Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci.

33 (2002) 567–581
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc

Asian traditions of knowledge: the disputed

questions of science, nature and ecology
Andrew Brennan a,b
a
City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong
b
The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Perth, WA 6009, Australia

Received 2 May 2001; received in revised form 8 January 2002

Abstract

The search for ‘ecological insights’ in venerable Asian traditions of thought prompts ques-
tions about how such traditions understood humans in relation to nature. Answers which focus
on philosophical and religious ideas may overlook culturally important understandings of
people and places articulated within scientific and medical thinking. The paper tentatively
explores the prospects for gleaning a form of ethics of place from the study of traditional
Hindu and Chinese medical sources. Although there are serious problems with the idea that any
unadulterated assimilation from other traditions can take place, these sources can be thought of
as incorporating a place-centred (topocentric) ethic. By looking closely at Francis Zimmerm-
an’s study of Hindu medicine, it is argued that a poetics of place can be ascribed to Ayurvedic
discourses on health and disease. It may be possible to associate a similar poetics with classical
Chinese medical worldviews, these being reconcilable with—though not the same as—contem-
porary ecological understandings of humans in relation to the world. Although no pristine
reconstruction of Asian traditions of medical thought can be made, the conclusion of the
present paper is that it would be wrong to dismiss these traditions as ‘antienvironmental’,
based purely on the study of philosophical and religious texts.
 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Chinese medicine; Ayurvedic medicine; Zimmerman; Needham; Ethics; Place

E-mail address: a.brennan@cyllene.uwa.edu.au (A. Brennan).

1369-8486/02/$ - see front matter  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 1 3 6 9 - 8 4 8 6 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 2 7 - 4
568 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581

1. Introduction

Some environmental philosophers have wondered if, in Holmes Rolston’s phrase,

the ‘east can help the west to value nature’ (Rolston, 1987). Others, expressing them-
selves in the idiom of the resource economists, have asked whether Hindu and other
‘Asian traditions’ of thought may be ‘defended as a valuable conceptual resource
for a positive and direct environmental ethic’ (Callicott, 1994, p. 48). In reply to his
own question, J. Baird Callicott claims that the main trends of Hindu thought have
been ‘ambiguous about the value of nature’ (ibid., p. 53) or perhaps even ‘anti-
environmental’ (ibid., p. 48), conclusions which the present paper rejects. I argue
that there is a plausible case to be made that Hindu medicine, as represented by the
tradition of Ayurveda, incorporates an understanding of health and disease which is
compatible with Western ecological thought. This tradition is not represented at all
either in Callicott’s survey of the world’s environmental thought (Callicott, 1994)
or in the earlier Callicott and Ames collection that is devoted to considering ‘the
role of nature in Asian thought’ (Callicott & Ames, 1989). If Hindu medicine is
capable of an ‘ecological’ interpretation, then why has this important fact been neg-
lected in these widely read studies of Asian thought? I begin the paper by proposing
a tentative answer to this question.

2. Incomplete histories

Any talk about the use of one conceptual scheme or framework of ideas, drawn
from a specific cultural context, as a resource, raises the questions that have been
well put by G. J. Larson. In his contribution to the Callicott and Ames volume,
Larson writes:

Ideas and concepts come to be construed as ‘things’ or ‘entities’ that can be

disembedded from their appropriate frameworks and then processed and made to
fit into our own framework. Such a method for comparative philosophy is, in
my view, one-dimensional, overly selective, forced, anachronistic, sociologically
unsophisticated and, perhaps worst of all, unpersuasive. (Callicott & Ames, 1989,
p. 270)

Larson also points out the imperialist resonances of the idea of extracting ‘concep-
tual resources’ from one culture and then processing, manufacturing and mass-pro-
ducing these in a form suitable for global marketing, congratulating ourselves that
‘what we are doing will subsequently benefit not only Asia, but all people every-
where. This, of course, is exactly the rationale the British used in India during the
Raj’ (ibid.). These are strong warnings. Apart from the colonial overtones of the
‘resource’ metaphor, Larson’s words caution against the extraction of ideas and frag-
ments of worldviews from a larger cultural framework. To understand a particular
cultural movement within a society at a given time, we may need to understand—
among many other things—social structures, religious beliefs, superstitions, philo-
 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581 569

sophical orientations, family relationships, scientific understandings, medical prac-

tices, and also the political and environmental stresses under which the society is
operating at the time. Extracting a particular philosophical idea, or a religious prac-
tice, from that larger background risks anachronism, distortion, simplification and
all the other dangers listed by Larson. Indeed, if we take a religious or philosophical
idea out of the context from which it was produced, can we tell what we are talking
about? As Wittgenstein indicated, a cog when removed from the mechanism in which
it functions may no longer be a cog at all. Drawing on the tired debates in anthro-
pology over the processes of cultural appropriation and translation, the question will
always arise as to whether it is realistic at all to think of unadulterated assimilation
of other traditions. Whatever the answer, it cannot be denied that processes of cultural
exchange and cross-fertilization have been going on for centuries. The present paper
makes no pretence of presenting pristine versions of Hindu or Chinese ideas. Rather,
it proceeds cautiously, wary of the challenges posed by the study of the adaptations
of (and mutual deformations among) divergent traditions of knowledge.
In a well known, and much cited, paper, Callicott put forward a defence of a
moral requirement for environmental ethics, namely that the good of the biological
community provides one ultimate measure of value. As he put it:

