A “Chinese Eratosthenes” Reconsidered: Chinese and Greek Calculations and Categories (original) (raw)

2002, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine

Han shu 99B: 4145-6 several treatises in the Huang Di neijing: "Cardinal Waters" (Jing shui , Lingshu 12), "Dimensions of the Bones" (Gu du , Lingshu 14), "Dimensions of the Pulsating Vessels" (Mo du , Lingshu 17), "Intestines and Stomach" (Chang wei , Lingshu 31), and "A Normal Person Abstains from Cereals" (Ping ren jue gu , Lingshu 32), all as discussed in Yamada 1991. 12 For example, the Song Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi (1130-1200), in a reported conversation with the polymath Cai Yuanding (1135-98) about the inaccuracy of calendrical systems, remarked that "if it were studied with enough precision to yield a definitive method of computation, there would be no further discrepancies ... the astronomical techniques of the Ancients were imprecise (shukuo , lit. `loose') but there were few discrepancies. The more precise (mi , lit. `tight') the systems of today are, the more discrepancies appear!" (Zhuzi yu lei 57: 14a-17a, trans. Sivin 1986, 163). In the foregoing interpretation, increases of precision led to greater expectations of accuracy. An alternative reading is to retain the literal meanings of "tight" and "loose." Read thus, the looser systems of the sages of antiquity showed fewer discrepancies than the overly tight systems of Zhu Xi's day, with the implication that the looser systems were preferable because of their greater overall consistency (Vogel 1996, especially 80-82). Concepts of precision also played an important part in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Chinese critiques of traditional cosmology. One of Xu Guangqi's (1562-1633) priorities in adopting the astronomy of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was to introduce more accurate astronomical knowledge based on precise observation (Hashimoto 1988, especially 1-6, 49-52 and 227-28). Fang Yizhi (1611-1671) and Wang Fuzhi (1619-1692) held that discrepancies and irregularities were an inherent part of the cosmos and are therefore not predictable. The astronomical version of this view was that indeterminacy was inherent in the fabric of the cosmos, and a corresponding imprecision in human knowledge of the world, regardless of care or precision in observation and calculation (Henderson 1984: 246).