The rise of the Mongolian empire and its fragmentation into four parts provides us with a model for seeing the largest scale movement of peoples, ideas and practices in the pre-modern world. In the diverse political, religious and commercial exchanges of the empires there was a tension between the pragmatic need to develop commensurable knowledge that could facilitate integration of local cultures to the new world order, and the desire to maintain local identity and difference. This tension will be illustrated by a study of the translation projects of the eminent Jewish court physician and minister Rashīd al-Dīn (1247-1318) of Tabriz. Among his prolific works, one appears to be the earliest extant monograph about Chinese medicine from the westerly world, the 519 page 1313 Persian work Tansūqnāmah [The Treasure Book of Ilqān on Chinese Science and Techniques ], preserved in the library of the Aya Sophia in Istanbul and contains substantial tracts of translation. It provides us with a rich resource for analysing the process of interpretation through which remote ‘ethnic’ medical ideas were assimilated to the knowledge of an ever-expanding Islamic universe.
Rashīd al-Dīn is best remembered for having compiled the earliest history of the world to aspire to cultural inclusivity from Adam right through to the complex world of his Ilqanate. Jami al-Tawariq (Compendium of Chronicles: completed 1307 to 1316) was based on Ala'iddin Ata-Malik Juvayni’s (1226 – 1283) Persian Ta' rīkh-i jahān-gushā ( History of the World), a work dedicated to Mongolian history. Much of Jami al-Tawariq‘s interest lies in the information assimilated from Buddhist monks, travellers, scholars and physicians. Two Chinese described in the introduction apparently brought all kinds of historical and other texts, attributed to the work of ‘three monks’. They had come themselves the breadth of the well ridden routes of the empire from China and Tibet, through Dunhuang, Kuche, Khotan, Samarkand to the translation workshop and scriptorium in Tabriz. Rashīd al-Dīn’s centre in the Rab‘-I Rashīdī suburb, with its hospital and medical school became what Allsen claims was one of the ‘leading cultural clearing houses of medieval Eurasia’.
Tansūqnāmah is indeed a treasure trove of interwoven medical cultures through which we might recover something of the nature of Rashīd al-Dīn’s vision and the complexities it entailed as his guests, scholars and scribes attempted to realise it. Beginning in 2010 we are hoping to devote three years to this project and to produce two books, one in Chinese and one in English. Our combined skills as sinologists, a medieval Persianist and a medical historian will facilitate the work on this text which has been relatively unstudied in seven hundred years. As far as it is possible, we will identify all the Chinese sources that he used in compiling his medical work. We will translate the seventy nine page introduction, the twenty page table of contents, and the one hundred page introduction to Chinese medicine. Our analysis will focus on what we can tell about Rashid al Din’s intentions in translating these Chinese medical writings, those areas of Persian culture that allowed some medical practices to seem instantly familiar and others remote and even dangerous. That analysis is greatly enhanced by the second half of Tansūqnāmah which is a transliteration and translation of a a very popular 12th century sphygmology text in rhyme titled Mai jue (脉诀, Chants of the Pulse in Rhyme) attributed to Gao Yangsheng 高阳生. For each chant we have a short contemporary record of the difficulties encountered in interpreting the text.
With his personal multi-faith religious history Rashīd al-Dīn would have had no trouble accommodating other medico- religious realities into his world view. If Mongol imperialism sponsored the first globalisation of medical knowledge under an Islamic administration, as some have suggested, it was surely not just those times and contexts where tolerance of local ways made it expedient. Tolerance implies that they had something unpleasant about them. Mongol appreciation of and assimilation of the ideas, technologies and things local, to the enrichment of their universal project, provided a fertile environment for Rashīd al-Dīn’s eclectic intellectual innovations.
Needham believed that ethnic knowledge would ultimately offer up its treasures to the common universal pool of knowledge and, ‘ like all other ethnic cultural rivers, ..flow..into the sea of modern science’. And so it has. But in the last decades social historians have learnt that there is more to history than the service of scientific progress in its limited sense. Rashīd al-Dīn’s complex religious and intellectual history gave him a head start in appreciating the transitory nature of our knowledge of the human condition. Whether his bricollage of traditions, his late medieval multi-culturalism, had any enduring impact on medical knowledge remains to be seen. His methods, however, are arresting and controversial enough to draw serious attention across many modern academic disciplines.
Vivienne Lo will be appearing on the BBC World News series "Ideas That Changed The World", championing the cause of Qi. For further information, please click here.
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