[好書] 《身體的語言》書評 by Paul U. Unschuld
文章出處：http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bhm/summary/v075/75.2unschuld.html
The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese
Medicine
《身體的語言：從中西文化看身體之謎》 作者：栗山茂久
台灣中譯本簡介
http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/booksfile.php?item=0010139822
________________________________________
Shigehisa Kuriyama. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of
Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 1999. 340 pp. Ill. $29.50.
This book is written in response to a profound question: "How can perceptions
of something as basic and intimate as the body differ so?" (p. 8). Where the
Europeans attempted to translate anatomical findings into objective
diagnostic parameters, the Chinese perceived the mo and offered metaphoric
descriptions of their haptic sensations. Where Europeans saw muscles and
depicted them in art and language, the Chinese, Shigehisa Kuriyama claims,
did not even develop a word for these morphological structures. Where the
Europeans discovered tangible organs, the Chinese perceived the zang and fu.
The European and Chinese interpretations of facial colors were not the same,
nor did the meanings associated with plethora in Greece and xu (fullness) in
China overlap.
Kuriyama's book is a delightful display of erudition, quoting an impressive
phalanx of philosophers and medical authorities of ancient Greece and ancient
China. His stories would not be so unusual if the book were about religions,
table manners, or wedding customs. In discussing the body, however, he has
chosen something that most people accept as a tangible reality. To describe
and interpret this reality is one task of medicine, and a comparison of
ancient Greek with ancient Chinese medicine inevitably invites a judgment
from today's perspective: who was closer to "truth"? This, however, is
exactly the type of judgment Kuriyama tries to avoid. He writes: "The true
structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere
the same, a universal reality. But then we look into history, and our sense
of reality wavers. . . . Accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions
frequently appear to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds" (p.
8). The comparison, he reminds his readers, "compels us to rethink much of
what we take for granted in the body" (p. 23)--how much, though, he leaves
undecided.
The overarching problem with this book is that it is not so much a meticulous
study of historical developments as a comparison of data from two unequal
pools. While Greek medicine has been researched by numerous scholars for
decades, if not centuries, only a very few aspects of ancient Chinese medical
thought have been studied in detail. The Chinese sections of Kuriyama's book
are not about "Chinese medicine"; rather, they are about a minority branch of
ancient Chinese medical reasoning that happened to dominate the early
medicine of systematic correspondences. It is neither representative of
"Chinese medicine" in the Han era, nor of "Chinese medicine" in later
centuries (or even today).
Even this minority branch was not a homogeneous body of views and notions.
The fascinating story of the beginnings of Chinese medicine in a period from
the [End Page 299] second centuryB.C. to the third century A.D. is only
beginning to unfold, but we already know that it is far more complex than the
present book seems to convey. We have come to realize, for example, that
theNanjing was not, as Kuriyama insists, a commentary on the Neijing. The
Nanjing, like the presumably later com-pilations of the Suwen and the
Lingshu, took its material from an unknown num-ber of short texts written
during the Han era. In contrast to the latter two, the Nanjing author heavily
edited his material, eliminating internal inconsistencies; the editors of the
Suwen and Lingshuonly superficially linked their original data, preserving
for posterity much of the divergence between individual perspectives.
The first (and least convincing) sections of the book address Greek and
Chinese pulse diagnosis. Kuriyama argues that Forke "succumbed to the spell
of anatomy, and rendered xuemo as 'blood vessels'" (p. 50), and he suggests
that "'streams of blood' is surely the more natural, more exact translation
here" (p. 51). ("Xuemo were the body's vital currents" [p. 51]). Kuriyama
emphasizes that "it is misleading to assert, flatly, that the term mo had two
meanings: the duality in English renderings is an artifact of translation"
(p. 48). This translation might be seen quite differently. TheSuwen and
further ancient writings abound with evidence to the effect that in many
instances the term mo referred to tangible, morphological entities--that is,
"blood vessels"; yet there is equal evidence that the same term was used to
combine a wide variety of sensations perceived when touching or eyeing
locations where pulsating arteries can be felt. The problem is that the
ancient Chinese subsumed these two lines of thought under one term. A dual
rendering in an English translation is therefore not an artifact, but
reflects different historical and conceptual layers; it is quite permissible,
as long as the reader is informed that one Chinese term in the course of
history came to cover different meanings. Surprisingly, in the latter half of
his book Kuriyama himself resorts to translating mo as "blood vessels"--thus
succumbing to the "spell" he so vehemently tried to flee in his early
chapters.
