The development and decline of Chinese cosmology

• Columbia University Press New York 1984

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of Louisiana State University in the publication of this book.

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Copyright © 1984 Columbia University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America Columbia University Press New York Guildford, Surrey

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Henderson, John B., 1948The development and decline of Chinese cosmology. (Neo-Confucian studies) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Philosophy, Chinese-History. 2. Cosmology. I. Title. II. Series. 84-400 B127.C68H46 1984 113'.0951 ISBN 0-231-05772-5 (alk. paper)

To the memory of my mother, Ruby Bryan Henderson, And to my father, John L Henderson

Neo-Confucian Studies Board of Editors Irene Bloom Wing-tsit Chan Wm. Theodore de Bary

Periods of Chinese History

ix

Acknowledgments

Xl

Introduction

XllI

1 59

1. Correlative Thought in Early China 2. Geometrical Cosmography in Early China 3. Medieval Criticisms and Extensions of Correlative Cosmology 4. Correlative Cosmology in the Neo-Confucian Tradition 5. Early Ch'ing Scholars and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Transition 6. Intellectual Origins of Early Ch'ing Cosmological Criticism 7. Criticisms of Correlative Cosmology in Late-Traditional China 8. Criticisms of Geometrical Cosmography in Late-Traditional China 9. Ch'ing Scholars' Anticosmological World View

207 227

Notes

259

89 119 137 149 175

Glossary of Chinese Book and Chapter Titles Mentioned in the Text

291

Glossary of Chinese Personal Names and Mythical Figures Mentioned in the Text

293

Glossary of Chinese Terms Mentioned in the Text and Notes

297

Selected Bibliography

301

Index

321

A number of my teachers, friends, and colleagues have contributed to the development and improvement of this study. These include my mentors in Chinese history and the history of science at the University of California, Berkeley, John L. Heilbron, David N. Keightley, Tu Wei-ming, and particularly Frederic Wakeman, Jr. All these gentlemen generously offered expert guidance and constructive criticisms on early drafts. Several of my fellow students at Berkeley and at the Inter-University Center for Chinese Language Studies in Taiwan, especially Alison Black, Judith Whitbeck, and Ch'eng I-fan, provided me with insights 0)1 some of the major issues in the intellectual history of late-traditional China. I am especially grateful to Professor Nathan Sivin of the University of Pennsylvania for his extensive comments, corrections, and helpful suggestions on several earlier drafts of this book. Professor Sivin's support and encouragement have been invaluable to me, as to many other students of the history of Chinese science. One of my colleagues at Louisiana State University, Stephen Farmer, contributed much to the comparative dimensions of this study through frequent conversations on the world history of correlative cosmology. I also benefited from Steve's perceptive comments on an earlier draft as well as from his bibliographical suggestions. Other colleagues, particularly Gary Crump, David Lindenfeld, and Karl Roider, generously responded to my requests for advice and comments on aspects of this study. Karen Mitchell of Columbia University Press deserves much credit for her thorough and sensitive editing of the manuscript. ' Finally, I would like to thank the LSU Foundation for having provided a subvention to support publication of this book, and the

xii

Acknowledgments

chairman of the Department of History at Louisiana State University, Professor John L. Loos, for having secured that subvention. Much of the research and writing of this work was accomplished while visiting with my grandmother, Mrs. Hugh Henderson, during summer vacation periods. So I wish to thank her as well as other members of my family for their support and encouragement. Naturally, I alone am responsible for all of the shortcomings that remain in this book.

The term "cosmos" is often used today as an antiquarian synonym for "universe." Moderns who employ the word seldom mean to imply that any particular type of order or pattern prevails in the world, though they might believe that such an order exists. The Greek root of "cosmos," however, is much more specific in its meaning, indicating the existence of a certain harmony and proportion in the world, even a "consonance between ourselves and the universe." 1 Most ancient peoples whose records have been preserved, including the Chinese, formulated a view of the world that may be characterized as a "cosmos" in this stricter sense of the word. Some of these views resemble one another so closely that a number of prominent scholars have attempted to abstract a universal stage or mode of human thought from a comparative study of early cosmological ideas. Classic works in twentieth-century sociology, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology such as Emile Durkheim's Primitive Classification, volume 2 of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Carl lung's studies of several oriental classics, and Claude Levi-Strauss' Savage Mind are partly devoted to this aim, to demonstrating that "primitive classification," "mythical thought," "synchronicity, "or "savage thought" is a general stage of human intellectual development which was not superseded until the era of the scientific revolution. But while these studies have revealed close parallels in the cosmological views of primitive and premodern people~, the pictures they present are generally static. Seldom do such works aim at describing how cosmological schemata develop or decline. Their principal concern, rather, is with the structure or operation of those modes of thought which informed the premodern intellectual world.

xiv

Introduction

Historians, however, have understandably shown more interest in the question of how premodern views of cosmic order were formulated and superseded. Students of early Greek philosophy, for example, have attempted to explain the origins of classical Western cosmology through their studies of Presocratic thought. Moreover, historians of Western science have long been concerned with the demise of that cosmology and its medieval extensions in the seventeenth century. But they focus on issues that are particularly relevant for the history of science, such as the critique of Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian cosmology. More general accounts of the decline and rejection of the larger sense of cosmos that ramified into medieval and Renaissance philosophy, religion, politics, literature, art, and popular culture, as well as science, are relatively rare. General studies of moments of cosmological transition, of the formulation and dissolution of world pictures, are also uncommon in sinologicalliterature. However, historians of Chinese thought have long recognized the importance of cosmological ideas of harmony, proportion, and correspondence in early China. Such classic studies as Marcel Granet's Chinese Thought are devoted primarily to describing the articulations and ramifications of these notions in the Han (202 B.C.-A.D. 220) and later ages. More recently, several scholars have explored the origins and early development of particular aspects of Han cosmology, including the idea of cosmic resonance, the concept of the five phases, and the cosmography of the simple magic square. 2 But few studies have been devoted to explaining the development of early Chinese cosmology as a whole. Nor have many sinologists explored the possibility that the cosmological conceptions that dominated the intellectual world of the Han era ever Calne to be generally superseded before modern times. 3 Not all major post-Han thinkers adhered to the cosmological schemata formulated in late classical times; but these conceptions exercised a pervasive influence throughout premodern Chinese thought and culture. Their impact is manifest in most of the arts and sciences, most conspicuously in medicine, alchemy, astrology, and the various divinatory sciences, but also in such impeccably orthodox branches of learning as official historiography, literary criticism, Neo-Confucian philosophy, and mathematical astronomy. So great was the sig-

Introduction

xv

nificance and so wide the influence of what Joseph Needham has called "correlati ve thiDkiUg" -the heart of traditional Chinese cosmology-that it might well be regarded as a sort of p~enI?:iaJ 12J}ihl~£hy in the history of Chinese civilization. Hence, the development of this mode of thought from the late classical era and its decline in the late traditional period, culminating in the seventeenth century, are matters of considerable import in the history of Chinese culture. The seventeenth century thus marked an epoch in the history of Chinese as well as European cosmological thought. For it saw the rejection of a sense of cosmos that was"'pervasive, in both high philosophy and popular culture, through almost two thousand years of Chinese history. The cosmological reformation of the early Ch'ing era was not marked by the same drama that attended the overthrow of classi£~LQn~~~J!n~1..medieval.cosmo10gY'·iwsevetiteennr·century Eur~~. Remnant~~