Sùwèn liùqì xuánzhū mìyǔ 素問六氣玄珠密語
Secret Sayings of the Mysterious Pearl on the Six [Climatic] Influences of the Basic Questions attributed to 王冰 (Wáng Bīng, 唐) — author (pseudepigraphic; received text late Sòng / Yuán)
About the work
The Liùqì xuánzhū mìyǔ is an esoteric wǔyùn liùqì 五運六氣 treatise transmitted under the name of Wáng Bīng (the Táng-period redactor of the Sùwèn, KR3ea001) and presented in the preface as the secret oral transmission of a fictional master “Xuánzhūzǐ” 玄珠子 to his disciple “Qǐxuánzǐ” 啟玄子 (Wáng Bīng’s own hào). The text expounds the cosmological-clinical doctrine of the seven great treatises of the Sùwèn (七篇大論, j. 19–22) in a highly recondite idiom, with extensive diagrams of the jiǎzǐ 甲子 cycle and step-by-step rules for predicting epidemics by climatic-cycle calculation. The work is universally regarded by modern scholarship as pseudepigraphic — the received text is late-Sòng or Yuán in date — but the doctrinal core is genuinely Táng and may preserve material from a lost Wáng-Bīng-era work on the yùnqì doctrine.
Prefaces
The author’s preface (KR3ea016_000.txt) is the foundational pseudepigraphic frame: a young scholar of Confucian background (“苦志文儒”), troubled by the brevity of life and seeking the deepest principles (“欲究真筌”), encounters Master Xuánzhū and serves him for several years. Master Xuánzhū transmits the doctrine only at last with the warning bǎinián jiān kě shòu yī rén 百年間可授一人 (“in a century only one transmission may be made”), forbids the disciple to reveal it lightly, and names him 啟玄子 (“the one who started [his learning] from Xuánzhū”). The disciple writes the doctrine in five copies of ten juan each, hiding them in the secret caves of the Five Sacred Mountains (五嶽深洞). This frame echoes the Daoist Língbǎo 靈寶 revelation pattern and is incompatible with the historical Wáng Bīng of the Tang Xīn Tángshū records.
Abstract
The textual history of the Xuánzhū mìyǔ is tangled. The Suí shū and JiùXīn Tángshū bibliographies contain no such title. The earliest secure attestation is in late-Sòng commentaries on the seven great treatises (notably in KR3ea022 劉溫舒 Liú Wēnshū’s Sùwèn rùshì yùnqì lùn’ào). The Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì records a “Xuánzhū lìzhèng yán 玄珠歷正言” in seven juan attributed to Wáng Bīng — likely the proto-form. The mature seventeen-juan text (ten juan main + supplements 占候十遺 etc.) is fixed in the Yuán Dàozàng and re-issued in the Míng Dàozàng under various titles. The jicheng.tw source preserves the Dàozàng-line text.
Modern judgment: the theoretical core (rules for zhǔqì 主氣 and kèqì 客氣, kèzhǔ jiālín 客主加臨, bùqì jiāoqì 步氣交氣) is consistent with the Táng-era seven great treatises and may derive ultimately from Wáng Bīng’s lost auxiliary works; the Daoist revelation framing and the zhànyàn 占驗 prediction rules are SòngYuán Daoist accretion. Modern PRC scholarship (most notably Wáng Hóngtú 王洪圖, Huángdì nèijīng yánjiū dàchéng, 1997) treats the work as a “compound text” with a Wáng Bīng nucleus.
Translations and research
- Catherine Despeux, “The System of the Five Circulatory Phases and the Six Seasonal Influences (wuyun liuqi)…”, in Elisabeth Hsu (ed.), Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge UP, 2001) — the most extensive Western-language analysis of the yùnqì doctrine and its pseudo-Wáng Bīng vehicles.
- Wáng Hóngtú 王洪圖, Huángdì nèijīng yánjiū dàchéng (1997), § on the Xuánzhū mìyǔ.
- Tián Hélù 田合祿, Wǔyùn liùqì jiǎngjiě 五運六氣講解 (Renmin Junyi, 2001).
Other points of interest
The Dàozàng recension of the same text is catalogued as KR5d0040’s companion work in the medical sub-section of the Canon; the present jicheng.tw edition transmits the text outside the Dàozàng canonical framing but is textually identical in the major chapters.