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合陰陽

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Text ID
KR2p0015
Date
-300–-168
Dynasty
西漢

Hé yīnyáng 合陰陽

Joining Yin and Yang

(anonymous; excavated silk manuscript, no attributable author)

About the work

Hé yīnyáng is one of the seven so-called “bedchamber arts” (fángzhōng 房中) silk manuscripts recovered from Mǎwángduī tomb 3 (馬王堆三號漢墓) at Chángshā, sealed in 168 BCE and excavated by the Húnán Provincial Museum in 1973–74. It is a short anonymous treatise on heterosexual technique framed within an early-Hàn medical-cosmological idiom, in which intercourse is read as a regulated procedure for circulating qì 氣 between male and female bodies; the goal is mutual nourishment, longevity, and the production of “spirit illumination” (shénmíng 神明). The text moves from a programmatic opening on the “Way of Joining Yin and Yang” through a fixed catalogue of stages — the Ten Movements (shídòng 十動), Ten Postures (shíshì 十勢, mostly named after animals: tiger, cicada, inchworm, etc.), Ten Refinements (shíxiū 十脩), Eight Movements (bādòng 八動, signs of female response), and Ten Signs of Climax (shíyǐ zhī zhēng 十已之徵) — to a closing description of the “great climax” (dàzú 大卒). The Tiānxià zhìdào tán 天下至道談, also from M3, transmits much of the same vocabulary, suggesting that Hé yīnyáng is one fixed teaching unit within a larger oral-pedagogical complex on bedchamber arts, rather than the work of a single author.

Abstract

The manuscript is part of the second of the two silk-text caches recovered from Mǎwángduī M3 — the medical-technical group, distinct from the philosophical-historical group containing the Lǎozǐ 老子 silk versions, the Yìjīng 易經 and its commentaries, and the Zhànguó zòngheng jiā shū 戰國縱橫家書. The tomb was sealed in 168 BCE upon the burial of an unnamed son of Lì Cāng 利蒼, marquis of Dài 軑; the manuscripts themselves predate the tomb seal and are generally dated to the late Warring States or very early Western Hàn, on palaeographic grounds and on the explicit dating of related material. The original silk had broken into fragments in antiquity; the title Hé yīnyáng was assigned by the Mǎwángduī manuscript collation group on the basis of the opening words fán jiāng hé yīnyáng zhī fāng 凡將合陰陽之方 (“for any procedure of joining yin and yang”), since the manuscript carries no transmitted title.

The text is anonymous and shows no attribution to any named master; bibliographic catalogs of the Hàn shū yìwén zhì 漢書·藝文志 list eight fángzhōng titles (Róngchéng yīn dào 容成陰道, WūChéng zǐ yīn dào 務成子陰道, etc.) under the fāngjì lüè 方技略, all lost; whether Hé yīnyáng corresponds to any of these is unverifiable, and the safer position is that the M3 cache preserves an otherwise lost branch of the early Chinese medical canon. The genre falls under the fángzhōng category of the Hàn zhì fourfold fāngjì taxonomy (yījīng 醫經, jīngfāng 經方, fángzhōng 房中, shénxiān 神僊). Conceptually the work is contiguous with the contemporary yǎngshēng 養生 literature: it shares with the Shíwèn 十問 (also from M3) and with the much later Sùnǚ jīng 素女經 a model of intercourse as a controlled exchange of vital substances, and it places ejaculation control (bù xiè 不瀉) and timing (the famous progression “ten, twenty, thirty… one hundred”) at the centre of the regimen. The closing claim that the practitioner “may live as long as Heaven and Earth” (jiǔshì ér yǔ tiāndì móu cún 久視而與天地牟存) signals a HuángLǎo affiliation already noted by Hàrper.

The Kanripo source reproduces the CHANT (Hànjí diànzǐ wénxiàn 漢籍電子文獻) digital reconstruction, which is itself based on the 1985 Wénwù chūbǎnshè reconstruction by the 馬王堆漢墓帛書整理小組. The 2014 Chángshā Mǎwángduī Hànmù jiǎnbó jíchéng 長沙馬王堆漢墓簡帛集成 (chief editor Qiú Xīguī 裘錫圭, 7 vols., Zhōnghuá shūjú) is now the standard photographic and palaeographic edition and has corrected several readings in the older reconstruction; for serious citation that edition should be preferred to the version reproduced here.

Translations and research

  • Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts, Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series 2, London / New York: Kegan Paul International, 1998. The standard English critical edition: introduction, full annotated translation of Hé yīnyáng (Harper labels it MSVII.B), philological apparatus.
  • Lǐ Líng 李零 and Keith McMahon, “The Contents and Terminology of the Mawangdui Texts on the Arts of the Bedchamber”, Early China 17 (1992): 145–185. Detailed analysis of vocabulary and structure across the M3 fángzhōng corpus.
  • 馬王堆漢墓帛書整理小組 ed., 《馬王堆漢墓帛書〔肆〕》, Wénwù chūbǎnshè 文物出版社, 1985 — the original published reconstruction of the medical silks, including Hé yīnyáng.
  • Qiú Xīguī 裘錫圭 (chief ed.), 《長沙馬王堆漢墓簡帛集成》, 7 vols., Zhōnghuá shūjú 中華書局, 2014. The current standard photographic and critical edition; volumes 5–6 contain the medical-bedchamber material.
  • Robin D. S. Yates, “Body, Space, Time and Bureaucracy: Boundary Creation and Control Mechanisms in Early China”, in Boundaries in China, ed. John Hay, Reaktion, 1994 — situates the fángzhōng texts within early Chinese discourse on bodily boundaries.
  • Vivienne Lo, “The Influence of Yangsheng Culture on Early Chinese Medical Theory”, PhD diss., SOAS, 1998; subsequent essays in Asia Major and Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge UP, 2001).
  • 周一謀, 《馬王堆漢墓帛書四種》注釋, 中華書局, 1988. Annotated Chinese edition of four medical silks including Hé yīnyáng.

Other points of interest

The text is the locus classicus for the so-called “ten/twenty/thirty/… hundred” ejaculation-restraint scheme that was reused, adapted, and increasingly moralised in the Six-Dynasties Sùnǚ jīng 素女經 / Yùfáng zhǐyào 玉房指要 tradition, and from there in the medieval Daoist Huángtíng jīng 黃庭經 internal-alchemy literature; Hé yīnyáng preserves the technique in a stripped-down medical register, before its religious-alchemical reformulation. The closely parallel Tiānxià zhìdào tán 天下至道談 (also M3) overlaps significantly in the catalogues of the Ten Movements and Eight Movements, which has supported Lǐ Líng’s argument that the two are companion redactions of a single oral tradition rather than independent works.

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