Nánjīng běnyì 難經本義
The Original Meaning of the Classic of Difficulties by 秦越人 (Qín Yuèrén / Biǎn Què 扁鵲, 周, attributed) — original text; 滑壽 (Huá Shòu, zì Bórén, hào Yīngníng shēng, late 元 to early 明) — commentator and de facto compiler of the received eighty-one-nán recension
About the work
The Nánjīng běnyì is the standard received recension of the Nán jīng 難經 — the eighty-one-chapter Warring-States to early-Hàn medical text setting out points of difficulty (難) in the Huángdì nèijīng. Huá Shòu’s edition, completed at Yín xiàn 鄞縣 in the late Yuán (張翥 preface dated 1364, Liú Rénběn 劉仁本 preface 1366), supplied a fresh annotation drawing on eleven prior commentaries — chief among them Lǚ Guǎng 呂廣 (Wú), Yáng Xuáncāo 楊玄操 (Táng), Dīng Dérún 丁德用 (Sòng), Yú Shù 虞庶 (Sòng), Yáng Kāngdí 楊康迪 (Sòng) — and combined them with Huá’s own philological judgements. The work prefaces three apparatus chapters, not counted in the two-juan main text: a Huìkǎo 彙考 (“Bibliographic Examination”) on the title and transmission of the Nán jīng; a Quēwù zǒnglèi 闕誤總類 (“Catalogue of Lacunae and Errata”) recording missing and corrupt passages with their corrections; and a Túshuō 圖說 (“Illustrated Explanations”) with diagrams of the channel system. The SKQS editors chose this as the standard Nán jīng of the canon; from the Yuán onward it is the immediate ancestor of all printed editions of the Nán jīng and remains the standard reference today.
Tiyao
Nánjīng běnyì, two juan. (Imperially-Compiled SKQS edition, 子部五 醫家類.) Edition: 兩淮鹽政採進本.
By Huá Shòu of the Yuán. Shòu, zì Bórén, is described in the Míngshǐ Fāngjì biography as a man of Xǔzhōu 許州 who took up residence in Yín xiàn 鄞縣. According to Zhū Yòu’s 朱右 Yīngníng shēng zhuàn 攖寧生傳, his family were great Xǔzhōu Xiāngchéng clansmen; in the early Yuán his grandfather served as an official in the South, and the family migrated from Xǔ to Yízhēn 儀真, where Shòu was born. The biography continues: “in Huáinán he was ‘Huá Shòu’, in Wú he was ‘Bórén shì’, in YínYuè he was ‘Yīngníng shēng’.” So Xǔ was the ancestral seat, Yín his lodging, and Yízhēn his actual birthplace. He died in the Míng Hóngwǔ reign and is therefore listed in the Míng shǐ Fāngjì.
Dài Liáng’s 戴良 Jiǔ líng shānfáng jí 九靈山房集 has a poem “Recalling Huá Yīngníng” (懷滑攖寧) that runs: “Sea sun, autumn-gray, my temples already streaked with silk — / so long now, drifting in foreign places. / Wishing to be the unspendable timber and remain on the official road, / I lean instead on Chángsāng’s tale of upper-pool water. / What man recognizes the writings of the wanderer from Shǔ? / The world only knows the medicines that Mister Hán sells. / All who tread this road are heart-stricken alike — / fitting, then, that we should sing the Yellow Millet together.” So Shòu was indeed a holdover loyalist, hiding in medicine to escape the world.
The book has a preface by Zhāng Zhù 張翥 saying that Shòu’s family lived close to Dōngyuán 東垣 [the home of Lǐ Gǎo 李杲] and that he received Lǐ Gǎo’s learning early on, while the Yīngníng shēng zhuàn says he studied medicine with Wáng Jūzhōng 王居中 of Jīngkǒu and acupuncture with Gāo Dòngyáng 高洞陽 of Dōngpíng. But Lǐ Gǎo’s footsteps never reached Jiāngnán, and his lifedates do not coincide with Shòu’s; what Zhāng Zhù says is probably an embroidery of the fact that Xǔ is close to Dōngyuán.
The eighty-one Nán of the Nán jīng are not recorded in the Hàn yìwén zhì; the Suí and Táng bibliographies are the first to list a Nán jīng in two juan by Qín Yuèrén, on which the Wú Imperial Physician Lǚ Guǎng wrote a commentary. The text must therefore have been current before the Three Kingdoms. Lǚ’s book is no longer transmitted, and one cannot tell whether this present recension is identical with it. But Zhāng Shǒujié’s 張守節 sub-commentary on the “Biǎn Què liè zhuàn” 扁鵲列傳 in the Shǐ jì (Táng) cites Nán jīng passages that all agree with the present text, so the present text is still substantially the old one.
