Sùwèn xuánjiě 素問懸解
A Suspended Exposition of the Basic Questions by 黃元御 (Huáng Yuányù, 1705–1758, 清) — author
About the work
The Sùwèn xuánjiě in thirteen juan is the Huángdì nèijīng Sùwèn commentary of Huáng Yuányù 黃元御 (zì Yuányù 元御, hào Yùqiū 玉楸 — the catalog meta gives the form 黃玉璐 evidently for 黃玉楸, retained here as a witness reading), the dominant 18th-century Shāndōng physician and the founder of the so-called “Four Sages” (四聖) school of clinical doctrine. Completed in Qiánlóng 18 = 1753, the work belongs to a five-text Sìshèng corpus in which Huáng Yuányù methodically re-exposes each of the four medical sages — the Sùwèn of Huángdì here, the Língshū in Língshū xuánjiě (KR3ea027), the Nánjīng of 秦越人 Biǎn Què in Nánjīng xuánjiě (KR3ea063), and the ShānghánJīnguì of 張機 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng in his Shānghán xuánjiě and Jīnguì xuánjiě. The jicheng.tw source carries the appendix Xiàoyú ǒushí 校余偶識 (Casual Identifications from Collation Spare Time) marked in _000.txt.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw _000.txt carries only the Xiàoyú ǒushí header. The body (_001.txt) opens in medias res with Huáng’s reconstruction of the philological history of the title Sùwèn — quoting 林億 Lín Yì’s bureau-note via the Bǔzhù shìwén Huángdì nèijīng Sùwèn xù, 全元起 Quán Yuánqǐ’s gloss (素 = 本), the Qián záodù 乾鑿度 etymology (素 = 太素), and 楊上善 Yáng Shàngshàn’s KR3ea031 Tàisù readings — and then proceeds directly through the eighty-one pian. Huáng’s distinctive interventions are marked typographically in the print: each disputed passage is reset against the variants in the Sòng base, the Tàisù, and the YuánMíng commentators, with his own gloss appended.
Abstract
Huáng Yuányù is the most original mid-Qīng commentator on the medical canon. After being blinded in his left eye by a botched cataract operation around 1737, he abandoned the examination track and devoted himself to medicine, building a comprehensive systematic doctrine on the Sùwèn’s yīnyáng wǔxíng metaphysics and the Língshū’s circulation theory. His clinical orientation is profoundly anti-Dānxī: he denies that “yīn deficiency” is a major pathological category and asserts the centrality of warming yáng and supporting “central earth” (中土). The Sùwèn xuánjiě is the doctrinal foundation; it re-orders the eighty-one pian under thematic categories — 養生 (juan 1), 藏象 (juan 2–3), 經絡 (juan 4), 五運六氣 (juan 5–8), 疾病 (juan 9–10), 脈法 (juan 11), 治論 (juan 12–13). Huáng’s commentary is concise, doctrinally driven rather than philological, and frequently in sharp disagreement with 王冰 Wáng Bīng and the Sòng校正醫書局.
The Sìshèng corpus was little read before the Republican era — Huáng’s local fame in Shāndōng did not extend nationally during his lifetime — but in the early 20th c. it was promoted by the Northern warlord-physician 張錫純 Zhāng Xīchún, and from the 1980s the work has been treated in PRC medical-historical scholarship as the high point of a “Sìshèng / 中氣” school distinct from both the Wú orthodoxy and the Dānxī revival.
The catalog meta gives 黃玉璐 — almost certainly an OCR mis-rendering of 黃玉楸 (Huáng’s hào, derived from a 楸 tree in his courtyard). The canonical name 黃元御 is used here; the catalog spelling is preserved in the person note’s alternateNames for searchability.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language scholarship located. In Chinese, Sūn Hóngyìng 孫洪英 (ed.), Huáng Yuányù yīxué quánshū 黃元御醫學全書 (Beijing: Renmin Weisheng, 1996) is the standard collected edition; Sūn Guójié 孫國杰, “Sìshèng xīnyuán yánjiū” 四聖心源研究 (PhD thesis, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, 2007), surveys the school.