Ancient experimentology: psi abilities in the science of the human body

By Prof. Si-Chen Lee

1. Meeting Chen Tao-Qiu, who collected ancient records of psi abilities

In October 1997 Beijing hosted the fourth Chinese Human Body Science Conference. More than a hundred researchers working on psi abilities — from mainland China, Japan and Taiwan — gathered at the Beijing Library for three days of sessions on the latest findings. October in Beijing already cuts to the bone, with temperatures close to zero Celsius, yet inside the hall the mood ran high and hot, everyone waiting for the next result, the next surprise. Each of us carried a sense of standing at the edge of science, of leading humanity into the mysteries of the universe inside the body.

At the conference a middle-aged man of medium build and kindly face came over with a stack of articles, hoping I would read them and, if it were at all possible, help get them published in Taiwan. He introduced himself as Chen Tao-Qiu, an electronic engineer from Shanghai. The moment I heard he had trained in electronic engineering I warmed to him, since electrical engineering is my own field — and the journey from electronics to human body science alone must have made for a good story. Leafing through the pages, I found a collection and ordering of classical Chinese sources, with cases of remote sensing, remarkable effects of intention, premonition and foreknowledge, extraordinary intelligence and much else. He had given the work an intriguing name: ancient experimentology in human body science. That caught my interest, and I listened closely to his presentation. His starting point, it turned out, was an argument from Qian Xuesen:

Historical documents are a record of humanity's past social practice; they can also be read as laboratory notebooks. … Once they have been examined, the coarse sifted from the fine and the false from the true, and put in order, they form a body of learning about ancient experiments — what might be called "ancient experimentology."

One of the central tasks of ancient experimentology is to use modern experimental means to search out and test what old documents may have to say to present-day science. The Treatise on Astronomy in the Book of Han, for instance, carries the earliest record in human history of a supernova, in 185 CE; the oracle bone inscriptions at Yinxu record a solar eclipse in 1302 BCE, from which evidence emerged that the Earth's rotation has slowed over three thousand years.

Chen Tao-Qiu graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing in the 1960s. Even then he was drawn to overseas research using brainwaves to study human potential, and he decided to go into bioelectronics. In the mid-1970s, while assigned to a mountain valley beyond the Great Wall, he seized the opening created by US President Nixon's visit to the mainland — which carried China's traditional systems of acupuncture treatment and acupuncture anesthesia out into the world — and applied for ministerial- and provincial-level research funding. With it he successfully developed a high-sensitivity dual-trace electrophysiological oscilloscope, and later returned to Shanghai to manufacture instruments. He had a deep interest in the historical record of mind-to-mind remote sensing, and after years of gathering and analyzing sources he concluded that "the various kinds of human potential are neither a modern marvel nor something that has to be imported from abroad, because abundant and solid records of them can be found in China's vast body of classical texts. Since they existed in history, they must also exist in the present, and their reality can be confirmed through social investigation and laboratory research, with past and present cross-checked against each other." That is what he meant by ancient experimentology in human body science.

2. Selected Historical Cases of Human Potential

For all sorts of reasons, Mr. Chen's book never did appear in Taiwan. But Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press finally cleared it for review and published it in December 1998 as Selected Historical Cases of Human Potential. From more than a thousand cases drawn from dynastic histories, local gazetteers and miscellanies, he picked 318 and arranged them chronologically across three parts, adding the original passages, sources, notes and modern-language renderings — a treasury for anyone trying to understand psi abilities in earlier times. Two very old examples will show how large a part human potential played in history.

Scroll three of the Annals of Yin in the Records of the Grand Historian tells the remarkable story of how King Wu Ding of Yin found the chancellor who would restore his dynasty. Tang the Successful had overthrown the Xia and founded the Shang; over the two centuries that followed the capital moved several times and the dynasty's fortunes rose and fell. After Pan Geng moved the capital to Yin, his nephew Wu Ding (1271–1213 BCE) succeeded him — later ages know him as King Wu Ding of Yin — and set his mind on how to make Yin flourish again, though he could not find an able minister to assist him. For three years he handed the business of government to others and quietly observed the temper of the country and the condition of the people.

One night Wu Ding dreamed of a sage named Yue, who was none of the civil or military officials at his court. He sent his officers to search the whole country, and in the end Yue was found. He was a slave at the time, building a road at Fu-xian (present-day Pinglu in Shanxi), and he was brought to the capital to see Wu Ding. At first sight the king said, "This is the man from my dream," appointed him chancellor, and the state of Yin was well governed thereafter. Wu Ding bestowed on him the name of the place where he was found, Fu, and he became known as Fu Yue. Seeing a person's face in a dream of this kind belongs to remote viewing, a form of extrasensory perception — and by this account it was human potential that restored a dynasty.