Aldo Leopold . . . provides a concise statement of what might be called the categ-
orical imperative or principal precept of the land ethic: ‘A thing is right when it
tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It
is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ What is especially noteworthy, and that to
which attention should be directed in this proposition, is the idea that the good
of the biotic community is the ultimate measure of the moral value, the rightness
or wrongness, of actions. . . . In every case the effect upon ecological systems is
the decisive factor in the determination of the ethical quality of actions. (Callicott,
1980, p. 21)

Callicott himself seems aware of the intricate interplay between ethical views like
this, on the one hand, and matters of scientific theory, on the other. In a recent
article, he writes:

I have been compelled, in light of paradigm shifts in ecology and evolutionary

biology over the last quarter century, to reformulate the conceptual foundations
of the land ethic and substantially revise its practical indications. (Callicott, 1999)

Callicott seems to believe that Darwinian ‘protosociobiology’, as he calls it, along

with various parts of physics and ecological theory, have a bearing on the moral
views he is putting forward. It is odd, to say the least, that he should ignore the
medical understandings that are characteristic of Indian and Chinese thought.
An analogy may make clear the strangeness of the approach to ‘Asian thought’
that is represented in the works to which I have been referring. Suppose we set out
to collect a number of essays on the last four hundred years of European thought on
nature. The essays cover religious and philosophical views on nature, while ignoring
570 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581

Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, indeed nearly all the science of the per-
iod. Seen only through the lens of religion and philosophy, perhaps Hegel’s philo-
sophy of nature would be regarded as one of our most important sources. Even better,
some scholars might stumble on the profoundly obscure work of Friedrich Schelling,
in whose later philosophy nature is depicted as a divine, structured organism—the
articulation of God. Hegel—not the world’s most lucid writer himself—once associa-
ted Schelling’s later thought with the ‘depth of night in which all cows are black’.
Such sources would be troubling and puzzling, using a concept of nature that is
obscure and hard for the contemporary thinker to grasp. By analogy, it is just such
an incomplete study of Indian and Chinese thought which, I suggest, may make it
hard for contemporary readers to grasp the understanding of people and places which
is characteristic of much east and south Asian traditions, and which reveals striking
affinities with Western ecological thought.
What has gone wrong with Callicott’s project, and what the present article attempts
to remedy in a small measure, is the focus on religious and philosophical thought
to the exclusion of other elements of the traditions under scrutiny. I am not intending,
of course, to disparage in any way the contribution that philosophical and religious
ideas can make to environmental thinking in general, and to environmental ethics
in particular. Nor is it my purpose to object to the idea that an approach to environ-
mental ethics can be informed by a religious perspective (see de Silva, 1998, for
example, for an openly Buddhist perspective). Nothing written in the present paper
is meant to put aside the insights that can be gleaned from a survey of indigenous
religious and philosophical traditions. My intention here is to supplement, not dis-
miss, the accounts of other writers. As Paul Unschuld puts it:

. . . medical thought and intervention have never ceased to be closely linked to

the general currents of thought and everyday life, and to reflect basic attitudes of
the time. To leave the study of concepts of health care aside in one’s study of
any foreign (or domestic) culture and society means to disregard a most important
key to the understanding of value systems and world views. (Unschuld, 1988, p. 1)

Let us suppose that Callicott is right to take some aspects of Hinduism as being
indifferent to, or neglectful of, the surroundings in which life is lived. Other themes
in Hindu thought, however, can be seen in quite the opposite way. The modest
positive thesis of the present paper is that there are understandings of people, place
and disease within both Hindu and Chinese medical traditions that recognize the
human being as continually interacting with, and profoundly influenced by, features
of the surrounding environment. Human life, health and disease are for such tra-
ditions essentially bound up with the place in which lives are lived and depict the
organism as revealing features of the place in which it is located.

