ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the popular medicinal and cultural practices of Yangsheng 养生 (Nourishing Life). The concept dates in name from the middle of the first millennium BCE but arrives at a form recognisable to today’s practitioners by around the second century CE. At its core are a group of beliefs and practices informed by the wider aspects of Chinese culture in relation to philosophy, religion and medicine that regulate a plan, or plans, for living, centred on dietetics, exercise and breath control, and sexology. The concept of ‘collusion’ by which actors’ confabulation of shared beliefs creates a meaning of worth to a practice, sometimes enhancing its practical merits or sometimes simply creating an appreciable value where little or no intrinsic worth can be found in the exercise beyond that of those shared beliefs in its benefits, is introduced. The chapter concludes by exploring the way the concept has been appropriated and melded into the twentieth and twenty-first-century political project of Guoxue 国学 (National Studies).
