This paper focuses on how Zhang Jiebin (1563-1640) connected medicine and divination in new ways as his contribution to the “recover antiquity” (fugu) movement. He made the largely Han-era Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (ca. 1st c. BCE) more accessible for a Ming audience be reclassifying its original 81 chapters into 32 new categories, explaining complex doctrines in vernacular Chinese, and adding verse as well as diagrams. Zhang’s new medico-divination synthesis appears most clearly in the Classified Canon’s appendices Illustrated Wing (tuyi) and Appended Wing (fuyi). The Illustrated Wing includes diagrams of two medical hand mnemonics and an essay explaining their connection to diviners’ hand-based fate-calculation methods. The Appended Wing starts with an essay titled “Meanings of Medical Divination” (Yi yi yi) that develops the deeper significance of the three yi words beyond being homonyms. For example, Zhang quotes Sun Simiao (ca. 581-682): “[If one] does not understand yi ‘divination,’ [then one] cannot be called a tai yi ‘great physician’.” The remainder of the essay details parallels between medicine and divination, arguing that they have the same origin (tongyuan) and similar ends to comprehend patterns within myriad transformations. Zhang’s Classified Canon thus provides an early 17th-century lens into how the two domains of medicine and divination had become combined into a distinct system of medico-divinatory knowledge and practice that went well beyond merely recovering the ancient medical wisdom of the Inner Canon for other late-Ming physicians.

This paper focuses on the Warring States period (c. 453-221 BCE), the critical turning point in Chinese history, when the Central Plains developed from a feudal multi-state political system to a unified empire. In this process, the diviners, people with technical knowledge and skills of prognostication, who enjoyed a relatively high political position in the Shang as well as the Zhou dynastic structure, were politically and intellectually challenged, as manifested in the negative portraits of them in Zuozhuan (the Zuo Tradition) and Guoyu (the Narratives of the States) and attested in bamboo and silk manuscripts excavated in recently decades. In the writings of Benjamin Schwartz, Li Zehou, Yu Ying-shih, et al., often labelled it as the Chinese “Axial Age” (600-200 BCE) or “the Age of Philosophers,” this period was seen as the flowering of the “hundred schools of thoughts,” In this paper, however, based on archaeological materials related to mantic arts and associated manuscripts, I argue that the breakthrough was not “from shamans/diviners to philosophers,” but rather from “old diviners to new diviners, old techniques combined with new techniques,” resulting in the multiplicity of mantic technologies. The old diviners (“shamans”) as historical figures were mythologized into the imperial pantheon and incorporated into the new imperial bureaucratic system. The earlier divination traditions were absorbed into new cosmological schemes. This process of transition ended with Emperor Wu (156-87 BCE) of the Han whose new policy on “Dismissing hundred schools, solely venerating Confucian learning” brought a new era in Chinese imperial history.

Early Chinese astrological devices shi 式/栻, which are usually translated as “cosmographs”, “diviners’ boards”, or more recently as “diviners’ mantic astrolabes” (Pankenier 2013) or simply “cosmic models” (Cullen 2017), are known from the 2nd century BC. These portable instruments are made of lacquered wood and consist of a static square plate representing the Earth, and a rotating disc placed on top of it representing the Heavens. They are considered to be widely used for hemerological divination (Cullen 2017, p. 202). There are scarce references in the early Chinese textual tradition to how these instruments were used, e.g. in the “Grand Scribe’s Records” (Shiji 史記 by Sima Qian 司馬遷, ca 145–87 BC).
Development of printing in late imperial China favoured broad diffusion of texts for commoners brought to life schematic cosmographic maps, which structure strikingly resembles shi, with the difference that in these maps the square Earth is placed in the centre of the round Heavens. These maps are found in the late Ming and Qing Household Encyclopaedia and Almanacs of Auspicious Images. These maps were then transmitted to Korea and apparently served as one of inspirations of the so-called circular world maps found in popular Korean atlases known from the late Joseon Korea.
I suggest that these maps, which similarly to the l shi, existed in handy portable form, played a role of cosmographic talismans and propose to trace the way from the early rotating astrological devices to the talismanic cosmograph-like maps.