3. ‘Ecology’ in Hindu medicine

When he discusses the Graeco-Roman roots of western culture, Callicott looks at

philosophy and mythology (Callicott, 1994, Ch. 2). Once again, this shows a signifi-
 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581 571

cant neglect, this time of the fundamentally situated understanding of health and
disease that was expressed in Hippocratic medicine. In that tradition, an attempt was
made to consider two things: to adapt the patient to the conditions around her, and
to adapt the surroundings of the patient, if possible, to the clinical condition (see—
in the Hippocratic corpus—On Airs, Waters, Places and On Regimen for Health).
On Airs, Waters and Places begins thus:

Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first
place to consider the seasons of the year, and what effects each of them produces
for they are not at all alike, but differ much from themselves in regard to their
changes. . . (Hippocrates, 1939, Airs, Part 1)

A history of European thought on nature, especially one wishing to include an

account of the foundations of ecological thought, would do well to give serious
attention to the Hippocratic tradition.
It is well known that there are considerable parallels among all ancient medical
traditions, and similar ideas to the Hippocratic ones were also expressed, indepen-
dently, in Ayurvedic medicine. Fortunately, we have available to us a study by
Francis Zimmerman which attempts to locate medical practices and texts of the
Hindu tradition within a wider cultural and biogeographic context. If Zimmerman is
right, then Hindu medicine incorporated a clear ecological theme. In this tradition,
there were two kinds of place, the land, and the body of the patient. Those places
were connected by the circulation of three subtle and invisible ‘humours’. These
humours supposedly circulated underground, in the water, in the air, in plants and
animals, and in our bodies. These were the ‘forces, powers which foment disorders,
pathogenic principles between which the doctor must establish justice. Medicine is
a form of politics’ (Zimmerman, 1987, p. 31). Within the land, there was a further
subdivision of places, exhibiting the fundamental alternation of wet and dry, the
marsh and the jāṅgala. The distinction between these two places became, in Zimmer-
man’s words, ‘an immense fact of normative ecology’ (ibid., p. 36). To see how
Zimmerman reaches this conclusion, I give a brief exposition of his main themes.
Zimmerman’s key contention is that western and Indian scholars alike have over-
looked the poetics and the biogeographical elements in Ayurvedic medicine, and
have also played down its ecology of cooking. Not only does cooking extract the
essences of the foods cooked, which are in turn essences these foods have absorbed
from the environment, but also the Ayurvedic model of the human body is the model
of a cooker, which itself extracts essence from—and changes—the food taken in by
the human being. Some disorders are thus disorders in the patient’s own cooking
device, for example, too much water, or not enough water, in various parts of the sys-
tem.
Where is the poetry in all this? Zimmerman emphasizes the importance of linguis-
tic structures, repetitions, contradictions, apparently bizarre classifications, and verse
itself, all of which reflect and reinforce an understanding of the linkages between
people and the places where they live, disease and the nature of the surroundings,
treatments and the nature of disease, food and the nature of the world, food and the
572 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581

nature of humans. The human being, the world, the beasts and the plants, are all
charged with medicinal, agricultural and culinary meaning. At the basis of this
poetics is the fundamental biogeographical distinction between two kinds of place—
jāṅgala and ānūpa, the dry open ‘jungle’ and the moist swampy marsh. Three invis-
ible fluids that are central to bodily health—the humours—are wind (vāta), bile
(pitta) and phlegm (kapha). The connections of these with the seasons are poetically
articulated in the regular association of wind, bile and phlegm with the triple of
terms summer, rains and winter. In this way, the abstract and invisible is associated
with the concrete and observable. The cycle of seasons is then linked to even more
concrete and observable recommendations about food, exercise and treatment regim-
es.
The two basic places actually define three fundamental landscapes—landscapes
which Zimmerman painstakingly argues to have been characteristic of those parts
of India in which the tradition was developed. The first place is the ‘jungle’ (jāṅgala)
soils, which are dry, associated with fire. Note that the modern sense of the word
‘jungle’ is now quite the opposite—referring mainly to dense rainforest. This striking
reversal of meaning may have come about by association with the word ‘tangle’ (so
speculates the OED). The jāṅgala of the Ayurvedic texts is an open, dry woodland,
capable, after clearing, of being converted into cultivable land by use of irrigation.
On the contrary side was the ānūpa, the marshy swamps, lakes and river areas charac-
terized by water. The third landscape type was simply the one intermediate between
the two, sādhārana, the temperate combination of wet and dry. Diseases may mani-
fest as imbalances ˙ in the humours, and these can be caused when the wind carries
bile from the jāṅgala to the patient, or when the wind brings an excess of wetness
from the ānūpa, thus leading to an illness characterized by wind and phlegm. The
wind itself is regarded as absorbing the dry or the wet, transporting it, and then
transmitting it to humans.
The people who live sensibly in the temperate regions, the agriculturalists, have
little to fear. For them, the following advice is found in one of the core texts: ‘who-
ever behaves in a suitable fashion has nothing to fear from the place, his ways of
feeding, sleeping and moving his body, etc. have all the qualities of the place’
(Corpus of Sus̄ruta, quoted in Zimmerman, 1987, p. 26). What a significant connec-
tion, then, between disease and the place: the healthy cultivated land, showing a
good balance of the wet and the dry, and a varied climate, will be one in which
humans can have a healthy life, absorbing ‘all the qualities of the place’.
Even in healthy places, however, there are diseases. Not everyone lives in the
ideal way. And winds can blow from other places, transporting illness to those who
occupy even the most favourable lands. So there is always work for the doctor,
which will involve attending to the imbalances of the patient, imbalances manifesting
as disease of various kinds. At the heart of Ayurvedic treatment are exercises,
regimes of bloodletting and enemas and, most significant for Zimmerman’s account,
diet. The dietary cures for disease are related to further features associating the hum-
ours, the aromas and the healing qualities of foods, qualities that can be distilled
and concentrated by the preparation of broths and other dishes. For example, phlegm,
associated with wetness, can be counteracted by acrid foods, while fiery excesses of
 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581 573

