Dú Sùwèn chāo 讀素問鈔
Notes for Reading the Basic Questions (with Wāng Jī’s continuation) by 滑壽 (Huá Shòu, fl. late Yuán to early Míng, 元) — original abridger and editor; 汪機 (Wāng Jī, 1463–1539, 明) — supplementary annotator
About the work
The Dú Sùwèn chāo is a Yuán-period thematically rearranged abridgment of the Huángdì nèijīng Sùwèn by 滑壽 Huá Shòu (zì Bórén 伯仁, hào Yīngníng shēng 攖寧生). Huá excerpted what he judged to be the doctrinally essential passages of the Sùwèn (about a third of the text) and reorganized them into thematic juan, removing what he calls “exuberant overgrowth” (蘩蕪) and retrieving the structural argument (撮其樞要). The Míng physician 汪機 Wāng Jī (zì Shěngzhī 省之, hào Shíshān 石山, of Qímén 祁門 in Huīzhōu) re-issued the text in 1519 with re-supplemented portions of 王冰 Wáng Bīng’s commentary inserted in passages Huá had left bare, his own glosses marked 愚謂, and Huá’s notes preserved under the rubric 今按. The jicheng.tw transmission is Wāng Jī’s 1519 print (the 正德己卯 edition).
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw source (KR3ea011_000.txt) reproduces Wāng Jī’s preface (dated Zhèngdé jǐmǎo sānyuè shuòdàn 正德己卯三月朔旦 = 1 March 1519, Qímén 汪機省之序), which describes the editorial program: praise of Huá’s abridgment for its concision and order, observation that Wáng Bīng’s commentary is too sparse on the most difficult passages, the decision to interpolate further commentary marked “續” at the head of the entry and “愚謂” for Wāng’s personal interventions. A double-signed self-portrait colophon (石山先生自贊) follows, identifying Wāng as a Qímén physician of frugal habits and Confucian temperament.
Abstract
Huá Shòu’s Dú Sùwèn chāo is the first systematic thematic restructuring of the Sùwèn in the post-Sòng commentarial tradition, prefiguring 張介賓 Zhāng Jièbīn’s Lèijīng (KR3ea036) by 250 years. It originally circulated in three juan; the Wāng Jī edition expands the apparatus but retains Huá’s basic thematic order. Huá’s main concern was to make the Sùwèn accessible to physicians who had no time to read the full text with Wáng Bīng’s eight-juan commentary, so the chāo functions both as anthology and as systematic textbook. The text was admitted to the Sìkù quánshū under the title Dú Sùwèn chāo, where the 提要 commends Huá’s editorial method but disputes the post-Wāng-Jī attribution of “supplementary commentary” (續注) to Huá himself rather than to Wāng. The catalog meta lists 滑壽 alone; the function annotation here adds Wāng Jī as 續注 because the jicheng.tw print is in fact the joint HuáWāng text.
Modern editions: Renmin Weisheng’s 1958 punctuated edition; Lìdài Sùwèn yánjiū wénjí (multiple reprintings); the 1519 Qímén print survives at the Beijing Library.
Translations and research
- Catherine Despeux, “Talking about Qi: Ontological Differences in the Suwen”, in Hans Ulrich Vogel and Günter Dux (eds.), Concepts of Nature: A Chinese-European Cross-Cultural Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010) — uses Huá’s selection as evidence for the 14th-c. canonical reading.
- Wáng Hóngtú 王洪圖, Huángdì nèijīng yánjiū dàchéng (1997), § on Yuán commentaries.