fundamental not only to the body’s growth but to its maintenance, irregularities in it are responsible for pain and disease. Somatic blockages are analogous to failures of circulation in the universe and the state.”20 In astronomy, the order observed in the celestial realm exemplified the desired order in a properly functioning Confucian society/state, and the particular sky events as recorded or predicted formed the basis for the calendar, presented by the Emperor as a mandate for the existence of a new year. Clearly, the Chinese interpretations of astronomical phenomena were heavily influenced by the microcosm/macrocosm view.
There remains a question of what governs all these correlated events and ideas. Once again, the answer involves inherent properties and relations as opposed to external causal influences. More specifically, the Chinese conception of nature is an organic one, in which processes and events unfold in accord with their inherent tendencies, and relationships are maintained by preexisting harmonies. “…the philosophia parennis of China was an organic materialism. You can illustrate this from the pronouncements of philosophers and scientific thinkers in every epoch. Metaphysical idealism was never dominant in China, nor did the mechanical view of the world exist in Chinese thought. The organicist conception in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to a hierarchical order was universal among Chinese thinkers.”21 No central directing intelligence is required or found in this paradigm. Changes and processes simply occur as they are meant to, in conformance with their own inner natures and in relationship to all other changes and processes occurring similarly. Immaterial agents and entities are not a part of orthodox Chinese philosophy, but this fact must be qualified in two ways: First, a strain of older animistic thinking did survive in Chinese culture and sometimes became integrated into the orthodoxy. For example, to say that the inner nature of water is to flow downhill can be closely related to (or even shade into) the attribution of a “desire” to flow downhill on the part of the water or the spirit that animates and governs the behavior of the water. The second qualification is that the substances of which all things are made, although material, have a surprising and peculiar set of properties compared to material substances found in many other cultures. These properties will be more apparent soon, when we examine more closely the details of the system that evolved, but an important point to reiterate is that Chinese thought was much more concerned with process and function than with substance per se. This emphasis governed the questions that were asked and the conceptualization of “material substance” that ultimately was formulated.
The basic substance underlying existence in Chinese thought is called ch’i, but to simply call it a substance is rather misleading. The word does not have any simple equivalent in English, though it is sometimes rendered as “vital principle” or “energy” and so on. “The most basic stuff that makes the cosmos is neither solely spiritual nor material but both. It is a vital force. This vital force must not be conceived of either as disembodied spirit or as pure matter.”22 So although ch’i is a kind of substance, it transcends dualities of matter and spirit, of active and passive, of structure and function. All of these potentialities are inherent in the concept of ch’i, but in order to develop them further we need a more extensive set of ideas. The undifferentiated unity allows no further discussion; the primary bifurcation of this unity is into the great archetypal polarity, represented in Chinese thought by yin and yang. Each has a large set of correspondences (earth, feminine, north, moist, cool, etc.; sun, masculine, south, dry, hot, etc.) and these can be used to describe the state and action of the ch’i as it circulates, vivifies, and imparts form to its own self in the continuous foundation of the universe and the human being. Once again, it is movement, process, and function that dominate this analysis, rather than static structures or properties of substances. In addition to the duality of yin and yang, a further set of descriptive categories is provided by the wu hsing, the five phases (sometimes translated as five elements, five agents, and so on). The five phases (earth, fire, water, wood, and metal) are once again not merely static substances, but rather they are modalities of transformation for the ch’i itself, and once again each of the five has associated with it a long set of correspondences. Together, the concepts of ch’i, yin and yang, and the wu hsing comprised a powerful and flexible system with which to describe the universe, the body, and the state, along with their correspondences and interrelationships. “A fully developed cosmological doctrine, in which yin-yang and the five phases became categories of ch’i, tools for analyzing its complex configurations and processes, appeared in the first century B.C.”23 From its origins in the Han dynasty, this system lasted almost two millennia and was applied in medicine, political theory, alchemy, astronomy, and ethics. Indeed, it is still used in traditional Chinese medical practice.
This complex set of ideas served to answer questions that arose within the context of China’s organicist paradigm. Given that actions occurred spontaneously in accordance with the harmonious unfolding of their inner natures, we want to know how to explicate these inner natures to understand the world (or behave correctly), and this system is designed to offer such understanding. The other great concept in Chinese thought, which underlies all the rest that we’ve discussed, is the Tao. The Tao, or Way, cannot be described or explicated itself, but it is the metaphysical foundation for all of the processes and functions encompassed by the ch’i, yin and yang, and the wu hsing. Lastly note that all of the myriad correspondences implied by the microcosm/macrocosm picture can be described, worked out, and categorized within this system. But the correspondences are not correspondences of static structure; the Chinese concept of nature (which includes the human and society as well as the cosmos) deeply emphasizes dynamic process at all levels. Their concept of time and change, though prominently featuring cyclic thinking (such as the changing of the seasons) and not having anything like time as a linear dynamical variable, does clearly offer a sense of time as having reality and directionality, a sense that novelty occurs even as an ideal of stability is sought.
The correlative basis and great complexity of this system hide two other important aspects of the Chinese attitude toward nature. One aspect is the strongly empirical side of their thinking. In astronomy, for example, precise observations were recorded for thousands of years. In medicine, a large amount of empirical information about symptoms and treatments was accumulated and passed on, also being folded into the system described above. The alchemists certainly included an empirical element in their work, and the state sponsored data collection on rainfall, seismic activity, etc. But another important aspect of Chinese attitudes toward nature stems from the mystical Taoist influence on their culture, namely the receptivity, openness, and love of nature that lie underneath the many complex correspondences, and an intuitive grasp of natural processes derived ultimately from union with nature, decreasing the separation to nothing. Although mixed with many other influences, this attitude remains a part of the Chinese concept of nature through the years.
These multiple influences give the Chinese concept of nature a deep richness and subtlety. The Confucian concern with the correct functioning of society and the role of the state reinforced the idea of a microcosm/macrocosm relationship, for example. And the absolute power of the Emperor deployed by a complex bureaucracy, to which almost all intellectuals belonged, shaped the idea of correlated but uncaused relationships. Also, the membership of the intellectuals in a bureaucracy that owed all of its power to the Emperor tended to maintain stability in the ideas about nature, as did the cultural trait of imputing authority to ancient sages as opposed to recent innovations. Interestingly, many practical workers, such as engineers, shipbuilders, metalworkers, and rural medical practitioners were barred from membership in this bureaucracy, so these highly skilled people were generally not literate and their knowledge had little effect on the theoretical ideas of the more literarily inclined state-sponsored intellectuals (alchemists also fell into this category). Hence, a great deal of the first-hand knowledge about the workings of nature in China was not well integrated into the rest of its intellectual culture, and yet was clearly present in the culture overall.
While some areas, like dynamics and anatomy, were not much emphasized, a number of particular disciplines were highly developed in China. Astronomy, for example, engaged in an unbroken series of precisely recorded observations that lasted millennia. A sophisticated coordinate system was used to record this data, and constantly improved mathematical algorithms were devised in order to make predictions based on the regularity
