Matters of the Heart in Early Chinese Manuscripts

Abstract Manuscripts dating from the second-century bce to the first-century ce , recently recovered from tombs and other ancient sites, provide new details on the transmission of medical knowledge and practices in the early imperial era in China. The texts show that the correlative cosmology reflected in the transmitted medical canons was not fully formed in the early imperial era and that the definitions for illnesses and for parts of the inner body remained in flux. Notably, they show the persistence of ancient understandings traceable to the pre-imperial era, including the reliance on demonic or supernatural explanations of disease. This essay reviews the recently discovered bamboo texts written on the subject of the “heart” ( xin 心) and notes that, while it is obvious that the transmitted medical literature had certainly been influenced by the practices and ideas reflected in the recovered manuscripts, the transmitted canons represent an endpoint of ideological development that was not yet achieved during the Qin-Han era.