Chǔshì yíshū 褚氏遺書
The Bequest-Writings of Mister Chǔ by 褚澄 (Chǔ Chéng, zì Yàndào, d. 483, 南齊, attributed)
About the work
A short medical work in one juan and ten chapters — Shòu xíng 受形 (the body’s reception of form), Běn qì 本氣 (root qì), Píng mài 平脈 (normal pulse), Jīn rùn 津潤 (fluid moistening), Fēn tǐ 分體 (bodily division), Jīngxuè 精血 (essence and blood), Chú jí 除疾 (eliminating disease), Shěn wēi 審微 (discerning the subtle), Biàn shū 辨書 (distinguishing the sources), Wèn zǐ 問子 (the question of conception) — that elaborates the SùwènLíngshū doctrine of qì, blood, yīnyáng, and reproductive physiology with original observations not present in the foundational classics. The work treats women’s medicine and reproductive medicine prominently, including a famous chapter arguing that widows, monks, and nuns, by their celibacy, develop pathologies different from married persons — and one warning against the indiscriminate prescription of cooling medicines for blood-vomiting and rectal bleeding (“of those who drink cold remedies for blood-vomiting and stool-blood, not one in a hundred survives”). Although attributed by the work’s prefaces to Chǔ Chéng of the Southern Qí, the SKQS editors and modern scholars treat it as a Northern-Sòng pseudepigraphic composition.
Tiyao
Chǔshì yíshū, one juan, by old attribution to Chǔ Chéng of the Southern Qí. Chéng, zì Yàndào, was a man of Yángzhái 陽翟, younger brother of 褚淵 Chǔ Yuān. He married a daughter of the Sòng Emperor Wén, the Princess of Lújiāng, and was appointed Imperial Son-in-Law. Under the Southern Qí he served as Grand Protector of Wú Commandery, rising to Director of Left Personnel and Right General. His career is in his Nán Qí shū biography. The book is divided into ten chapters: Shòu xíng, Běn qì, Píng mài, Jīn rùn, Fēn tǐ, Jīngxuè, Chú jí, Shěn wēi, Biàn shū, and Wèn zǐ. Its main thrust is to elaborate the subtleties of qì, blood, and yīnyáng in the human body. The Sòng shǐ is the first to record it.
The book opens with a preface by Xiāo Yuān 蕭淵 dated to Hòu Táng Qīngtài 2 (935), saying that during Huáng Cháo’s disturbance bandits opened a tomb and found a stone tablet, which they discarded; Xiāo’s ancestor happened upon it and bore it home; later, by deathbed instruction, the same Chǔ-stones became his own coffer. There is also a preface by Buddhist monk Yìkān 釋義堪 saying that the stone-tablet was recovered from the tomb of the Xiāo family in nineteen pieces, of which one was Xiāo Yuān’s preface. There is further a postface by Dīng Jiè 丁介 of Jiātài 1 (1201) saying: “this book was first preserved by the Xiāo father and son guarding the stone, then preserved by the monk Yìkān copying it onto paper, then transmitted by Liú Yìxiān 劉義先 cutting it in wood.” This Liú Yìxiān is otherwise unidentified.
The book has considerable insight into the meaning of the Língshū and Sùwèn. Lǐ Shízhēn 李時珍 and Wáng Kěntáng 王肯堂 both drew on it. Its discussion of widows and nuns — that they must have a treatment different from married women — develops a point earlier authorities had not made; its discussion of vomiting blood and bowel-bleeding — that the indiscriminate use of cooling medicines is fatal — is a perpetual standard for the discipline. We suspect it is the work of someone deeply versed in medical theory in the Sòng period, falsely attributed to Chǔ Chéng for transmission, with the prefaces also being later attachments. Yet what it says is worth adopting; though pseudepigraphic, it cannot be discarded. It contains some discussion of essence and blood and the principle of generation, which serves to differentiate disease-sources and warn against improper economy of vital substances. Gāo Rú’s 高儒 Bǎichuān shūzhì 百川書志 lists it under the category of fáng zhōng (bedchamber arts), which is a serious error.
(Respectfully verified, 3rd month of Qiánlóng 44 [1779]. Chief Compilers Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì; Chief Collator Lù Fèichí.)