Similarly, Kuriyama continues the myth of liver, heart, spleen, lungs, and
kidneys as not "anatomically conceived" (p. 266). When in the 1970s the first
textbooks were written to introduce "Chinese medicine" to Western audiences,
the apparent discrepancies in organ functions and organ links between modern
biomedicine and "Chinese medicine" drew accusations of absurdity by modern
scientists. To protect against such criticism, apologetic authors claimed
that Chinese "blood" is not identical with biomedical "blood," that the
Chinese "liver" is not identical with the biomedical "liver." Likewise, they
could have claimed that early-twentieth-century European "blood" is not
identical with that of the late twentieth century. This confusion of
substratum and interpretation is projected by Kuriyama on the texts of
Chinese antiquity. And yet, ancient Chinese physicians could not have
expressed themselves more clearly in making their point that they conceived
the organs anatomically, that their "liver" and "stomach" referred to the
same tissues as the "liver" and "stomach" in the European tradition. Where
they differed from their Greek and modern colleagues was in ascribing
functions to these organs and understanding the links between primary [End
Page 300] organs and secondary body parts. Like mo, the terms for the organs
covered different meanings, and it is legitimate to separate these meanings
in translations.
Kuriyama explores only one of the metaphors used by ancient Chinese authors
to convey their views of the organs, namely, the image of zang and fu, which
he renders as "repositories." However, several other sets of metaphors were
also applied to the organs--for example, the spleen was a "governor" (zhu)
sitting in a "palace" (fu--in this case, the stomach) and ruling the
subordinates (qi--i.e., vessels, skin, sinews, etc.). To state that "the
hierarchy structuring the Chinese body was defined not by the logic of ruler
and ruled" (p. 266), and to build a comparison of ancient Chinese and Greek
conceptualizations of the organs on only the zang-fu dichotomy without taking
into account the significance of this juxtaposition of terms, is both
inadequate and misleading. Furthermore, to emphasize, as Kuriyama does, that
"discussions of the zang and fu in the Neijing typically have to do less with
discrete structures seen in dissection than with configurations of
sympathetic powers" (p. 265), is off the point; metaphors and configurations
all started from morphological facts.
At one point, Kuriyama hints at the possibility of Greek-Chinese medical
exchanges in antiquity, but he does not follow this through. Yet the Suwen
has quite a few terms and concepts that can be understood only if rendered
back into Greek. Feixiao is one example: this term (literally, "lung
melting/wasting") makes little sense in the context of ancient Chinese
medical thought. If we hypothesize that it is a transliteration plus
translation of the Greek phthisis, and if we see this term together with
others that may have found their way from West to East, we realize how much
work is yet to be done to appreciate the degree to which shared knowledge was
at the basis of the divergences of European and Chinese traditions. Kuriyama
is certainly right when he asks us "to rethink much of what we take for
granted in the body" (p. 23)--but not only there.
Paul U. Unschuld
University of Munich
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這一篇書評，是我看到對於栗山茂久所寫的書最深入的一篇，就內容進行實質評論。
儘管作者挑毛病的部份多，但也提供我們理解這本書的不同面向。
（一般看到的書評大多贊賞居多，或許是因為對中醫的瞭解不足吧？）
分享給大家。
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※ 編輯: godsound 來自: 140.112.156.65 (11/08 22:06)
※ 編輯: godsound 來自: 140.112.156.65 (11/08 22:07)
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