Cathay Science is an intellectual platform devoted to the exploration of Chinese traditions as comprehensive systems of knowledge and practice. Rather than treating “medicine,” “philosophy,” and “religion” as isolated domains, we approach them as interwoven modalities of life, thought, and cosmology—fields where epistemology, ontology, and praxis converge.
Mission
Our mission is to pursue a rigorous hermeneutics of tradition, where classical texts, embodied practices, and cosmological frameworks are studied as dynamic modes of meaning-production. We are committed to:
- Knowledge Systems – Examining traditional Chinese ways of knowing that integrate the body, the cosmos, and the ethical order.
- Modes of Thought – Interpreting conceptual structures that link metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics as inseparable dimensions of human existence.
- Structures of Practice – Analyzing ritual, healing, and cultivation not as static customs, but as evolving disciplines of self, community, and world.
Vision
We envision Cathay Science as a space where traditions are not reduced to “medicine,” “philosophy,” or “religion” in Western taxonomies, but rather recognized as holistic systems of knowledge and practice. In this vision:
- “Medicine” is understood as an epistemology of life, integrating body, environment, and spirit.
- “Philosophy” becomes a grammar of thought, articulating relations between order, harmony, and transformation.
- “Religion” is read as a technology of transcendence, sustaining collective and individual encounters with the sacred.
Research Orientation
Our work proceeds along three axes:
- Textual – Engaging classical canons as living archives of conceptual innovation.
- Practical – Interpreting embodied disciplines—healing arts, meditative techniques, ritual forms—as laboratories of knowledge.
- Comparative – Situating Chinese traditions within global conversations on ontology, ethics, and cosmology, without subsuming them under external categories.
Intellectual Commitment
We affirm that Chinese traditions represent emergent epistemologies—systems that resist reduction and demand new conceptual vocabularies. Cathay Science therefore stands as a project of abstraction, translation, and critical renewal, where the inherited wisdom of tradition is neither fossilized nor romanticized, but rearticulated for contemporary and global discourse.