Abstract
The composition window is set at 1100–1200, the most likely period of the Northern-Sòng to early-Southern-Sòng pseudepigraphic composition. The SKQS editors’ diagnosis — that the work is a Sòng-period medical writer’s composition with the prefatorial machinery (the dramatic HuángCháo / 黃巢-era stone-tablet recovery story, the HòuTáng 935 Xiāo Yuān preface, the Dīng Jiè 1201 postface) attached to authenticate it — is convincing on several grounds: (a) the work is not recorded in any pre-Sòng bibliography, including the Suí, Táng, and Wǔdài standard-history bibliographic chapters that would normally have caught a 5th-century medical work; (b) the work is first recorded in the Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì, in which it is listed under Yījiā (medical schools); (c) the ten-chapter argumentative-essay structure, with each chapter taking up a single physiological theme and developing it from the Nèijīng tradition, is in form a SòngYuán medical genre rather than a Liù Cháo or Six Dynasties one; (d) the prefatorial machinery is precisely the kind of pseudepigraphic device — recovery of an ancient text from a tomb in a politically chaotic period — that became fashionable in Sòng pseudepigraphy. The historical Chǔ Chéng’s biography in the Nán Qí shū makes no mention of medical writings, though it does record his amateur interest in medicine.
The work’s content is nonetheless original and influential. The doctrines of widow-and-nun pathology and of the danger of cooling-prescriptions for hemorrhagic conditions entered the standard SòngYuán women’s-medicine tradition, were cited by Lǐ Shízhēn in the Běncǎo gāngmù 本草綱目 and Wáng Kěntáng 王肯堂 in the Zhèngzhì zhǔnshéng 證治準繩, and remain part of the canon of Chinese medical reasoning to the present. The chapter on women’s medicine — particularly the Wèn zǐ on conception — offers an unusually sophisticated discussion of male and female contributions to the embryo, treating both as equal sources of the fetal jīngxuè.
The catalog meta lists 褚澄 as 撰 by long-standing convention; the prose makes the SKQS editors’ attribution-doubt clear.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western secondary literature on this specific work. The text is treated in the broader histories of Chinese medicine — Goldschmidt 2009, Despeux & Obringer (eds.) 2010, Furth 1999 — but does not have a freestanding monographic study in a Western language.
- Liào Yùqún 廖育群, Yīxué yǔ chuántǒng wénhuà 醫學與傳統文化, Tianjin: Bǎihuā Wényì, 2002 (chapter on the Chǔ-shì yí-shū’s status as a pseudepigraphic Sòng work).
- Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Zhōng-yī wénxiàn xué 中醫文獻學, Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi Kēxué Jìshù Chūbǎnshè, 1990. The standard reference; treats the Chǔ-shì yí-shū’s textual situation.
- Furth, Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Discusses the Chǔ-shì yí-shū’s women’s-medicine and conception doctrines.
Other points of interest
The famous warning about cooling medicines and hemorrhage — 飲寒涼百不一生 — became a SòngYuánMíng commonplace and a focus of the JīnYuán medical revolution’s debate over Liú Wánsù 劉完素’s “fire-heat” doctrine. The Chǔshì yíshū is on the LǐZhū side of that debate, anticipating Lǐ Gǎo 李杲 and Zhū Zhènhēng 朱震亨’s caution against indiscriminate use of cooling medicines.
The Sòng pseudepigraphic genre of “tomb-recovered medical text” — to which the Chǔshì yíshū belongs — is a recurrent feature of the medical tradition (cf. the Bāwángcūn 八望村 / Fùyáng 阜陽 manuscripts of the Kǒngzǐ jiāyǔ parallels, KR3a0001’s textual situation). What distinguishes the Chǔshì yíshū is that it is in fact original Sòng medical thinking dressed in the borrowed authority of a fifth-century aristocrat — and in the SKQS editors’ final judgement, that authority is dispensable but the medical content is not.
Gāo Rú’s 高儒 Bǎichuān shūzhì 百川書志 of the Míng period miscategorizes the work under fáng zhōng 房中 (bedchamber arts) on the basis of the women’s-medicine and conception material, a misreading the SKQS editors flag.