bile can be counteracted by sweet food. The acrid foods are the dry ones, growing
naturally in the dry soils. The sweet foods are those of the wet lands.
Susruta and the other authorities have no interest in a systematic taxonomy of
plants and animals in terms of overall structural similarity. Rather, as Zimmerman
puts it, Hindu zoology is ‘absorbed into pharmacy’. Susruta produces a bestiary, for
example, which begins with an apparently biogeographical classification—the ani-
mals are said to be either of the dry lands—jāṅgala—or of the wet lands. Those of
the jāṅgala are then subdivided into various classes, for example, those that have
legs, those that scatter grain when they feed, and more apparently peculiar subdiv-
isions. Those of the wet lands are classified according to whether they live on the
river banks, like the elephants, or float, like the swans. What makes the classification
comprehensible is the link with pharmacy, and ultimately with cooking as a mode
of distilling out the ‘essences’ within animals and plants. Susruta’s classification
actually corresponds to a hierarchy of meats that can be organized by their medical
uses, linked to their relative sweetness or acridity.
Given the view that feeding involves absorbing and concentrating the humours in
what is eaten, then it is almost straightforward to make sense of further classi-
fications. For example, the ‘animals that pull at their food’ are subdivided into two
further types—the croppers of grass and the carnivores. Since the carnivore eats what
has already eaten grasses, seeds and leaves, the meat of the carnivore will be
especially potent, for it will have a concentration of essences that have already been
concentrated by the prey. Those animals—the large predators and the raptors—which
eat the eaters of flesh then have an additional potency over and above that of other
carnivores. Zimmerman notes that Susruta comments on ‘the exceptionally nourish-
ing character of the meat of eaters of meat’ (Zimmerman, 1987, p. 175). Rec-
ommended Ayurvedic practices therefore use meat, including the meat of large pred-
ators, in treatment regimes. This is at odds, however, with the ideal of purity for
some of the patients, for whom the highest form of life was one of vegetarianism
and non-violence. Doctors, as practitioners of violence, thus could not themselves
be as pure as some of their patients, as Zimmerman points out. Moreover, they would
have to lie about some of the dietary treatments, otherwise patients would refuse to
eat the food that was specially good for their condition.

4. Environment, physiology and the poetic

The condensed and simplified summary given above does little justice to the pro-
found scholarship and dense layering of Zimmerman’s text. I hope, however, to have
captured the main features of his account of the evolution of Ayurvedic medicine
against a biogeographical setting which itself is enfolded and articulated within the
texts and practices of Hindu medicine.
There is, however, a subtext of Zimmerman’s own work, which seems to raise a
significant question. This is whether sound medical and environmental practice needs
to be based on ‘science’ as that term is presently understood. To clarify what I take
to be Zimmerman’s implicit querying of the ‘scientific’ stance, I will expand a little
on his remarks about environment and physiology.
574 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581

