Feel the Difference: The Dantian, Cultural Difference, and Sensory Remapping

Abstract

This work engages with a longstanding problem of East-West cultural difference: the different conceptions of anatomy and biology between modern scientific/‘Western’ medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. To do so, the work focuses on only one example of difference: the Chinese notion of the dantian (丹田). This is not present in Western anatomy or biology. So, the question arises as to its objective existence: If Western science cannot detect it, what does it mean to say that it exists? Must a Westerner who has no prior exposure to such a notion believe in the dantian? What is the status of this belief? Many approaches to such questions turn to debates in phenomenology, epistemology, translation and religious studies. However, this work instead proposes a more direct way to proceed. It proposes that such differences arise and can helpfully be understood in terms of the specific sensory maps and fields of the body that are developed by specific exercises, disciplines, or training regimes (what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls anthropotechnic practices).

Keywords:

• Dantian
• Taijiquan
• Qigong
• cultural difference
• discourse
• post-structuralism

Acknowledgement

Sincere thanks to Daniel Mroz, Douglas Wile, Adam Frank, and the two anonymous reviewers of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Phillip Beach, ‘Decoding the Chinese Meridial Map’, in Muscles and Meridians (United Kingdom: Elsevier Health Sciences, 2010), 154.

2 Beach, 154.

3 On the differend (a book which does not actually deal with East-West cultural difference, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). For an effective entry-level discussion of what we might call the differend between Western and Chinese medicine, see Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Chichester: Capstone, 2006).

4 As David Palmer explains: ‘It’s possible to be engaging in a pragmatic ontology without knowing about an associated conceptual ontology, and it’s possible to discourse on a conceptual ontology without engaging it in a pragmatic way. For example, to practice taijiquan is to transform one’s body into an expression and experience of Chinese cosmology. However, it is not necessary to have any intellectual knowledge of this cosmology to do so. Conversely, Daoist cosmology is rooted in a specific experience of the body. Many people have intellectual knowledge of Daoist philosophy, without having ever practiced or experienced it in an embodied manner’. David A. Palmer, ‘Isomorphism, Syncretism, and Poly-Ontological Dynamics: The Implications of Chinese Religion for Covenantal Pluralism’, in The Routledge Handbook of Religious Literacy, Pluralism, and Global Engagement, 1st ed., vol. 1 (Routledge, 2022), 124, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003036555-11. With thanks to Daniel Mroz who alerted me to this work.

5 On the cross-cultural concept of the ‘contact zone’, see Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, no. 91 (1991): 33–40.

6 See: Alexandra Ryan, ‘Globalisation and the “Internal Alchemy” in Chinese Martial Arts: The Transmission of Taijiquan to Britain’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 2, no. 4 (2008): 525–43, https://doi.org/10.1215/s12280-009-9073-x; Adam Frank, Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity Through Martial Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West, 2016.

7 The notions of wellbeing, wellness and mindfulness are presented as unquestionably positive in and of themselves, although there are a growing number of connections being made between certain wellness beliefs and the slide into the ideology of conspiracy theories. See, for example: Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat (New York: Public Affairs, 2023); Sirin Kale, ‘Chakras, Crystals and Conspiracy Theories: How the Wellness Industry Turned Its Back on Covid Science’, The Guardian, November 11, 2021, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/11/injecting-poison-will-never-make-you-healthy-how-the-wellness-industry-turned-its-back-on-covid-science; Richard Sprenger et al., ‘Has Wellness Become a Gateway to Conspiracy? A Sceptic’s Guide to the Industry – Video’, The Guardian, November 21, 2022, sec. Life and style, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/video/2022/nov/21/has-wellness-become-a-gateway-to-conspiracy-a-sceptics-guide-to-the-industry; Eva Wiseman, ‘The Dark Side of Wellness: The Overlap between Spiritual Thinking and Far-Right Conspiracies’, The Observer, October 17, 2021, sec. Life and style, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/17/eva-wiseman-conspirituality-the-dark-side-of-wellness-how-it-all-got-so-toxic.

8 A huge body of research has sprung up around the theme of mindfulness, its practices, effects, and relationship to a range of ideologies. See, for example: Steven Stanley, ‘Mindfulness’ (Springer, 2014), http://orca.cf.ac.uk/88005/.

9 Peter Doran, ‘Mindfulness Is Just Buddhism Sold to You by Neoliberals | The Independent | The Independent’, The Independent, February 25, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthy-living/mindfulness-sells-buddhist-meditation-teachings-neoliberalism-attention-economy-a8225676.html; Catherine Wikholm and Miguel Farias, ‘Mindfulness Has Lost Its Buddhist Roots, and It May Not Be Doing You Good’, The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/mindfulness-has-lost-its-buddhist-roots-and-it-may-not-be-doing-you-good-42526 (accessed November 15, 2016).

10 Headspace has even strategically chosen to give those who work in many universities around the world free access to its features, on the condition that people who use it become participants in a study that seeks to elaborate the benefits of Headspace. The rhetorical and semiotic power of such a study for the branding and marketing of the app is clear.

11 On which, see: David A. Palmer and Elijah Siegler, Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Thomas J. Csordas, ‘Introduction: Modalities of Transnational Transcendence’, in Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 1–30.

12 See: Paul Bowman, Izzati Aziz, and Xiujie Ma, ‘Translating Tai Chi and Transforming Qigong in British Media Culture’, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 9, no. 2 (2023): 173–90, https://doi.org/10.1386/eapc_00106_1.

13 ‘Chinese Doctor in Hazmat Suit Teaches Coronavirus Patients Tai Chi to Help Them Exercise | Daily Mail Online’, 02 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8003703/Doctor-hazmat-suit-teaches-coronavirus-patients-Tai-Chi-help-exercise-quarantine.html.