Scroll 105 of the Records of the Grand Historian, the biographies of Bian Que and the Lord of the Granary, describes the famous physician Bian Que (Qin Yue-Ren), roughly a contemporary of Confucius. After taking a secret preparation from Chang Sang-Jun for thirty days, he found he could see people on the other side of a wall. From then on, when Bian Que examined a patient he could perceive where the trouble lay among the five viscera. In other words, Bian Que possessed what Buddhism counts among the six supernormal powers as the divine eye — the clairvoyant strand of extrasensory perception.

So the phrase "Bian Que reborn," used in China for more than two thousand years to praise a physician's skill, rests on his psi abilities. It gives one pause that the four diagnostic methods of Chinese medicine — looking, listening and smelling, asking, and feeling the pulse — place looking first. Beyond ordinary sight, perhaps something of clairvoyance is folded into it.

3. Three cases of psi abilities in earlier times

Here are three more cases from Selected Historical Cases of Human Potential, illustrating telepathy, foreknowledge and spirit descent.

Scroll 443 of the History of Song records the case of Tang Bo-Hu of the Northern Song, who sensed his father's grave illness from a distance. In 1088 CE Tang Bo-Hu's father traveled to Hunan, south of Shanghai, while the brothers stayed in Zhoushan observing mourning for their mother. One night Bo-Hu shook his younger brother Tang Geng awake and said, "I dreamed an urgent letter came from Father. I opened it and there were only two words — 'come quickly.' Can something have happened to him?" They decided to set out for Hunan at once, and went to hire a boat first thing the next morning. The river was in flood and the passenger boats stayed at the bank, unwilling to move, so in the end Tang Bo-Hu boarded a boat himself and paid the boatman handsomely to press him into casting off. Two and a half days later he reached Hunan. His father was indeed gravely ill, and was astonished at his sudden arrival. Bo-Hu arranged a boat to carry him home, and a few days after they arrived his father's illness took him.

Accounts of this kind, of a message carried at a moment of crisis, run right through the histories, and I have heard and read plenty of them myself, from friends and relatives and in the press. Such things come without warning and cannot be repeated, which is why modern scientists do not accept them. Yet those who have lived through one feel a shock that stays with them, and never doubt again that it was real.

Scroll 191 of the Old Book of Tang records that Sun Si-Miao, the famous physician of the Sui and Tang, could see what was to come. He set his heart on study as a boy, and by his twenties had a command of Zhuangzi, Laozi and the hundred schools, along with considerable study of the Buddhist canon. Emperor Wen of Sui, Emperor Taizong and Emperor Gaozong of Tang each issued edicts offering him office, and he declined every time. He drew together the medical theory and clinical experience of the ages before the Tang, gathered prescriptions, acupuncture methods and much else, and wrote the thirty-scroll Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold, which circulated widely. It put the ailments of women and children first, advocated a classification into diseases of the zang and diseases of the fu organs, and gave Chinese medicine a new systematic order. His Alchemical Classic of Sun the Perfected One also contains the first record of the composition of gunpowder — hence his title, the King of Medicines.

He once foretold how the three sons of Sun Chu-Yue, a vice-minister of the Eastern Terrace, would turn out, and events bore him out. He also foretold the office that the young crown prince's steward Lu Qi-Qing would hold fifty years later, and said that his own grandson would serve under him — at a time when that grandson had not yet been born. All of it came to pass. It seems that from Bian Que onward, China's famous physicians needed some measure of human potential to earn a name that would last a thousand years.

Dream Pool Essays, by Shen Kuo of the Northern Song, records an oracle of the goddess Zi Gu that he witnessed himself. The British historian of science Dr. Joseph Needham, in his Science and Civilisation in China, called Shen Kuo and his Dream Pool Essays a fixed point of reference in the history of the natural sciences in China. In one passage he sets down what he observed of a Zi Gu oracle. Zi Gu, the goddess of the privy, appears only from the mid-Tang, and is probably the youngest of China's old deities. From the Tang and Song onward, welcoming the goddess Zi Gu at the Lantern Festival to deliver an oracle became a folk custom. On the strength of what he saw and heard, Shen Kuo held that Zi Gu could be summoned to give an oracle at any time, and that the poetry, prose, calligraphy, painting, medicine and divination she delivered were remarkable — she could even hold her own at chess against a national champion.

What he observed is in fact still current among ordinary people: a jitong, or spirit medium, allows a deity to take possession and speak with people about their troubles, and the fuji planchette writing of Yiguandao does much the same. Even my own finger-reading experiments can exchange messages with spiritual beings and take questions about life, the universe and science. All of it bears out what Chen Tao-Qiu wrote: since they existed in history, they must also exist in the present.