Zimmerman starts his book by pointing out that the word ‘desert’ has several kinds
of significance. It has a geographical meaning—the definition of a spatial object—but
we can also define the desert as an idea, something that resonates with our culture.
Deserts, as objects, are sterile, dry, without many people or animals. But the idea
of the desert collects cultural values—presence, versus absence, civilization versus
desolation, community versus solitude. Writing as an avowed structuralist, Zimmer-
man puts the point in terms of sense versus reference. The reference of the word is
the geographical place; its sense is the world of meanings and associations it acquires
through its embedding in a language and a culture.
In the texts that he studied, Zimmerman found that space had itself become struc-
tured by the language of poetry, the language of cooking and the language of medical
instruction. Geographical configurations were formulated in texts before the student
was able to observe them on the ground. The world of sense thus gave structure,
and meaning, to the world to which reference was being made. We can see some
of this at work by looking, for example, at the notion of cara in the Hindu texts, a
word which can be translated as ‘environment’. This translation can be a dangerous
disembedding; cara means something whose objective, spatial reference is incorpor-
ated within a set of practical considerations. Thus one text states that ‘cara is a place
such as marshy land, the water, the air, a dry land, etc. in which food can be found’
(quoted in Zimmerman, 1987, pp. 20–21). This immediately assimilates a spatial
reference to one defined in relation to food. The place where one lives, or walks
about, becomes also a place in which one eats, and thereby takes on the character
of one’s environment. The character of the environment becomes charged with culi-
nary and medical significance. One’s identity in turn is environmentally constituted:
one becomes what one eats.
For Zimmerman, it seems to follow that Indian medicine is not based so much
on natural history, conceived as the systematic, scientific classification of species
and environments, as on a poetics of people and place, structured by traditional
formulas which are learned and recited. This traditional lore specifies what has to
be collected, and the medical reasons for doing so, with no botanic or zoological
basis of the kind that might be attributed to Greek science. The ecology of place
that emerges seems to be predominantly anthropocentric: an ecology of agriculture,
cooking and pharmacy, not an ecology of interacting systems defined without refer-
ence to human meanings and practices. It is a profoundly human ecology, in other
words, yet one which sees the world in terms of processes linking different individ-
uals and populations (within and across species)—for example, the processes of con-
centrating essences through feeding.
It is a commonplace observation that rudiments of systematic physiology are found
in Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, where the parts of animals are divided into two
sorts: (a) those which divide into uniform portions (as flesh divides into flesh); and
(b) those which are composite and hence divide into non-uniform portions (hands
do not divide into hands). Aristotle argues further in De Partibus Animalium that
bodily functions depend on the organs (the composite), and the uniform parts (flesh,
blood, bone) only exist for the sake of constituting the organs. Nothing like this
approach to function and structure is found in Indian medicine. Instead, it employs
 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581 575

a series of mythic essences and happenings in a narrative that seems to relate mainly
to the body conceived either as a kind of cooker, or as a kind of agricultural system.
This is revealed clearly in a discussion of a technical problem which emerges from
the doctrine of the seven dhātu (vital tissues). These tissues were meant to be pro-
ductively connected in that one of them produces the next, and it the next, and so
on. The seventh dhātu is seminal fluid, and a worry that was expressed regarding
the doctrine of production was that a man who fasted for a month should, in theory,
be constituted of nothing but semen (for each of the earlier tissues, having no supple-
mentation from the diet, would have been used up in producing the next in the
series). To avoid this absurdity, some modifications had to be made to the doctrine.
Zimmerman points out that in the discussions of this problem, a number of explana-
tory schemas were proposed. These include the schema of the curdled milk, the
schema of pigeons in a barn and the schema of channels in a rice paddy. None of
these makes the least attempt at working out real physiological functions, drawing
instead on analogies with cooking and agriculture (Zimmerman, 1987, pp. 164–168).
The space of the human body, then, was not conceived as a functioning hierarchic
system, with organs made of tissue, tissue made of cells and so on. Neither was the
surrounding environment conceived in the terms of modern chemistry, toxicology
and environmental science. Are we then to say that in the absence of systematic
physiology and systematic ecology the traditional Hindu conceptions of body and
place are inconsistent with our modern understanding? Such a conclusion, in my
view, would be too hasty, requiring that the only legitimate understandings of health,
disease, place and people are scientific ones. My conclusion from Zimmerman’s
study is that poetic understandings—based on structures of meaning themselves
incorporated into, and constituting, cultural practices—are not only legitimate items
of historical and cultural study, but are also illuminating ways of thinking about
ourselves and the world. Science has not yet displaced poetry from the world, and
contemporary science provides only one among many standards against which to
measure earlier conceptions of humans and nature. (The poetics of a science itself
are not, as I point out later, available to be articulated within the science itself.) This
is not to deny that the history of scientific ideas is itself part of broader cultural-
historical studies. Instead, what I am proposing is that to view traditional medical
classifications as no more than proto-science is to do the subject-matter considerable
injustice. This would be just as skewed an approach to the history of ideas as the
stance criticized in the opening section of the present paper. Western ecology itself,
although now a perfectly proper focus of scientific research, is also the label of a
political movement and a suitable theme, I would argue, for poetics.

