The Semen in the Subject: Deferral of Enjoyment and the Postmodernist Taoist Ars Erotica

Abstract

The Semen in the SubjectDeferral of Enjoyment and the Postmodernist Taoist Ars Erotica Ron S. Judy 還精補腦,可得不老矣 (Returning the semen to supplement the brain, one can achieve agelessness)1 Taoism, as most readers know, is the Chinese philosophy of the Way—an ancient doctrine that stresses epistemological ambiguity, freedom of action, and the concept of “naturalness” (ziran) in human affairs. What is perhaps less well known is that from earliest times Taoism was closely associated with China’s ars erotica—the so-called “art of the bedchamber” (fangzhong shu)—and that Lao Zi and other early Taoists promoted “nurturing life” (yangsheng) through various arcane therapeutic sexual techniques. The dictum at the top of this page, often attributed to Lao Zi, the Old Master, is one of the earliest formulations of the Taoist ars erotica and states that one of these techniques, re-circulating the semen to the brain (huan jing), can indefinitely curtail old age. This Taoist concern with healthful sexuality and matters of physiology seems only natural, for in contrast to the Confucian moralists who stressed obedient observance of traditional rites and the maintenance of early customs, Taoists were fond of pointing out that the Way is “natural,” amoral, ever changing, and without any fixed grounds or meaning—or, as the famous opening lines of the Dao De Jing (The Classic of the Way and its Power) puts it, “the way that can be followed is not the true Way; the name that can be named is not the true Name.” Marginalized and more or less driven underground after the establishment of Confucianism as the official state religion during the Han Dynasty (221 BCE-224 CE), by the late 6th century Taoism had evolved into secret religious sects that stressed: experiments with a variety of esoteric “body practices” aimed at cultivating life (yangsheng) and seeking a path to self-deification (cheng xian). Thus while Taoist philosophy did persist, it did so alongside an esoteric, mystical discourse of the body—a discourse contained in intentionally obscure manuals and records that teach meditation, dietetics, acupuncture, drug/herb use and, of course, a complex set of therapeutic sexual techniques (Kohn). Given this intense focus on the body in religious Taoism, the great historian of [End Page 135] Chinese science, Joseph Needham, claimed that the medieval Chinese ars erotica developed into an extremely advanced, proto-scientific “Physiological Alchemy” (Needham). Alongside Needham’s work in volume five of Science and Civilization in China, the other great masterpiece on Chinese sexology in the twentieth century, Sexual life in Ancient China (Engl. 1961; Fr. 1971), is also a magisterial work of cultural history. Written by Needham’s friend, the Dutch scholar-diplomat Robert van Gulik, the work translates and distills a broad range of Chinese sexual discourse, making the significant claim that sexual repression was relatively unknown to Chinese culture thanks to Taoism. Van Gulik’s book is remarkable not merely as a work of sinology, but as work that exerted a mesmerizing effect on the minds of several important postmodernist thinkers—namely, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Due to its connection to Foucault, a much recent scholarship on the Taoist ars erotica comes from the fields of comparative literature and philosophy, focusing on Foucault’s overreliance on van Gulik and his limited knowledge of the ars erotica. Foucault’s well-known, controversial claim that the West produced a Scientia Sexualis (modern sexology) that applied scientific classification and methods of analysis to the understanding of sex while the East, notably China, produced an ars erotica tradition is problematic to say the least (History of Sexuality 1 59–60). According to this, in the Asian ars erotica traditions, “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul” (57). The claim that the ars erotica tries to acquire and prolong “pleasure...