reform project included an unprecedented effort to come to grips with one major irregularity in the trajectories of the planets (retrograde motion; p. 13; 107) and to predict their positions. He also improved the design of observation instruments, at the ser- vice of a wholesale program for restructuring the observational basis of the calendar. For the planets, but also for the Moon (the many data available had accumulated large errors over the centuries), he proposed to read “exact coordinates ... three times a night for five years”.32 He further proposed to confront the astronomical phenomenon at the heart of
imperial authority – solar eclipses. These were hard to capture with sufficient precision by means of the algebraic (not, as with the Greeks, geometric) tools that predominated in Chi- nese astronomy. More than anything else did eclipses run a serious risk of failed prediction. However, an inability to make his inert staff cooperate in his bold and well-prepared reform projects, along with the sudden fall from grace of his immediate patron, caused Shen Kua’s efforts to come to naught. He spent the remainder of his days at Dream Brook, an exquisite garden estate that had appeared to him in a dream years before he sought for and purchased it.
Almost two centuries later, an even vaster and also more successful reform of the season- granting system was undertaken at the behest of Kubilai Khan, the first Mongol emperor, who established the Yuan dynasty. In a move meant to reconcile with his rule both his newly acquired subjects in northern China and those in the south whom he planned to subjugate next, he assembled a tightly knit group of Chinese literati at court and ordered them to pre- pare and install a new season-granting system by and large from scratch. In 1276 the reform group, which counted more than a hundred officials altogether, was given authority to by- pass the existing directorates of the imperial Astronomical Bureau and set up a directorate of its own. The group devised new, ingenious interpolation techniques, new measuring in-
42 struments of unprecedented size (e.g., two gnomons each ten feet high), and new techniques for making measurements. For instance,
teams of observers ... carried out a great latitude survey with portable equipment at 27 lo- cations scattered from Siberia southward for 3600 miles. They recorded for each place time differences of eclipse observations, variations in the ratio of day length to night length, and changes in the latitude of the sun, the moon, and possibly the planets.33
To test the accuracy of the new measurements, the new directorate made a vast inventory of previous observations as recorded under earlier dynasties over many centuries and kept in the imperial archives ever since. Kubilai’s astronomers
included in their tests a series of early eclipse observations that specified not only the day but the time of the eclipse, often to the nearest quarter of an hour. This was not the norm. Those records were, by and large, quite accurate. The Yuan group used them systematically and pro- fusely, not only because of its high standard, but because its funds permitted it to do that.34
Indeed, generous funding made possible certain things but inhibited others. On the one hand, there was Kubilai’s manifest interest in enhancing, in a way the Chinese population could recognize as authentic, the accuracy of celestial prediction for the determination of the seasons, for divination, and for similar purposes. On the other hand, his interest was bound up with positions and eclipses of the Sun and the Moon, not of the planets. Just as with Shen Kua’s failed reform two centuries earlier, no efforts were undertaken to direct the new techniques to determining planetary trajectories with enhanced precision.
Let us now return to Shen Kua in the late 11th century. He spent his enforced retirement writing up the experiences and insights of a lifetime in a text entitled Brush Talks at Dream
Brook. His sole remaining companion, his brush, served him to jot down notes of a few lines
to a full page on a variety of subjects, among them poetry, omens, comments on the clas- sics, or the careful observation and interpretation of certain rock formations. These ‘Brush Talks’, although they did not have much of an impact upon the further course of events, have in our day caused Shen Kua to be regarded as China’s greatest premodern thinker about natural phenomena. He perceptively noted, for instance, that the peculiar shape of those rock formations stemmed from erosion patterns created long ago by streams that had in the meantime dried up – an effect that he went on to recognize in hills, “miniatures of the Yen- tang mountains, but in earth rather than in stone”.35 Another example is his observation of a
peculiar spring with water that when heated turned into bitter alum. If he kept heating it, it yielded copper, and if he heated the alum for a long time in an iron pan, the pan itself turned into copper. The phenomenon (a well-known displacement reaction in modern chemistry)
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reminded him of the conquest cycle of the five phases – Metal conquers Water. Clearly, the very existence of that conceptual apparatus made the investigator receptive to observations of such a subtle kind.
