RCCHC "Science, Technology, Society and Culture" Talk Series - Situating Practice: How the study of Daoism and Medicine can Inform the History of Science in China

The old saying has it that the Dao and Medicine have the same origins 醫道同源. But did they really?  And if they did, what were the processes which then separated the Dao from Medicine as different knowledge forms? This question involves clearing the cobwebs of legacy categories like ‘science’ and ‘religion’, or daojia 道家 and the later daojiao 道教, that have quietly shaped our imaginations, as well as neologisms like ‘Daoist medicine’ which attempt to do so anew.

Looking afresh at the ground of the Han dynasty, which saw the formation of both the classical medical tradition and the Daoist religion, we find a rich array of sources that touch upon key issues, whether imperial, folk, elite or communitarian works, extending to myths and poetry, legal cases and technical works. One of the unifying threads across these different discourses is a core concern with practice, whether cataloguing, correct transmission, authoritative use, statistical experimentation, or simply their glamour. 

A focus on practices usefully resolves an established problem in the history of science in China. While it is broadly agreed that epistemology was not a topic of imperial Chinese science, it is hardly the case that early actors were not highly reflective about what they did and how they knew it. Shifting our gaze from Eurocentric questions of epistemology, and developing a richer vocabulary for the praxeology in the history of Chinese knowledge reveals a deep vein of critical reflection among earlier practitioners, that can help us come to better terms for how they organised knowledge.