Língshū jīng 靈樞經
The Spirit Pivot Classic by 史崧 (Shǐ Sōng, fl. 1155, 南宋) — collator and de facto compiler of the received recension; 王冰 (Wáng Bīng, fl. 762, 唐) — earlier transmitter under the alternate title Língshū
About the work
The companion classic to the Sùwèn 素問 (KR3e0001), the Língshū jīng contains the more clinically focused half of the Huángdì nèijīng corpus, with concentrated treatment of acupuncture (the nine needles 九鍼, points and channels), needle technique, channel-level pathology, and zàngfǔ physiology. It is structured in eighty-one 篇 distributed over twelve juan in the received Shǐ Sōng (1155) recension. Although the catalog meta — following the prefatorial conceit propagated by Wáng Bīng and Lín Yì — assigns 王冰 as commentator, the SKQS tíyào and Shǐ Sōng’s own 1155 preface make it clear that the received text first surfaces with Shǐ Sōng. Wáng Bīng’s role was to identify the Jiǔ líng 九靈 / Língshū with the lost half of the Nèijīng and to assign it the canonical title; Wáng’s commentary on the Língshū is not transmitted (perhaps never existed) and the textual ancestry is therefore Shǐ-Sōng-onward.
Tiyao
[Sub-classification: 子部十三 醫家類一. Edition: 大理寺卿陸錫熊家藏本.] — drawn from Kyoto Zinbun (entry 0208401), since the local source KR3e0002_000.txt carries only Shǐ Sōng’s 1155 preface (SBCK base edition) and not the WYG 提要.
Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Dúshū zhì says: “Wáng Bīng identified the Língshū with the nine juan that comprise the second half of the eighteen-juan Huángdì nèijīng of the Hàn zhì. Some say that a busybody scribe extracted it from a ‘Cāng Gōng’s discourses’ included in Huángfǔ Mì’s Nèijīng compilation and named it an ancient book. It is uncertain which is correct.” The Yīshǐ 醫史 of Lǐ Lián 李濂 records the Yuán physician Lǚ Fù’s 呂復 Qún jīng gǔ fāng lùn 群經古方論, which says: “Of the Nèijīng Língshū, the Hàn, Suí, and Táng bibliographies make no record. The Suí zhì lists a Zhēn jīng 鍼經 in nine juan; the Táng zhì lists a Língbǎo zhù Huángdì jiǔ líng jīng 靈寶註黃帝九靈經 in twelve juan, and that is all. Some say Wáng Bīng renamed the Jiǔ líng as Língshū; others say the Jiǔ líng was particularly detailed on acupuncture, hence Huángfǔ Mì named it the Zhēn jīng. But if it were one work under two names, the Táng zhì would not list a Zhēn jīng in twelve juan separately. Hence the Língshū is not as old as the Sùwèn — Sòng and Yuán scholars already said so.”
The recent Háng Shìjùn’s 杭世駿 Dào gǔ táng jí 道古堂集 has a “Postface to the Língshū jīng” that says: “The Hàn yìwén zhì lists Huángdì nèijīng in eighteen 篇; Huángfǔ Mì made these up by joining a Zhēn jīng in nine juan and a Sùwèn in nine juan. The Suí jīngjí zhì lists a Zhēn jīng in nine juan and a Huángdì jiǔ líng in twelve juan. So the Jiǔ líng is the Jiǔ líng and the Zhēn jīng is the Zhēn jīng; they cannot be combined. On what basis Wáng Bīng renamed the Jiǔ líng as Língshū is unclear. I observe that its phrasing is shallow and brief, unlike the language of the Sùwèn, and seems instead to filch from the Sùwèn and elaborate. That it is a forgery foisted on Wáng Bīng is recognizable. After him no one transmitted the book. Then in the Sòng Shàoxīng period (1131–1162) Shǐ Sōng of Jǐnguān 錦官 said that he had a family-held copy in nine juan, and besides the formal report he had submitted to the relevant office, he was instructed by the prefectural commissioner to forward it through the Transport Commissioner for the appointment of an officer to verify it, and to deposit it in the Imperial Library and Directorate of Education. So this book first emerged at the Sòng’s middle period and was not subjected to the collation of Gāo Bǎohéng, Lín Yì and the others. Among its chapters, the ‘Twelve Channel-Waters’ (十二經水) refers to a list of names that did not exist in Huángdì’s day; Wáng Bīng made it up out of his own observations and conjecture.” Háng’s evidence is especially clear.
Yet Lǐ Gǎo 李杲 (Dōngyuán), who studied medical theory with great care, had Luó Tiānyì 羅天益 compose the Lèijīng 類經 drawing equally on Sùwèn and Língshū, and Lǚ Fù too commended the practice of reading the two together to elucidate each by the other. The book may be a forgery, but its statements are stitched together from old texts and have a substratum of authentic source-material — like the spurious “old-text” Shàngshū of Méi Yí 梅頤, an assemblage of lost passages from cited sources, internally inconsistent and obviously invented, but preserving by collection a great deal of pre-classical didactic material that would otherwise have been lost. So the work cannot be dismissed.