5. Chinese medicine and the erotics of disease

Given the parallels among many of the traditional medical practices, it might be
wondered whether any similar themes to those discussed by Zimmerman can be
identified in traditional Chinese medicine. Even to contemplate this question, how-
ever, provides a warning about the generalization involved in concepts of ‘Asian
576 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581

thought’, ‘Chinese thought’, and the like. By comparison with China, India is a
relatively small country in area. While Zimmerman was able to focus his studies on
three principal treatises on classical Indian medicine, there are roughly 13000 treat-
ises on Chinese medicine together with an enormous number of manuscripts. This
mass of writing reflects many different cultural traditions, and was composed against
quite distinct biogeographical backgrounds. The latter fact has been noted as of inci-
dental benefit to scholarly classification and dating of doctrines. For example, by the
time of the Han dynasty (approximately 200 BCE to 220 CE) there was apparently
wide agreement in the scheme of five phases (or ‘elements’)—wood, fire, earth,
metal and water—and two primal forces—the yin and the yang. However, in the
texts that survive, the groupings of exemplars of the five phases are quite revealing
of the geographic location of the thinkers and schools who made the original group-
ings. Grains, for example, are grouped so that wheat is allocated to wood, beans to
fire, and millet, panicled millet and hemp allocated to the other three phases. As the
distinguished sinologist Joseph Needham pointed out, the omission of rice from the
grouping suggests that it originates from thinkers located in the north of the country
(Needham, 1978, pp. 153–156). In the light of the major biogeographical differences
within China, it may seem unlikely that a poetics of place and ecology can be found
for China as a whole. This observation, however, should not inhibit the search for
influences of the environment on local traditions within the larger context.
A small amount of comparative work has been carried out on Indian and Chinese
medicine (see, for example, Svoboda & Lade, 1998; and compare Chapter 2 of
Huard & Wong, 1968). However, there has been, as far as I am aware, no attempt
at even a local cultural history of any Chinese thought that matches the scope and
ambitions of Zimmerman’s work. Perhaps the closest work in overall scope is
Manfred Porkert’s study of humoral thinking in Chinese medicine (Porkert, 1974).
As noted by others, however, Porkert’s work is not grounded in anthropology and
poetics (see Leslie & Young, 1992, p. 11). As well as the variety of bioregional
backgrounds against which Chinese medicine and its practice have evolved, there
are also further complications that face the scholar. One of these is the accumulative
and empirical character of Chinese medical practice (sometimes described in terms
of the ‘syncretism’ of the tradition). As Judith Farquhar has argued, a study of cases
described by traditional practitioners reveals the doctor as attempting always to ‘forge
a link between a concrete illness and the relevant portions of the medical archive’
(Farquhar, 1992, p. 72; and see also Farquhar, 1987). If Farquhar is right, then it
would be simplistic to regard the classic texts as providing a ‘theory’ against which
the practice of the clinician can be studied. Instead, the contradictions and contro-
versies embedded in the written documents contain a store of experiential knowledge
on which students and practitioners can draw and to which they can contribute.
Despite the potential hazards involved in comparing traditions, there are clear
affinities between Chinese and Indian thinking which suggest that some of Zimmerm-
an’s suggestions may carry over from the latter to the former. According to classical
Chinese texts, winds, as Unschuld points out, can bring depletion or repletion to the
individual, and humans have to live in harmony with the influences and emanations
of all natural phenomena. The feminine and masculine principles, yin and yang,
 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581 577

themselves originally referred to the ‘shady hillside’ and the ‘sunny hillside’, strongly
reminiscent of the wet and dry principles in Ayurvedic medicine (Unschuld, 1985,
Ch. 3). The five phases are even said by Huard and Wong to be a foreign introduction
to Chinese thought based on information gleaned from travellers between India and
China (Huard & Wong, 1968, pp. 88–89). Just as taste and pharmacological function
are associated in Ayurvedic medicine, so too are they in the Huang Di Nei Jing Su
Wen (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine), composed between the
second century BCE and the eighth century CE (Veith, 1949, Vol. III, p. 9). And
the notion of ch’i itself—often wrongly translated as ‘energy’—is in fact the notion
of a fine matter, or humour (Unschuld, 1985, Ch. 3).
One further and little-explored issue that appears to emerge clearly from compari-
sons of Chinese and Indian thinking about health and disease is the importance of
sexual difference, and the qualities associated with men, women and the sexual act.
Some of these features may reflect male projections within largely patriarchal
societies. However, the study of cultural erotics, and its relation to patriarchy and
gender bias, would appear to be a fertile area for further study. The fundamental
role of the wet and the dry in traditional Indian medicine, and its corresponding
dualism of yinyang in China, can possibly be traced back to an erotic basis that lies
deep in most long-lived cultural traditions. It is not surprising to find parallel pairs
of oppositions in each tradition that resonate with the same eroticism—soft and hard,
cold and hot, dark and light, hidden and open, and so on. The fact that Chinese
medicine thus has a role for diseases caused by an excess of yin over yang, or vice
versa, just as Ayurvedic medicine posits excesses of wet over dry and vice versa,
may signify a common poetics, this time a poetics of sex, of sexual difference and
of sexual balance. A cultural history of thinking within these traditions would thus
need to take account of the poetics of the erotic as well as of those features emerging
from Zimmerman’s study.
The contemporary scientific stance, viewed narrowly, is that the environment and
the body are items that can be impartially and ‘objectively’ studied, their chemistry,
physiology and the rest noted and accounted for. When in doubt we can analyze,
dissect and dismantle the object under scrutiny to find out how it works. Scientific
investigation presupposes complete detachment from all social and cultural meanings
whatsoever. Even so, the ambition to seek for ‘science’ or ‘protoscience’ within non-
Western traditions seems legitimate if only for two reasons. First, science conceived
in the narrow sense ignores much that is culturally relevant or important. Hence, a
history of science which inherits the narrow understanding will inevitably miss the
cultural and ideological dimension of the search for knowledge and remedies.
Second, as has been argued (cf. Hallyn, 1990), even modern western science has its
poetics too. Encounters with the tropes and metaphors of other traditions may encour-
age some sensitivity to those lying unexplored within our own.
Within any culture, there is always more happening than can be captured in the
categories of narrow science, just as within a science itself more will be happening
than can be captured by the constructions and observations of that science alone.
Nature and the body are realms charged with meaning and significance, central to
our relationships, our communities, our food, our addictions, our hopes and aspir-
578 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581

