Knowing Hands: Chinese Hand-memory Techniques & Handy Knowledge in Situ, Comparison, and Contact

Researcher: Marta Hanson and Stéphanie Homola

Research Project: Knowing Hands: Chinese Hand-memory Techniques & Handy Knowledge in Situ, Comparison, and Contact

Region: China

Fig. 1. Patchwork of hand-memory diagrams from various sources (see references)

While looking at the Stock Exchange online, a Chinese truck-driver runs his thumb on his fingers before buying stocks. In China and Taiwan, hands are similarly used in varied contexts: with hands traditional doctors establish diagnoses, diviners compute horoscopes, and Daoist priests perform rituals. Historically, hand-memory techniques have been attested in China since the 7th c., first in Buddhist ritual practices and then in many fields: medicine, mathematics, music, poetry, law, and divination. However, they have never been connected as a common practice. How did cognitively using hands spread or declined over time in these fields? How widespread are these practices within contemporary East Asia? The Knowing Hands project thus examines in comparative and cross-cultural perspectives unexplored historical and ethnographic material on Chinese hand-based practices. It seeks to understand both how people use their hands to think with by linking 1) hand mnemonics – what we term “epistemic hands” as a form of extended cognition, i.e., how humans use hands to aid cognitive processing; and 2) handy knowledge – “mindful hands” as a form of embodied cognition, i.e., what knowledge is grasped corporeally with hands to do things. For the first time, the project aims to link these two distinct uses of the hand: how do forms of extended cognition observed in epistemic hands inform embodied know-how in mindful hands and vice versa? We examine these practices in three ways: 1. epistemic hands in situ, historically and ethnographically in China (and spread to Japan and Korea); 2. epistemic hands in comparison between East Asian and European traditions and in contrast to mindful hands; and 3. cross-cultural Sino-European contacts about epistemic and mindful hands. Our hypothesis is that Chinese hand mnemonics are an overlooked traditional data-management tool conducive to knowledge acquisition, retention, and dissemination. We aim to build a digital corpus of these techniques in East Asia to facilitate comparisons with scattered scholarship on European examples and contrasts with mindful hands.

References of fig. 1 “Patchwork of hand memory diagrams from various sources”

1. Divination method (lesser liuren) taught by an amateur diviner (Homola, Stéphanie. Field Notebook, Kaifeng 2010).

2. Yixing. 1995. Damo yizhangjin (Bodhidharma’s Treasure of the Palm). Taizhong: Ruicheng shuju, 2.

3. Hand diagram of the eight trigrams (https://kknews.cc/astrology/ba5bm4n.html, accessed November 11, 2021).

4. Orientation method taught by a scout (Homola, Stéphanie. Field Notebook, Taipei 2016).

5. Divination method (lesser liuren) (Doré 1911, fig. 163b, 263).

6. Cover page of Lin, Qiyang (ed.). 2000. Shouzhang jue (Hand-memory techniques). Taizhong: Wenlin.

7. Mental calculation method from the Unified lineage of Mathematical Methods by Cheng Dawei (1533-1606) (Cheng 1990).

8. Divination method (treasure of the palm, yizhangjin) taught by an amateur diviner (Homola, Stéphanie. Field Notebook, Kaifeng 2009).

9. Ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches in the medical treatise Suwen rushi yunqi lun’ao by Liu Wenshu (late-eleventh century), quoted in Hanson 2008, 357.

10. Software for horoscope computation (http://dragon.fengshui-chinese.com/, accessed June 25, 2016).