Recipes of Planting the Seeds and Songs of Sleeping Along: A Profile of Male Body Culture in Ming-Ch'ing China

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

One of the challenges historians face these days is documenting the ever-changing historical experience of humanity stressed by scholars in other disciplines as some sort of a universal constant. The different perspectives humanists and behavior scientists take with regard to the body culture of men either as a particular cultural tradition sensitive to specific time and place or as a general human pattern founded on physical and material conditions represents disparate viewpoints. On top of this, in the field of Chinese studies, there exists a parallel tendency which designates ”traditional China” some kind of an essential base (another level of universal constant in a regional sense?) over which the still larger force of progressive modernity (the global reality) eventually takes command. This study proposes to use the body culture of men during the Ming-Ch'ing period as an example to investigate and discuss such deliberations on historical specificity against a hypothesized general humanity and their myriad implications.Although often described as a long thread running through the ages of Chinese physical culture, the belief and practice of both life-nurturing (yang-sheng) and chamber-art (fang-chung) may not in fact be as timeless as they appear. Nor were they, in their many manifestations nearly as domineering, consistent, or one-dimensional as they have been assumed to be. Using medical texts from male medicine (nan-k'o, andronology) from the 16th century onward, juxtaposed with literary evidence representing various religio-philosophical convictions in their advocacy on sleeping alone as a way of self-cultivation, this essay tries to give a portrait of the Ming-Ch'ing male body as both many-sided and temporal. The daily or individual management of this many-sided and temporal male body had to operate under the assumption of multiplicity as well as constant adaptation. The re-discovery of this pluralistic and ever-changing body culture of Ming-Ch'ing males, in addition, sharpens the problematic historical framework in both Chinese and Western scholars which customarily identifies the period under investigation either as the ”late-imperial” period as China travels through its latter phase of the past, else as the ”early modern” phase signifying the incipient stage of some new era. In other words, this historically contextualized body management of Ming-Ch'ing males hopes to help us face up to the modernity discourse founded on the universal and objective nature of bio-physical essentialism, as it engages both social specificity and the cultural representations of a different past.The paper is divided into three parts: It first examines the historical character of the presumably ever-present Chinese tradition of yang-sheng and fang-chung. The essay then moves on to show the textual evidence for male reproductive medicine as it matured in Ming China. Thirdly, it reviews male rites of passage in attempting to ”sleep alone” as men entered ”post-reproductive middle age” as a significant countercurrent and a factor their culture created to handle the bigger element of time as men went through the process of personal life course. Final thoughts will dwell upon the contrast and/or parallel meaning this may have for both the modern bio-physical male body on the one hand and the traditional (sexual or sexless) life-nurturing physique of Chinese men on the other.