THE COMPOSITE BODY IN EARLY CHINA

Speaker: Mark Lewis

Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Chinese Culture, Stanford University

All peoples reveal much about themselves in their methods of training their bodies, explanations of their workings, and applications of these explanations to their images of the world. In early China one major image of the body was that it was a composite of materials of diverse character and quality, along with the consequent idea that the body could be transformed through the augmentation of certain substances and the elimination of others. This idea figured throughout religious and medical practices related to the body, and it was employed to articulate ideas about the family, the state, and the cosmos.