Something similar is true of Shen Kua’s researches involving magnets. Building on the doctrine of geomancy (feng shui, the determination of places propitious for building), he made magnetic needles float on water and found that there is always a slight displacement vis-à-vis the north pole. To establish and measure magnetic declination he made trials with a suspended needle but also determined with great accuracy how far the polestar is removed from true north.
So much by way of an outline of the Chinese conception of nature and of paths taken to investigate its myriad details. Also during the Sung dynasty (960–1279), by and large si- multaneous with Shen Kua, the Han synthesis underwent its boldest extension ever. It was due to five successive thinkers collectively known by the label ‘neo-Confucian’, even though their commentaries on the classics were also tinged by Taoist and even Buddhist ideas. They were concerned to refine a conceptual understanding of how precisely the myriad things cohered in the ceaseless alternation of cyclical processes. Their speculations culminated in a newly forged concept, li, or ‘organic pattern-principle’ in the closest English equivalent. On occasion neo-Confucian thinkers extended the principle to more mundane matters. For in- stance, Cheng I rebuked run-of-the-mill physicians for not recognizing that, when a certain yellow substance (a tannine) is added to another given substance that is white (an iron salt), and the two mix to form black stuff (a pigment used for ink), the latter should be regarded as an essentially new substance. He wrote:
if we have c and continue to look for a and b in it, if we have black and persist in looking for yellow and white in it, then we are failing to understand the nature of things. (This is why) the ancient (sages) investigated to the utmost the organic pattern-principles of things; they studied tastes, smelt odours, differentiated between colours, and acquired knowledge of what substances will mix or combine together.36
The Mohist exception.
Throughout China’s premodern history, the myriad natural phenomena were treated in the broad manner just elucidated. Surely variations of many kinds were tried out over time, and in many ways nature-knowledge under the Sung looks different from that of the Han period. Even so, the basic setup of correlative pattern seeking in a broadly empiricist vein remained by and large the same: explanations were sought in terms of the Tao, ch’i, yin-yang, and wu-hsing throughout premodern times. But there is one genuine exception to this rule – an approach to phenomena undertaken on a fundamentally different plane. This concerns a collection of writings stemming from the text lineage that emerged with Mo Ti. The surviving fragments are known as the Canon and Expositions and44 date from the Warring States period (c. 300 BCE). The approach taken in these texts is not so much marked by the correlative mode of thought that goes with the conception of the cosmos as an organically cohering fabric. Tellingly, the texts invoke neither yin-yang nor the five phases nor even ch’i. Ideas and concepts are developed in more rigorous fashion, not nearly so associative but more by way of logical inference, directed toward if/then relations rather than the and/and of all-encompassing, mutual interdependence:
The advantage of the Mohists over the Yin and Yang and Five Elements schools (which laid the foundation of traditional Chinese science) is that their logic gives them a clear conception of what they find acceptable as an adequate explanation. “One uses explanations to bring out reasons” ... and ku ‘reasons’ are of two kinds, the necessary conditions without which some- thing “necessarily will not be so”, and the necessary and sufficient conditions having which it “necessarily will be so”. ... The Mohist’s fundamental objection to the Five Elements type of explanatory principle is that it lacks the necessity he finds in causal explanation. But ... he looks for causal relations only in specific phenomena. ... His problems arise from the manipulation of mirrors, balances, ladders or masonry. Why is the image in a concave mirror upside down? And why only if the object reflected is outside the centre of curvature? The problems, although suggested by practical situations, are purely theoretical; one point not mentioned is the practi- cal function of the concavity, to make a burning-mirror.37
The Canon and Expositions, then, focuses on questions of motion and force, of light and shadow. Beside the distinction made between cases when the image in a concave mirror ap- pears reduced and right side up and when it appears enlarged and inverted, specific answers are sought to such questions as “‘Why does a cross-bar not bend under a weight?’ or ‘Why does the longer arm of a beam go down when equal weights are placed on both sides?’”38
After the emergence of the Han synthesis and its organic materialism, topics like these were seldom investigated – what little has been preserved of the Mohist text lineage was never again
called back into life.