The Petrified Heart: Obsession in Chinese Literature, Art, and Medicine

THE PETRIFIED HEART: OBSESSION IN CHINESE LITERATURE, ART, AND MEDICINE* Judith T. Zeitlin The concept of obsession, or pi, is an important Chinese cultural construct that underwent a long development and reached its height of influence during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. A sixteenth-century dictionary, A Complete Mastery of Correct Characters (Zhengzi tong), offers the essential Ming definition of this concept: "pi is a pathological fondness for something" (pi, shihao zhi hing)} As the sickness radical suggests, pi was originally a medical term for an obstruction within the digestive track. An influential early seventh-century medical book, The Aetiology and Symptomology of All Diseases (Zhubing yuanhou lun) contains a detailed description: If digestion stops, then the stomach will not work. When one then drinks fluid, it will be stopped from trickling and will not disperse. If this fluid then comes into contact with cold qi (energy ), it will accumulate and form a pi. A pi is what inclines to *A draft of this paper was presented at a panel on literature and medicine at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, 17 March 1989. I would like to thank Ellen Widmer, the organizer of the panel, for her longstanding encouragement and support, and Nathan Sivin, the panel respondent, for his generous comments and advice. I am especially grateful to Charlotte Fürth for sharing her medical expertise and critical acumen with me. I have also benefitted from the suggestions of Mi-chu Wiens and the anonymous reviewers at Late Imperial China. Finally, I would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for grant support which assisted me in my research and writing. A fuller study of obsession and its cultural forms will appear in my book (Zeitlin in press). *See the entry on pi in Zhang Zilie's (fl.1627) dictionary, Zhengzi tong (1685 ed; 1670 preface) wuji 24a. Zhengzi tong was based on the Zihui (Lexicon) of Mei Yingzuo (15701615 ), printings of which were still extensive circa 1691. Goodrich 1976:1061-62 calls Zhengzi tong "the most successful of a large number of vulgate versions of the Tzu-hui which circulated widely in late Ming and early Qing times and which dominated both popular and professional Chinese lexicography until the Kang-hsi tzu-tien became available." Zhengzi tang's definition is in fact also cited in the famous Kangxi Dictionary (Kangxi cidian) completed in 1716. (Taibei photo reprint 1973:7.1769.) Late Imperial China Vol. 12, No. 1 (June 1991): 1-26© by the Society for Qing Studies 1 2 Judith T. Zeitlin one side between the two ribs and sometimes hurts . . . 2 Also according to a mid-eighth century medical book, Secret Prescriptions of the Outer Tower ( Waitai biyao) a pi could even become as hard as stone and eventually abscess.3 The authors of these Sui and Tang texts, however, only presented an advanced view of the concept but did not invent it; the medical usage of pi can be traced back to the The Classic Materia Medica (Bencao jing), of the second century, where according to Paul Unschuld, the term pi shi or "indigestion" already figures as "one of the most important kinds of serious illnesses."4 From this sense of pathological blockage evolved the extended meaning of obsession or addiction—something that sticks in the gut and cannot be evacuated, hence becoming habitual. This pathological component of pi is significant: indeed, a synonym for pi is sometimes bing, illness. When written in its alternative form with the person radical rather than the sickness radical, however, the primary meaning of pi becomes "leaning to one side," or "off-center."5 An attempt to relate the meanings of both graphs (which share a phonetic element) becomes apparent in the etymology given in The Aetiology of All Diseases cited a moment ago: "a pi is what inclines (pianpi) between the two ribs and sometimes hurts ..." From this sense of one-sidedness or partiality, pi also comes to denote the individual proclivities inherent in human nature, as in the compound pixing (written with either radical). This paradoxical view of obsession as at once pathological and normative helps account for the peculiar range...