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IAS Talking Points Seminar: Acu-Moxa and Qi (氣)

19 February 2019, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

shan jiang

Dr Shan Jiang, IAS Visiting Research Fellow, will talk on "Acu-Moxa and Qi (氣): On Qi-Narratives of Acu-Moxa Theory in Chinese Medical Classics." Respondents: Dr Vivienne Lo (UCL) and Dr Nancy Holroyde-Downing (UCL)

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Institute of Advanced Studies

Location

IAS Common Ground
Ground floor, South Wing, UCL
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Qi, a concept created by Chinese ancestors during the Warring States period (475-221 BC), had diverse context-dependent meanings. In medical texts, Qi was mostly related to breath and vital essence fluxing through the whole body by channel systems. The latter is the basic theory of acu-moxa therapy, which is the main focus of my forthcoming book. The quantity of Qi in medical narratives is so huge that we cannot ignore its connotations. In the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, one of the earliest known Chinese medical classics, the character ‘Qi’ can be found in more than 500 different text blocks of narratives relevant to acu-moxa. Most interestingly, when Qi is a monosyllable, it varies between twelve individual meanings from flatus to a description of pulsation.

The book starts with an analysis of ancient texts, ascending to the Chinese ancestors’ understanding of the body as well as the dynamic phenomena which happen in everyday life. Since annotation was an academic tradition during the transmission of knowledge in China, abundant explanations and commentaries to show the evolvement of ideology of Qi are quoted in this book.

The book tries to answer these questions: How did Qi adapt its semantic tendency in various narrative dimensions? Is there any subtle relevance among these semantic orientations of Qi? Why could the Chinese ancestors use a single character in different contexts with individual connotation but without confusion? Were there any negative influences on the inheritance of knowledge caused by the ambiguity of Qi? If so, why did these people keep on using it for thousands of years? For people like us with a modern scientific knowledge structure, what’s the best way to translate Qi - directly using the expression, or by giving detailed explanations depending on the context?

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