Wàitái mìyào fāng 外臺秘要方
Secret Essential Prescriptions from the Outer Censorate by 王燾 (Wáng Tāo, ca. 670–755, 唐) — original; 林億 (Lín Yì) and 孫兆 (Sūn Zhào) and the Sòng校正醫書局 team — collators (presented 1067)
About the work
Wáng Tāo’s massive Táng-period encyclopedic medical compendium, completed in Tiānbǎo 11 (752) at his post as Grand Protector of Yè Commandery 鄴郡, organizing the previous millennium of clinical material into 1,104 categorical gates (門) across forty juan, with each gate giving first the disease-aetiology (drawing principally on Cháo Yuánfāng’s Zhū bìng yuánhòu lùn KR3e0012) and then the prescriptions, each with its source-text precisely cited at the juan-level. The Wàitái mìyào preserves substantial fragments of dozens of pre-Táng medical works that have otherwise been lost in independent transmission — the Xiǎopǐn fāng 小品方 of Chén Yánzhī 陳延之, the Shēn shī fāng 深師方 of Shēnshī, the Xǔ Rénzé fāng 許仁則方, the Cuīshì fāng 崔氏方, the Zhāng Wénzhòng fāng 張文仲方 — and is the principal indirect source for our knowledge of pre-Táng prescription literature. The Sòng校正醫書局 collation by Sūn Zhào, under Lín Yì’s supervision, was presented to the throne in Zhìpíng 4 (1067) and is the basis for the SKQS recension (Míng Chéng Yǎndào 程衍道 reprint of the Sòng print).
Tiyao
[Sub-classification: 子部十三 醫家類一. Edition: 通行本 / common circulating text.] — drawn from Kyoto Zinbun (entry 0209201), since the local source KR3e0015_000.txt is essentially empty (header only).
Wàitái mìyào, by Wáng Tāo of the Táng. Tāo was a man of Méi, grandson of 王珪 Wáng Guī. The Tángshū appends his notice to Wáng Guī’s biography. He was, it says, of extreme filial nature: when his mother fell ill, for more than a year he did not unbelt himself; he watched the cotton-pad and prepared the decoctions himself (the two characters 視絮 are unclear; but the Yùhǎi citation has the same reading, so the Sòng base text already had it; we retain it). He frequently sought the company of high physicians and so mastered the art. With his learning he composed the Wàitái mìyào. His exposition is precise and clear; the world has prized it. He served as Senior Counselor (給事中) and Grand Protector of Yè Commandery (鄴郡太守).
The Yìwén zhì records the Wàitái mìyào in forty juan and a Wàitái yàoluè 外臺要略 in ten juan; the Yàoluè has long been lost, only the Mìyào remains. The present is the recension collated by Sūn Zhào and others in Sòng Zhìpíng 4 (1067), reprinted by Míng Chéng Yǎndào 程衍道. The head bears Wáng Tāo’s own preface dated Tiānbǎo 11 (752); also the Imperial Decree of Huángyòu 2 (1050) ordering its reprinting; also Sūn Zhào’s presentation memorial. The actual juan-headers carry Lín Yì’s name.
Examining Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí citation of the Sòng huìyào 宋會要: “In Jiāyòu 2 (1057) the Jiàozhèng yīshū jú 校正醫書局 was established at the Editing-and-Compiling Court (Biānxiū yuàn 編修院). Zhí Jíxián yuàn Zhǎng Yùxī 直集賢院掌禹錫 and Lín Yì served as 校理; Zhāng Dòng 張洞 as 校勘; Sū Sòng 蘇頌 et al. as 校正. Later Sūn Qí, Gāo Bǎohéng, and Sūn Zhào were appointed as fellow collators. Each book on completion was submitted to the throne, with Yì and the others composing the prefaces.” So the Lín-Yì-titled juan-header is general — covering the leadership of the entire bureau — and the děng (et al.) accordingly follows.
