The Question He Declined to Settle

The argument that runs underneath this whole field is whether any of it counts as science, and Ho Peng Yoke is cited on both sides of it, which is a sign that he answered carefully. His position was that the categories being applied are modern and Western, and that in their own setting calendar making, astronomy, astrology, medicine and alchemy were not separate enterprises to be sorted into the respectable and the discarded. The same office computed the eclipse and interpreted the omen. The same texts give the mathematics and the meaning. Splitting them retrospectively tells you about the person doing the splitting.

That approach is why he is useful to a reference work rather than only to a specialist. Systems such as Zi Wei Dou Shu, the star chart method that assigns notional stars to twelve palaces derived from a birth time, are served in English mainly by books written to teach the practice, which take the framework as given and do not ask where it came from or when. A historian who describes what practitioners did, in what period, with which texts, and declines to certify or dismiss it, produces material an atlas can use in either direction. The atlas cites him for the history and leaves the verdict where he left it.