The title Nán jīng means “passages of the canonical text on which there is doubt, each set out as a question with an answer to clarify it.” Some passages are introduced with “the jīng says…” but no corresponding text is found in the present Sùwèn or Língshū; this is because the present Sùwèn has scribal omissions, and the present Língshū is a Wáng Bīng pseudepigraphic confection rather than the old text. (N.B. — the Kyoto-Zinbun version of this tíyào reads only “the present Nèijīng has scribal lacunae” and omits the polemical phrase about Wáng Bīng; the WYG print is the harsher version.) The text’s argument is finely-grained and its phrasing terse and remote, not easily understood at a first reading; for this reason, medical scholars across the dynasties have written commentaries on it. Shòu drew on eleven, but only Shòu’s own work is now in general circulation. The book begins with a Huìkǎo 彙考 chapter on the work’s name and origins, then a Quēwù zǒnglèi 闕誤總類 chapter on missing characters and erroneous readings, then a Túshuō 圖說 chapter — none of these are counted in the juan-numbering. Shòu’s commentary integrates the various authorities and adjudicates among them by his own judgement; his exegesis is precise and his philological investigation is thorough.
The Yīngníng shēng zhuàn has Shòu say of his work: “The Nán jīng is rooted in the Língshū and Sùwèn. Setting out difficulties and explaining the meaning, on questions of the position of nutritive and protective qi, on the channels and method of pulse diagnosis at the zàng-fǔ, and on the channels and acu-points — its discussion is broad indeed; but the lacunae and errors are also many. I shall annotate it according to its own meaning, and so read it.” This is precisely the present book. Shòu was originally a Confucian scholar, and was therefore able to penetrate the language of ancient texts; for this reason his commentary covers more ground than that of any of his predecessors.
(Respectfully verified, 10th month of Qiánlóng 46 [1781]. Chief Compilers Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Chief Collator Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.)
Abstract
The Nánjīng běnyì is dated to 1361–1366 by the prefaces — Zhāng Zhù’s at 至正甲辰 (1364) and Liú Rénběn’s at 至正丙午 (1366); the surviving Yuán print is from this window. Composition presumably began somewhat earlier, but the published recension is the late-Yuán one. From the late Yuán onward the Nánjīng běnyì effectively replaces all earlier Nán jīng recensions in circulation, including the Wáng Hànlín jí zhù (KR3e0003), and is the basis of all subsequent Nán jīng scholarship through the Qīng. Huá Shòu’s principal departures from his predecessors are: (a) the Quēwù zǒnglèi — a systematic philological examination of received-text problems, the first such treatment of the Nán jīng; (b) the integration of the channel-and-point material with the commentator’s own Shísì jīng fāhuī 十四經發揮; and (c) the willingness to declare a passage corrupt or interpolated where his predecessors merely paraphrased it. The SKQS editors chose this recension over the Wáng Hànlín jí zhù both for its scholarly precision and for its convenient size (the apparatus chapters, Huìkǎo, Quēwù zǒnglèi, and Túshuō, are all that the editor of the medical canon needed).
The catalog meta lists 秦越人 as 撰 (compositor) by long-standing convention, but on every premodern bibliographic and modern philological account this attribution is honorific: the Nán jīng is a Warring-States to early-Hàn anonymous compilation taking the legendary Biǎn Què 扁鵲 as its frame author. The composition window of the received recension is therefore Huá Shòu’s: 1361–1366. Pre-Huá strata exist (back to a third-century Lǚ Guǎng commentary fragmentarily preserved through the Wáng Hànlín jí zhù) but are reconstructible only via the received Huá Shòu base.
Translations and research
- Paul U. Unschuld, Nan-Ching: The Classic of Difficult Issues — With Commentaries by Chinese and Japanese Authors from the Third through the Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. The standard scholarly English translation; Huá Shòu’s Běnyì is one of Unschuld’s principal commentary witnesses, and substantial passages are translated.
- Catherine Despeux, “L’évolution des conceptions du corps et de l’embryologie dans la médecine et la religion chinoises,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 8, 1995, 47–80. Discusses Huá Shòu’s reading of channel anatomy.
- Liào Yùqún 廖育群, “Lùn Huá Shòu” 論滑壽, in his Yīxué yǔ chuántǒng wénhuà 醫學與傳統文化, Tianjin: Bǎihuā Wényì, 2002. Standard biographical-philological treatment.
- Wáng Yùchuān 王育川, Nánjīng běnyì jiàoshì 難經本義校釋, Beijing: Rénmín Wèishēng, 1990. Modern critical edition.
Other points of interest
The WYG and the Kyoto Zinbun digitizations of the Sìkù tíyào on this work differ in one polemically significant detail: the WYG version explicitly identifies the received Língshū as a Wáng Bīng forgery (“今本靈樞乃王冰依託而作非其舊也”), echoing the SKQS editors’ own diagnosis as expressed in the tíyào on KR3e0002; the Kyoto Zinbun version softens this to a generic remark about scribal lacunae in the Nèijīng. Both are SKQS, but the WYG manuscript-print version preserves the harsher reading. This is a useful witness to the editorial team’s internal back-and-forth on the Língshū question.