Chinese Science 12 (1995): 6-9

Working with Nathan Sivin: Four Decades

Nakayama Shigeru

was first introduced to Nathan Sivin at a seminar held at I. Bernard Co­ I hen's home in the late 1950s, perhaps 1957. Both of us were Harvard graduate students. Since that time, we have enjoyed a close professional relationship and a strong friendship as well. This is not to say that we have not developed our own individual interests over the years. In this brief essay, I shall try to appraise both Nathan Sivin's work and Nathan Sivin the man.

Working on Chinese Astronomy

During our graduate days, Nathan helped me greatly by editing the work I wrote towards my Ph.D. Perhaps it was this which piqued his interest in Chinese as­ tronomy. In any case, with encouragement from Willy Hartner, he published "Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathematical Astronomy," T'oung Pao 55 (1969). When I returned to Harvard in 1972-73, and Nathan was at MIT, we worked together on an annotated translation of the Yuan dynasty calendar known as the Shoushi Ii ("Season-granting Calendar"). Earlier, Yabuuti Kiyosi and I had collaborated on a Japanese translation of that text. But we thought that our translation from classical Chinese into Japanese did not mean a great deal, as we often left technical terms untranslated and unannotated. In putting the text into an entirely different language context, such as English, we were prompted to interpret it more meaningfully. Hence, Nathan and I collaborated, in the hope of eventually publishing an annotated translation under the joint names of Yabuuti, Nakayama and Sivin. We had an unsolved problem, however. In the planetary table, there is a col­ umn for which we were unable to find the physical reality it referred to. We hoped that some day we might be able to interpret it, and thus we decided to postpone publication until that time. Since then, nearly a quarter of a century has passed, but we have yet to solve the problem. Hence the translation remains un­ published. As part of the research for the translation of the Shoushi Ii, I undertook an exhaustive study of solar motion and the question of how accurately astronomers

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had observed that motion. I learned that the precision of Chinese solstitial obser­ vations in the thirteenth century far exceeded that in the West. I had intended to extend this approach to lunar motion and then eventually to the prediction of eclipses. At that time, I used a hand calculator for multiplying and an abacus for adding and subtracting. In stepping up from the study of solar motion to lunar motion, the parameters involved become so many and complex that, using the simple instruments at my disposal, the task proved virtually impossible. It was at this point that I decided to leave the field. In the quarter of a century since then, the history of astronomy has been re­ vived with greater use of computers and now lunar and even planetary motions can be calculated quite easily. Nathan Sivin was a pioneer in this endeavor. He has told me that the environment of MIT in which he worked in those days gave him an advantage. An advantage, he might have added, that he put to good use: his use of computers for the prediction of eclipses and other calculations moved the entire field forward in a way that would have been unimaginable in the pre­ computer era.

Alchemy, Medicine and Anthropology

Having soared into the heavens, so to speak, Nathan Sivin's interests shifted in more earthly directions. His major scientific background was in chemistry, and the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation was Chinese alchemy. As he worked in this area, he became increasingly interested in understanding medical problems from an anthropological viewpoint. Unlike astronomy, which at times seems to be trapped in a positivistic tradition, the hitherto unexplored areas of alchemy and medicine appeared more revealing and fascinating. Thanks to the Science and Civilization in China project, Joseph Needham has been credited with emphasiz­ ing the importance of Chinese alchemy as an example of Daoist science. How­ ever, it is Nathan Sivin who must be credited with the penetrating theoretical treatment of the subject.

Bifurcation points

One's scholarly interests are inevitably influenced by one's background and the environment in which one works. In my work on the history of classical Chinese astronomy, I am very much a pupil of Yabuuti Kiyosi. During the early days of Nathan's study of Chinese science, I introduced him to the history of Chinese science research group organized by Yabuuti at Kyoto University's Jinbun ka­ gaku kenkyiisho (Research Institute for Cultural Sciences). He seems to have been fascinated by their intellectual epicureanism. If I had stayed in Kyoto after returning from Harvard in 1959, I would have been more deeply involved in the study of premodem China. But in Tokyo,

