Almost all cultures recognize that placing bodies in certain cultural programs is a way of achieving religious and spiritual goals (xiuxing 修行),cultivating moral and emotional virtue (xiuyang 修養)，or simply transposing ideas into bodily practices (shijian 實 踐).Fasting, meditation, vegetarianism, and qigong come readily to mind when “bodily cultivation” is discussed. But rather than highlight these obvious examples, which are habitually associated with Eastern cultures, this special issue will examine culturally driven bodily practices, including proper ways to walk, sit, sense, and gesture, which may appear trivial in their repetitions, but are often endowed with rich cultural meanings and considered key in the learning and cultivation of values and virtues. Those practices generally perceived as art forms (e.g., tea ceremonies, bonsai, music performances, calligraphy, sphygmology) at first glance may not seem to have direct ties to the physical body because they stress as a primary goal the cultivation of emotional poise and temperament (yiqingyangxing 怡情養性).In these cases, bodily cultivation is considered a channel for learning, manifesting, developing, or shaping cultural concepts and ideals. In this issue, the authors define bodily cultivation in a broader sense, so that cultural learning encompasses exercise, nurturance, and physical training as special modes of concept construction.
The authors do not focus on mind-body dualism/interaction, a popular analytical topic for over two decades, or on contrasts between East and West, differences that have probably been over-exaggerated, especially in terms of bodily cultivation. Instead, we direct our attention to how diverse forms of bodily cultivation have been adopted for purposes of internalizing cultural ideas, morality, and knowledge, whether they involve intentional designs or unintentional programs, professional or amateur training, spiritual or secular in orientation, or mundane or hedonistic/ascetic principles. Our goal is to explore how the body plays a part in the processes of cultural learning.