Wáng Tāo lived for over twenty years in the Hall of Library and Court (館閣), seeing extensively the books and prescription works of the Hóngwén Guǎn 宏文館. The composition was completed during his tenure at Yè; his official title there was chí jié Yèjùn zhūjūnshì jiān shǒu cìshǐ 持節鄴郡諸軍事兼守刺史 — hence the title “Outside the Censorate” (Wàitái). (The Yījué liáo zájì 猗覺寮雜記 says: “Wàitái appears in the Tángshū biography of Gāo Yuányù 高元裕. The old practice was to call those Three-Treasury-Inspection officials carrying the censorial badge ‘Wàitái’.“) The Shūlù jiětí writes the title as Wàitái mìyào fāng 方; Wáng’s own preface does the same; but the Tángshū and Sūn Zhào’s preface omit the fāng. This is mechanical abbreviation in transmission.
The book has 1,104 gates, in every case discussion first and prescription after. The discussions are mostly based on Cháo’s Bìngyuán. Under each entry the original Táng-period source is precisely noted by juan-number. The custom of citing the source-juan in book-citations is usually credited to Lǐ Fú 李涪’s Kānwù 刊誤 and Chéng Dàchāng’s Yǎnfánlù 演繁露; people do not realize that the practice was originated by Wáng Tāo. From this, his careful precision can be seen. The prescriptions are largely from the lost specialist transmissions of antiquity. Already in late Southern Sòng Chén Zhènsūn observed: “the Xiǎopǐn, the Shēnshī, the Cuīshì, the Xǔ Rénzé, the Zhāng Wénzhòng, and the like are now lost in independent transmission, but bits of them are still found in this book.” Now, four or five hundred years after Chén Zhènsūn, the ancient medical books are still more dispersed; only this work of Wáng Tāo’s preserves them — all the more precious.
The book contains in places interdiction-arts (禁術); the Qiānjīn yìfāng 千金翼方 already had this practice. A Táng xiǎoshuō records that Jiǎ Dān 賈耽 cured a louse-cyst (蝨瘕) with a thousand-year-old comb — a prescription which is in fact in the twelfth juan of this book. A Sòng xiǎoshuō records the use of a prayer-bead to retrieve an accidentally-swallowed fish-hook as a marvel; this prescription is in the eighth juan. The Táng court’s ritual of the Làrì 臘日 imperial gift of kǒu zhī 口脂 (lip-balm) and miàn yào 面藥 (face-medicine), now unidentified — its prescriptions are recorded in the thirty-first juan. All of these are useful for bówù (broad knowledge of things). The thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth juan are entirely on the rǔshí lùn 乳石論 (milk-and-stone discourse): the Shìshuō 世說 records Hé Yàn 何晏’s praise of the wǔshí sǎn 五石散 (“opens the spirit”); the Yùtái xīnyǒng 玉臺新詠 has a poem “A Concubine Resents Her Powder-Taking Husband”; this was a Jiāngzuǒ-period self-cultivation art now no longer practiced. Further, the twenty-eighth juan records a māoguǐ yědào fāng 猫鬼野道方, agreeing with Cháo’s Bìngyuán; this too is a Northern-Southern-Dynasties ghost-disease, no longer reported after the Táng. But preserving them suffices for textual reference.
The reprinter Chéng Yǎndào did considerable collation, but does not always understand pre-Táng usage. For example: in the lì (dysentery) chapter, the phrase “treating the dysentery slightly jiào 較” — Yǎndào notes “the character jiào is suspect.” But examining Táng colloquial idiom, “tolerably better” was jiào 校 — Xuē Néng 薛能’s “Yellow Sunflower” poem has “I remember the jade-girl’s spring-illness becoming jiào”, and Féng Bān 馮班’s collation of the Cáidiào jí 才調集 makes this perfectly clear. Yǎndào sensed an error but did not see that jiào (較) was an error for jiào (校); he was not yet through the matter. Still, he is mostly right in his correctional decisions, so we have retained his work.