ations, our fears and terrors. They are thus a realm of poetry, of eroticism, of con-
struction and deconstruction. Nathan Sivin laments that

Classical sinology, still obsessed with texts and tending to treat them as sacred
objects, has barely noticed the fruitfulness of new methodologies, and has rolled
unseeing like a juggernaut over wave after wave of intrepid social constructionists,
literary deconstructionists, discourse analysts and other representatives of the aca-
demic millennium. (Sivin, 1995, p. viii)

Sivin’s remarks are surely an exaggeration. For example, both Hay (1994) and Zito
and Barlow (1994) propose post-structuralist treatments of body and place which
suggest that there are ample opportunities for ecologically fruitful studies of the
poetics of place, the body and the erotic in Chinese thought.

6. Conclusions

What lesson can be drawn from the study of Hindu medicine and its potential
relation—and comparison—with Chinese thought? One cautionary conclusion is that
each discipline brings only a partial illumination to the aspects of a culture with
which it engages. It is unsurprising that philosophers and students of religion concen-
trate on religious and philosophical accounts of the relationship between humans and
nature. Likewise, historians of science, whose interests are focused on the develop-
ment of scientific and technological techniques and concepts, will tend to give only
partial attention to philosophical, social and religious views or to what we have been
referring as the poetical understanding of people and place. Their primary interest
in such views will be mainly on how they relate to scientific development. More often
than not, histories of medical thought focus on diagnostic and therapeutic techniques,
disregarding broader socio-environmental contexts, and downplaying the aetiology
of disease. Thus the preconceptions of modern writers can dominate the selection
of materials they choose to make from a tradition whose semantic richness and poetry
exceeds the narrow technical understandings they themselves bring to the study. It
is not easy to transcend the frameworks imposed by contemporary disciplinary
boundaries. Just as the philosophical and religious approach of Callicott and Ames
is incomplete, so also is the technical perspective of many historians of science. The
awareness that all frameworks of ideas are inevitably incomplete invites humility on
the part of every academic discipline (Brennan, 1991). We can at best hope for
fragmentary insights within any particular discipline. This should not, however, pre-
vent us from opening up the cultural and disciplinary boundaries of our explorations.
This point is reinforced if we look back to the magisterial and monumental study
inaugurated by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China. Despite its
attempt at a fair and comprehensive coverage of its themes, a certain view of science
underpins Needham’s work, a view to which caveats have already been entered. To
get a sense of Needham’s approach, it is helpful to read the abridgement by Colin
Ronan of the first two volumes (Needham, 1978). Doing so, we are struck by the
 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581 579

fact that the measure of all scientific achievement is the contemporary state of west-
ern science. Needham is vexed by the failure of Chinese science to ‘develop’ beyond
a certain ‘level’, a failure he attributes to the fact that Chinese society moved ‘straight
from feudalism to bureaucratism’, a bureaucratism that stifled independent scientific
creativity (Needham, 1978, p. 306). A related theme is that Chinese thinkers were
creative enough to anticipate such modern ideas as the inseparability of matter and
energy, and had a precursory conception of feedback mechanisms, and of homeo-
stasis. Even the hexagrams of the I Ching are said to have played a part in the
development, via Leibniz, of binary arithmetic.
In connection with this latter point, Needham writes:

