Constructing the “Culture of Bian Que” in Scholarship from China

• In Event: Evidence for the Medical Tradition of Bian Que

Abstract

Scholarship on Bian Que in China often focuses on distinguishing between history, presumed to be secular, and myth and legend, which are presumed to be based on beliefs and notions of the sacred. Thus, for example, records of Bian Que in canonical works such as the Record of the Historian are privileged as history while the images of Bian Que on Han tombs in Shandong province depicting him as half-bird and half-human are considered to be cultural “remnants” of past beliefs in bird totems or immortals. Orally-transmitted legends of Bian Que, which are still circulating today in some areas Hebei with temples and burial sites dedicated to him, are not even the object of serious scholarly inquiry and are relegated to the realm of “culture” and “folk beliefs.” This secular/sacred dyad is part of a network of other constructed dichotomies in the historiography of medicine in China that includes distinctions between elite/folk, truth/belief and medicine/religion.
In this paper I examine three domains of narrative related to Bian Que: the Record of the Historian; Han tomb art in Shandong province; and oral legends of Bian Que collected in Hebei province in recent times. I show that this mosaic of narrative, image, community practice and collective memory can be more productively studied through an analysis of recurring motifs and the “performance of truth.” What is referred to in China as the “culture of Bian Que” supersedes the boundary between secular ideology and religious belief.

Author

• Shelley Denise Ochs, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine