Working with Nathan Sivin: Four Decades

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 6 Nakayama Shigeru: Working with Nathan Sivin 7 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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