Grasping Heaven and Earth (Qian Kun Zai Wo): The Body-as-Technology in Classical Chinese Medicine

Abstract

Shifting focus from the patient’s body to the healer’s body, this essay focuses on how Chinese physicians instrumentalized their bodies to heal (ie, body-as-technology) and their hands to think with (ie, hand-memory techniques or simply, hand mnemonics). When physicians used their hands to memorize concepts related to clinical practice, calculate with time variables, and carry out ritual gestures intended to reduce risk, improve fortune, and even cure, their hands became extensions of their minds. This essay has three parts that follow the discovery process of the author’s research on hand-memory techniques found in Chinese medical texts. The first part “Divination and Revelation” explains the significance of how the author first learned about Chinese divination practices that used hand mnemonics. The second part “Original Frame” introduces the scholarship on arts of memory in Europe that informed interpretations of the earliest hand mnemonics found in Chinese medical texts. The third part “Expanded Frame” deploys some concepts from cognitive science to help situate Chinese medical hand mnemonics more broadly as an example of extended cognition. The essay concludes with an important distinction: sometimes Chinese healers’ hands were used separately from their bodies to think through things and sometimes hand and body had to be integrated in order for the healer’s body-as-technology to act as a therapeutically effective instrument.