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where I have since lived, there has been nothing like the Yabuuti school. Al­ though I return to the study of the premodern period from time to time, I have been increasingly involved in the contemporary social problems that metropoli­ tan tokyo has created. On the other hand, Nathan, teaching in a major institution in the United States, and equipped with the rare combination of a scientific background and a facility in the Chinese language, has occupied a central posi­ tion in the premodern study of Chinese science in the Western world. I have discussed the differences between premodernist and modernist schol­ ars in my recent article "History of East Asian Science: Needs and Opportuni­ ties," Osiris 10 (1995). In China and Japan, the modernists tend to converge with the modernizers, who adopt a certain ideological stance towards history. As the president of the Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, I have tried, perhaps in vain, to bridge the gap between the two groups. I have thought about why these two groups of people have a very differ­ ent historical outlook and what at times appears to be little in common. I was finally hit by the idea that the sharp dividing line between the two groups was created at a time of crisis when East Asian scholars recognized the Western threat posed by the rapid post-Napoleonic progress in military technol­ ogy which manifested itself in the Opium Wars in China (1839-42, 1856--58) and Commodore Perry's dropping anchor in Tokyo Bay in 1853. Historians of science share the problematique of the people of the time they are working in. Thus, those who study premodern East Asia share the rather playful attitude to­ ward the West-the sense of its exoticism-that characterized the subjects of their study, that is, the thinkers of past centuries. Scholars of the premodern era have indulged in intellectual epicureanism, have been fascinated by the curious, and-unlike their colleagues who study the modern period-have been free of a sense of concern over the Western invasion. Historians who deal with the modern period, however, sympathize with local scientists in their drive to catch up with Western science. Their historiography emphasizes the narrowing gap between their countries and the West, and places great importance on scientific and technological progress. The concept of prog­ ress found in their histories is not that of the Condorcetean ideal of the Enlight­ enment but more one of ''progress or perish," or ''progress for survival" in the social-Darwinian sense of crude, nineteenth-century "competitionism." Modern native scientists, as well as their historians, tend to emphasize military technol­ ogy over everything else. It is true that postwar Japanese switched their survival strategy from one based on military technology to a more market-oriented one, but the same ''progress or perish" drive has survived even to this day. Historians of the modern period cannot be disengaged from the intellectual milieu of mod­ ern native scientists, who believe in progress so ardently that their faith can in­ deed be described as "progressism." The problematique of progressism was seriously challenged at the time of the campus crisis in the late 1960s that hit most industrialized countries. Modern science was criticized as the cause of intellectual as well as material pollution.

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This was a time when Western historians of science started to look upon tradi­ tional Chinese science as an "alternative science." While native "modernizers" are still struggling to overcome progressism, Westerners may be able to share the problematique of premodemists much more easily, as they are free from having to engage the local intellectual milieu. Their critical stance, which serves to dis­ tance them both in time and space, should be appreciated. Nathan Sivin's love and curiosity for East Asia has led him to fresh insights on the East, including things-such as the practice of Daoism-which have often been taken for granted in modem China and considered vulgar and not worth paying attention to. But unlike the Orientalists of old, he shares the concerns of historians of contemporary science.

Personal Differences

Nathan Sivin is a critical perfectionist. In all he touches, he exercises meticulous care; in his thinking and writing, he accepts nothing less than what one might call classical rigor. I, on the other hand, am a fuzzy synthesizer of sorts. I would like to be a pathfinder in the hitherto unexplored, more open-ended subject of con­ temporary history, happy to leave room for latecomers to revise and correct. The difference may well be a reflection of the different historical periods in which we work. In dealing with modem subjects, historians are not be able to be perfectionists, as source materials are too numerous to research within the space of one's lifetime. In dealing with the ancient period, however, because of the scarcity of sources, we inevitably have to supplement such materials with conjec­ ture. Yabuuti often said to me that the ancient period is interesting because we can extend our imagination freely. In dealing with medieval times, source mate­ rials and the time spent in research are so well-balanced that we can aspire to be perfectionists and command all source materials available. I can do this only in the limited field of astronomy in Edo Japan, while Nathan is able to cover a wider area of traditional China, in alchemy and medicine. I like to think that it is not the identity but the complementarity of our back­ grounds, interests, and personalities that has provided the foundation upon which the intellectual fellowship and warm friendship between Nathan Sivin and me has been built.

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