The present text has Shǐ Sōng’s preface dated Shàoxīng yǐhài (1155), saying his old copy was in nine juan and eighty-one 篇 with phonetic glosses appended at the end of each juan. The table of contents is headed: “Re-edited and proofread by Áo Fēng Xióng Zōnglì 鼇峯熊宗立”; at the end it notes: “originally in twenty-four juan, now combined into twelve juan.” So this is in fact Xióng’s reprint, in which the juan-count was halved. Lǚ Fù’s claim that Shǐ Sōng combined the work into twelve juan to restore its original form probably mistakes Xióng’s recension for Shǐ’s.
Abstract
The Língshū is the more textually fragile half of the Nèijīng corpus. The eighteen-篇 Huángdì nèijīng of the Hàn zhì certainly included a roughly-equivalent body of acupuncture and channel material — the Zhēn jīng 鍼經 listed in the Suí zhì and Huángfǔ Mì’s Jiǎyǐ jīng preface attest to its independent transmission — but the specific ancestor of the received Língshū is uncertain. Wáng Bīng (in the preface to his Sùwèn edition, 762) is the first to use the title Língshū and to identify it with the Jiǔ líng known to the Suí and Táng bibliographies; whether the work circulating under that title in his day is identical with the text Shǐ Sōng put into circulation in 1155 is doubtful. The Shǐ Sōng recension was never collated by Lín Yì’s bureau (it surfaced two generations after the bureau closed) and is therefore textually less stable than the Sùwèn. The Yuán scholar Lǚ Fù 呂復 already noted that the Língshū’s style is “shallow and brief” compared to the Sùwèn; the eighteenth-century scholar Háng Shìjùn 杭世駿 went further and called it a forgery. The SKQS tíyào — represented in this entry — accepts the substance of Háng’s critique but defends the work’s continued use on the grounds that it nonetheless transmits genuine pre-Sòng material in stitched-together form.
The composition window is therefore set at 1155, the date of Shǐ Sōng’s preface — the date at which the received recension comes into existence. Pre-Shǐ-Sōng strata are real but cannot be reconstructed independently of the 1155 text. Some of the chapter divisions and titles are ancient; some, like the “Twelve Channel-Waters” (十二經水), name post-Hàn administrative geography and cannot have been part of any Hàn-era recension. The catalog meta retains 王冰 in the persons list because his name appears on the transmitted title page; the prose makes clear that he was not the actual collator of the received text.
The Língshū and Sùwèn are usually printed and studied together, and the SòngJīnYuán medical revolution drew on both in roughly equal measure (Liú Wánsù, Zhāng Yuánsù, Lǐ Gǎo, Zhū Zhènhēng). The Daoist Canon recension is catalogued separately as KR5d0042 (Huángdì sùwèn Língshū jí zhù 黃帝素問靈樞集註).
Translations and research
- Paul U. Unschuld, Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu: The Ancient Classic on Needle Therapy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. The standard scholarly English translation, with extensive philological apparatus.
- Wú Lìán-cháng 吳連勝 and Wú Qí 吳奇, The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine, Beijing: China Science and Technology Press, 1997 (bilingual; popular but not critical).
- Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Língshū jīng yánjiū 靈樞經研究, Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1990; revised as Língshū jīng kǎozhèng yǔ shìjiě 靈樞經考證與釋解, Beijing, 2002. The most thorough Chinese textual study, including reconstruction of the pre-Sòng strata.
- Catherine Despeux and Élisabeth Hsu (eds.), Médecine, religion et société dans la Chine médiévale, Paris: Collège de France / Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2010, 3 vols. (esp. essays by Despeux on the formation of the medical canon).
- Yamada Keiji 山田慶兒, Chūgoku igaku no kigen 中國醫學の起源, Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1999. Foundational study of the formation of the Nèijīng corpus, including the Língshū’s transmissional history.
Other points of interest
The local Kanripo digitization is the SBCK photographic facsimile, which preserves Shǐ Sōng’s 1155 preface — see KR3e0002_000.txt. The catalog meta lists only WYG, but the digitized text is the SBCK; the WYG 提要 is therefore taken from Kyoto Zinbun. The SBCK base print is the Míng Xióng Zōnglì 熊宗立 reprint, which combined Shǐ Sōng’s twenty-four-juan format into twelve, as the SKQS tíyào notes.
The textual relation of the received Língshū to the much older Mǎwángduī silk-text Yīnyáng shíyī mài jiǔ jīng 陰陽十一脈灸經 (early 2nd c. BCE) is one of the central problems of early medical history: the silk text knows eleven channels, the Língshū twelve, and the additional channel — the Hand Reverting Yīn (手厥陰) — must therefore have been added between the second century BCE and the consolidation of the Língshū’s “Channels” (經脈) chapter, presumably in the late Western or Eastern Hàn.