The Only Sacred Ground. Gregory N. Derry

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 of the night sky. This mathematics, however, was not geometrical (but instead arithmetic/algebraic), and the Chinese did not attempt to create any kind of model for the motions of celestial bodies. Such a project would have been antithetical to their entire view of the world; the order and regularity of these sky events simply arose from the broader order of the entire cosmos, micro and macro alike. That this order could be described with mathematics was interesting but not extraordinary, because order was naturally to be expected everywhere in accordance with the Tao and the organicist conception of nature. From it came the accompanying order to the calendar, presented each year by the Emperor to the people as a sign of his maintaining of this proper cosmic balance in the state and in nature itself. To ask for some sort of other underlying source of the order and regularity found in astronomical observations would have made no sense, because the observed order was simply a manifestation of what was inherently there in all of nature, even when disguised by locally unbalanced tendencies (this is why an unexpected event was considered a bad omen for societal affairs).

      Chinese cosmology has already been described in some detail. The major elements of cosmology were the macrocosm/microcosm paradigm, the material organicist conception of the world, the role of ch’i, yin and yang, and the wu hsing, and underlying all of these the ineffable Tao. Like any genuine cosmology, in the traditional sense of the word, this conception penetrates into the specific understandings developed in all of the particular sciences. This is seen in astronomy, and we have already discussed the influence of the Chinese cosmology on medicine. These cosmological ideas were combined with a store of empirical knowledge, resulting in a sophisticated medical practice that developed its own diagnostic methods based on observable symptoms and its own treatments such as acupuncture, moxibustion, and herbalism. One of the basic ideas of this medicine was that of disease as a disruption in the natural balance and harmony of the body (along with its relation to the world). Balance in the yin and yang plus proper flow of the ch’i through the body are essential to good health, so problems with these things as demonstrated