Binary arithmetic has now assumed great importance as the basic counting method
used in the circuits of all electronic computers and calculators, and is also found
helpful by biologists in their analyses of the central nervous system of mammals.
Thus something that was unconsciously stumbled upon in the I Ching hexagrams,
and brought to consciousness by Leibniz, has proved of fundamental use in mod-
ern science and technology. (Needham, 1978, p. 190)

The ‘cultural cringe’ associated with this kind of claim is unfortunate, and Need-
ham’s approach has seemingly encouraged subsequent writers to extend his formula
in ways far beyond his own modest claims. For example, in their study of traditional
Chinese medicine, Po and Lisowski claim that physicians and scientists in ancient
China ‘had a remarkably sophisticated grasp of the concept of dynamic equilibrium
(what is now called homeostasis in modern medicine)’ (Ho & Lisowski, 1993, p.
18). My claim is that there are fascinating theories of humans and the world in the
non-Western traditions whose appeal lies not merely in their scientific interest, nar-
rowly conceived, but also in their cultural potential for revising received Western
notions about science and environment.
The cultural-historic study of Hindu medicine by Zimmerman stands in sharp con-
trast to these accounts. By attempting to take a comprehensive view of the emergence
of certain key ideas, Zimmerman articulates the structure of Ayurvedic medicine and
relates it to a wider scheme of cultural meanings. What emerges from such a study
is the fascination of understanding a worldview in its social and bioregional context.
Zimmerman does not try to apologize for the odd taxonomies of Hindu medicine,
let alone find chains of association which bring them into tangential contact with
contemporary science. Instead, his work attempts to let a tradition stand forth in its
own terms, against the physical and environmental background which set the stage
for the lives of the people and which was so poetically captured in their theorizing.
Such a tradition is worthy of study independent of how it measures up against the
standards of contemporary science conceived narrowly. Whether there are any eco-
logical themes (either ‘scientific’ or ‘poetic’) that would emerge in a similar study
of Chinese medicine is something that may be disclosed by future research. China’s
biogeographical diversity itself makes such an undertaking enormously complex and
challenging. However, I hope that the brief remarks about Ayurvedic medicine made
580 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581

in the present paper may at least encourage those better qualified than me to contem-
plate the possibility of such an undertaking.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the Hindu tradition, with its emphasis on
place, provides what may be tentatively called a ‘topographical medicine’. It is this
crucial move, the ‘topocentric’ focus of the theories, which provides a kind of eco-
logical understanding of the human subject, of the subject in relation to the surround-
ing world and of that world itself. Zimmerman regards the Hindu theories as anthro-
pocentric, but it is not clear how to connect his use of the term with contemporary
uses of the same term in relation to environmental ethics. As he points out, the cara
is a place not only of geographical features, but one in which food is to be found;
for the Hindu writers, place and food, surroundings and utility, become fused in one
idea. We might argue that a thoroughly ecological approach to the world is not at
odds with a thoroughgoing anthropogenic stance, by which is meant one in which
all the terms and concepts brought to bear on nature are ones drawn from primary
human models, human interests and human understandings. As already noted, the
Chinese tradition in science and medicine is often said to contain a large component
of anthropocentric doctrine. Whatever this means it would not seem to rule out the
possibility that such a doctrine is reconcilable with Western ecological understand-
ings of humans in relation to the world, or of the world itself. Callicott has argued
that the anthropocentrism of main traditions in both Indian and Chinese philosophy
leaves them incapable of properly supporting a truly environmental ethic. Even in the
absence of a detailed discussion of all the ambiguities in the term ‘anthropocentric’, I
hope to have shown that Callicott’s conclusion is unjustified. A medicine closely
intertwined with agriculture, as both Indian and Chinese medicine have been, sensi-
tive to place and to the place of humans within larger places, provides a route to
re-valuing and managing nature that respects and cultivates both ecological health
and biodiversity. Such a medicine of land and body, disease and place, offers a
context, a ground from which may spring an ethic of place and the environment.
Though this ethic may well be very different from the land ethic favoured by Callic-
ott, it cannot be dismissed as ‘anti-environmental’.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were read in 2001 at seminars at City University,
Hong Kong, the University of Western Australia and at the Australian Association
for Philosophy’s annual conference in Hobart, Tasmania. I am grateful to members
of all three audiences for their helpful comments. Special thanks are due to my Hong
Kong colleagues Ho-Mun Chan and Julia Tao. Comments from Christopher Fraser,
John Gordon and Daniel Star helped me get clear on—even if not always avoid—
the pitfalls waiting for those who engage in comparative studies. The production of
the final version of the paper benefited from critique by an anonymous referee, and
also from valuable suggestions by Y. S. Lo, Clare Palmer and Nina Witoszek.
 A. Brennan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 33 (2002) 567–581 581

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