Abstract
The composition is dated by Wáng Tāo’s own preface to Tiānbǎo 11 (752); notBefore/notAfter are accordingly set at 752/752. Wáng’s career trajectory — twenty-some years in the Imperial Library (where he transcribed the medical literature) followed by his tenure at Yè (where he wrote up the work) — is one of the few well-documented Táng-period medical-literary careers, attested both in his own preface and in the Xīn Tángshū notice.
The textual ancestry: 1066/1067 Sòng校正醫書局 collation under Sūn Zhào and Lín Yì → Sòng Zhìpíng print → Yuán reprint → Míng Chéng Yǎndào reprint (1640) → SKQS / Kanripo recension. The principal modern critical edition (Mǎ Jìxīng 1993) collates against the Japanese Edo-period reprint of the SòngYuán recension preserved in the Tōkyō Imperial Library, which preserves a closer-to-Sòng-school reading.
The Wàitái mìyào is the most important indirect witness for pre-Táng prescription literature. Through it, we have access — via direct citation with juan-number provenance — to the Xiǎopǐn fāng 小品方 (Liù Cháo, ca. early 6th c.; Chén Yánzhī), the Shēnshī fāng, the Cuīshì fāng, the Xǔ Rénzé fāng, the Zhāng Wénzhòng fāng, and many other otherwise-lost sources. The work’s organizational principle — disease-aetiology first (drawn from the Bìngyuán), then prescription (drawn from many earlier sources, with explicit attribution) — is the Táng standardization of clinical reasoning that became normative under the Sòng校正醫書局 reception.
The 38-juan Rǔshí lùn 乳石論 chapters on cold-food powder (寒食散 / 五石散) are a unique systematic Táng-period treatment of an by-then-archaic Six Dynasties cultivation practice; they are an essential source for the history of mineral and alchemical pharmacology in early-medieval China. The māoguǐ yědào 猫鬼野道 prescriptions of juan 28, parallel to those in the Bìngyuán, similarly preserve the SuíTáng exorcistic-medical fringe.
Translations and research
- Despeux, Catherine. Préscriptions d’acuponcture valant mille onces d’or: Traité d’acuponcture de Sun Simiao du VIIe siècle, Paris: Trédaniel, 1987 (also treats the Wài-tái as Sūn Sīmiǎo’s near-contemporary).
- Despeux, Catherine and Frédéric Obringer (eds.), La maladie dans la Chine médiévale: la toux, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Foundational French-language study of Suí-Táng pathology, drawing on the Wài-tái alongside the Bìng-yuán.
- Sivin, Nathan. Health Care in Eleventh-Century China, Cham: Springer, 2015 (Archimedes 43). On the校正醫書局 reception of the Wài-tái.
- Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Wài-tái mì-yào jiào zhù 外臺秘要校註, Beijing: Rénmín Wèishēng, 1993. Standard modern critical edition.
- Liào Yùqún 廖育群 and Fù Fāng 傅芳 (eds.), Zhōngguó kēxué jìshù shǐ — yīxué juàn 中國科學技術史·醫學卷, Beijing: Kēxué Chūbǎnshè, 1998. Standard reference history; treats the Wài-tái in the Táng-Sòng context.
- Yamada Keiji 山田慶兒, “Tang dài yīxué” 唐代醫學, in his Chūgoku igaku no shisō 中國醫學の思想, Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 2002.
Other points of interest
The jiào 較 / jiào 校 textual discussion in the Sìkù tíyào — chastising Chéng Yǎndào for sensing an error but identifying the wrong character — is one of the better illustrations of mid-Qīng philological method applied to medical-textual problems. It rests on the recovery of Táng colloquial usage from Táng poetic and paradigmatic sources, an approach the SKQS editors otherwise mostly reserved for the literary classics.
The Wàitái’s preservation of the lost pre-Táng formularies has become a major research target in modern Chinese medical scholarship; reconstructions of the Xiǎopǐn fāng (Mǎ Jìxīng 1985) and the Shēnshī fāng (Mǎ Jìxīng 1993) draw principally on it.