1) the sentimental body: Han physicians saw the zang/yin viscera as storehouses of qi and emotions, and that emotions were one of the main influences on human health (remember that Paul Unschuld translates qi 氣 as ‘influences’)

2) the architectural body: something like Da Vinci’s ‘man’. Up, down, inside outside, back front, extended limbs. The realm of the channels.

3) the ecological body: the realm of dampness, cold, heat, wind and other climatic elements inside of human beings.

Very helpful information in trying to understand Han dynasty conceptions of human life as interpreted in medicine.

I want to apologize for not explaining myself more clearly. When examining the gua (trigrams), I will consider both 先天 xiantian (pre heaven) and 後天 houtian (post heaven) sequences/orientations. The gua 震 zhen is in the northeastern position of the xiantian sequence and in the eastern position of the houtian sequence. The following line is taken from the Shuogua section of the Yijing: “萬物出乎震，震東方也” where all living things emerge in zhen, and zhen is in the eastern (東 dong) direction. In this example we can see that the bagua contains both direction and time, where zhen is related to both spring (萬物出) and the eastern direction.

When we examine the Shuowen definition of 陳 chen, we find that it is from 木 mu (wood) and is the ‘empty lines’ (虛畫) of an ‘expansive sky’ (大昊), a location within the bagua, and the beginning (a wooden virtue, 木德 mude). If we were to choose a gua that fits this description, then I believe it would have to be 震 zhen. Zhen is shaking, movement (動 dong), rising (起 qi), thunder (雷 lei); all qualities belonging to Spring. The Shuowen also suggests that 陳 chen is derived from the significant 木 mu and the phonetic 申 shen. This is the same argument Karlgren uses based on the Seal characters. What I was suggesting is that it is difficult to ignore the similarities between 陳 chen and 東 dong (east), where dong is the image of the sun rising behind a tree. Even in the Bronze characters, that predate Seal script, the image of the sun is maintained. The character 東 dong is also defined, in the Shuowen, using the character 動 dong (movement), which is directly related to the gua 震 zhen.

The character 陳 chen is currently translated as display, lay out, or exhibit. But, in this passage I believe a better interpretation to be manifest, especially when considering the character prior to chen, 發 fa (emit). Spring is the time of beginning, when all living things start to emerge. This is symbolized by the gua 震 zhen, with one Yang line underneath two Yin lines, shaking and moving upward; when the sun rises up above the horizon.

I hope this is more clear. Thank you for sharing.

-Brian

I know you think about these things a lot – do you have any methods for sitting with these texts that you’ve found to work well? You are so right that the various chapters read so differently…and often, I am surprised at what appears in a collection when looking at it’s title, how abruptly the chapter ends, etc. These things point towards something that isn’t as planned as many people that we went to school with talked about. (Akin to a students accumulated notes!). At other times, I wonder how much of the book is a patchwork of streams that came from an earlier time, at least Warring States, probably even before….

If we really wish to understand what they attempt to communicate, it would make sense to follow a model of inquiry appropriate to the textual module in question. Some “chapters” of a neijing read like a students accumulated notes, containing material from different sources across the centuries along with the equivalent of highlighting and notes in the margin.

In any case, for the most part, the Han models of textual study that Michael Nylan discusses in his essay “Towards an Archaeology of Writing” look more like enormous technical schools designed to churn out beaurocrats, rather than the early contemplative study of the east or the west. I imagine that students were trained to spit back out what their teachers wrote in their extensive commentaries, rather than entering into a personal relationship with the classical stream. “Han thought,” apart from isolated monastic groups, and to contrary to the general view, might have looked more like our western industrial age technical schools.