Astral Sciences in Early Imperial China: Observation, Sagehood and the Individual by Daniel Patrick Morgan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Astral Sciences in Early Imperial China: Observation, Sagehood and the Individual by Daniel Patrick Morgan Nathan Sivin Astral Sciences in Early Imperial China: Observation, Sagehood and the Individual by Daniel Patrick Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 257. $105.00 cloth, $84.00 e-book. This book packs quite a wallop. As the author puts it, “the subject of this book is not ‘empiricism’, ‘progress’ or ‘science’ but the legend that these and similar ideas have inspired. The question as concerns legend, the history of religion should teach us, is not whether it is true, but how it is told, how it is acted upon, and how it is reimagined, renegotiated and [End Page 549] repeated” (p. 220). Morgan uses the word “legend” in a sense introduced by Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of science and other topics.1 By “Legend” (with a capital “L”), Kitcher means the convictions with which “successive generations of scientists have filled in more and more parts of the COMPLETE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD” (emphasis in original, p. 3). Morgan sees its utility for other times and for places beyond Europe and America. The result is a book that analyzes old and new sources in a refreshing way to yield a rich crop of insights. Morgan writes, “it is only when we let go of modern assumptions about ethics, power, gender, reason, and daily tasks that the grunt work of textual and terrestrial archaeology can reveal something of the other beyond the [investigator’s] self” (p. 6). And “[we] must disabuse ourselves of... the very notion of a transhistorical entity called ‘Chinese astronomy’ [and] work instead to substantiate the textual, mythical, conceptual, historical, institutional, social and epistemological framework within which a given community is performing a given activity, and we should do so century by century as we move. The point . . . is not, then, to answer questions about ‘what the Chinese thought’ about heaven; it is to . . . watch what plays out as conflicting elements collide” (p. 49). Morgan pulls off a convincing first approximation to the goal of letting go of modern assumptions and gives many examples of how to work toward it. He has read everything worth reading in European and Asian languages, and he draws on important recent findings. A few of Morgan’s strikingly phrased insights include “‘Heavenly patterns’ are more than just patterns in space (constellations) and time (periodicities); they are the very germ and blueprint of civilisation” (p. 15); “Sagecraft is a joint endeavour, and it is li [曆, calendar] men [that is, practitioners of mathematical astronomy] like Cai [Yong 蔡邕 (33–192)] and Liu [Hong 劉洪 (fl. 167–206)]—Cai and Liu remind us—to whom the burden of sagesse [Fr., wisdom] falls. It is they who apprehend the substance, principle, past and future of the cosmos, and it is they who shall usher mankind into peace and prosperity by this knowledge. All that is required of the emperor is the silence and fixity of a distant star” (emphases in original, p. 19); and “[astronomical] reform [End Page 550] history tends to lodge with the emperor more historical agency than those authoring and executing the policies that he approves, thus placing the cart before the horse” (p. 31). The book argues that, despite the narrative of an astronomy unified by its imperial origin, which has been the norm in ancient and modern times, astronomy is actually a saga of discontinuities and conflicts over the centuries. In addition to its normal duty of preparing and distributing the annual almanac, the Grand Clerk’s office dealt with proposals for change. Proposals that claimed superior methods were deliberated upon by the Three Excellencies (Sangong 三公) or in a “public” debate open to a variety of officials (p. 41). The fate of the proposal was then “settled by popular vote” (p. 139). The debates could be quite technical, but experts on astronomy were widely scattered through the bureaucracy. (Less than a third of named officials who took part in such debates between 206 BCE and 420 CE belonged to the Grand Clerk’s office.) Credibility depended on “an idiom of myth, values, etiquette and cultural tradition that marked [experts] as members of the...