14 Unfortunately, therefore, because of such hopes in the preventative, healing and restorative powers of ‘natural’ approaches such as ‘positive thinking’ and tapping into the wisdom of holistic ancient traditions, outlooks and practices of mindfulness, wellbeing and ‘alternative’ health regimes were also pulled into the orbit of ‘anti-vax’ and ‘anti-Big Pharma’ discourses – or the novel hybrid of Western spirituality and conspiracy theory, or what is now termed ‘conspirituality’. Charlotte Ward and David Voas, ‘The Emergence of Conspirituality’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 26, no. 1 (2011): 103–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846; Beres, Remski, and Walker, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat; Wiseman, ‘The Dark Side of Wellness’.

15 The overwhelmingly popular media representation of taiji in the UK context is detailed in Paul Bowman, The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular Culture Between Asia and America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). See also Bowman, Aziz, and Ma, ‘Translating Tai Chi and Transforming Qigong in British Media Culture’.

16 In my own studies, my own instructors tended to introduce particular terms – such as qi, jin or shen – or locations of the body – such as the dantian, or the yongquan meridian – in isolation, one at a time, and only when pertinent to a certain stage of training.

17 Daniel Mroz disagrees with me on this point, arguing that in certain contexts, it is only said to take 100 days of 40-minute daily practice to begin to feel qi gan. However, I would propose that it takes some considerable time to be able to get anywhere close to anything like 100 consecutive days of 40-minute qigong practice. Ultimately, though, perhaps this difference or disagreement boils down to the specificities of different syllabi. In the school I studied in, one progressed through different stages of the taiji form (square, round, continuous, slow, high/low, light), and it would not be until training reached ‘slow’ (something that took many months or even years) before the ‘feelings’ that slowness training engendered might be connected directly with those of qigong.

18 ‘Internal’ practices such as taiji and qigong actually identify three dantians, each located at a different point of the body (head, chest and lower-belly). But they tend to make most regular reference to what is called the lower dantian. (The distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ martial arts is often problematic. However, it is useful in this discussion to the extent that practices such as taiji are characterised by preoccupations with such ‘internal’ entities as qi and the dantian.)

19 In this practice, the very bottom of the belly is contracted on the inhale, in a way that is used to ‘pull’ air into the body. On the exhale, muscles slightly higher up the belly are used to gently massage the air out.

20 I was studying in what was then called The Yongquan Tai Chi Chuan Association, whose name was subsequently changed to The Yongquan Martial Arts Association, to reflect the wider range of styles practiced. My instructor was Graham Barlow. I became a certified instructor in 2006, but a catastrophic ankle injury in 2009 ultimately stymied my progress thereafter.

21 See, for example, Peter Skafish, ‘Equivocations of the Body and Cosmic Arts: An Experiment in Polyrealism’, Angelaki : Journal of Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 4 (2020): 135–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790845.

22 Bruce Lee, ‘Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate’, Black Belt Magazine, 1971.

23 On which, see Douglas Wile, Lost T’ai Chi Classics of the Late Ch’ing Dynasty (New York: State University of New York, 1996).

24 There is a spectrum of other possible reasons for wanting to train in this way and to look for or learn these things: taiji and qigong are associated with various forms of health and wellbeing practices, therapeutic and complementary medicine, meditation and mindfulness, each of which can be more or less connected with or divorced from ‘Eastern’ beliefs in phenomena such as the dantian, qi, and so on.

25 CF stands for ‘contractile field’. This is Beach’s term for his theory of human movement anatomy: ‘The CF model explores the innate patterning found in the human neuromuscular system. Based on an analysis of vertebrate movement, I have identified the minimum number of interactive CFs needed for primary human movement patterns’. Beach, ‘Decoding the Chinese Meridial Map’, 2.

26 Beach, 182–83.

27 Ibid., 5.

28 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Penguin, 2013), 33.

29 David Hall, ‘Modern China and the Postmodern West’, in Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 50–70. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham and London: Duke, 2003).

30 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970).

31 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

32 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977).

33 Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, European Perspectives Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

34 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.

35 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York; London: Routledge, 1990).

36 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Polity, 2013).

37 Mroz is currently working on a monograph for Cardiff University Press which covers this in detail. I have been able to see early drafts of his chapters. I am indebted to his thinking in what follows, and in terms of the general contours of my argument throughout this work. See also his podcast episode for The Martial Arts Studies podcast, of 20^th November 2023. This episode is available as a video on The Martial Arts Studies YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rrbQsdTxD4&list=PLywv_DP-EcGaB2h_dPop3ozM8r2MzjSWX&index=164&t=193s. It is also available as an audio podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3AexQC7n8BE4PkvwK6YfMD?si=O3wE-fQqRZyG_kjLzivW6g

38 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149. My emphasis.

39 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

40 Phillip Beach, Muscles and Meridians: The Manipulation of Shape, 1st ed. (London: Elsevier Health Sciences, 2010), 5, 59, https://doi.org/10.1016/C2009-0-38569-4.

41 Beach, 155–83.

42 Arjana, Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi.

43 See: Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (Verso, 1986), ‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’; Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Weber, Points - : Interviews, 1974-1994 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’.

44 Palmer and Siegler, Dream Trippers, 97.

45 Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’, in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 1–10; Heath and Potter, The Rebel Sell.

46 I borrow this image directly from Frank, Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man.

47 Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Bowman

Paul BOWMAN is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. Author of over a dozen books, his latest monograph is The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular Culture Between Asia and America (Oxford University Press).