Sùwèn xīndé 素問心得
Heart-Achievements from Reading the Basic Questions by 胡文煥 (Hú Wénhuàn, fl. 1592–1604, 明) — editor / compiler
About the work
The Sùwèn xīndé in two juan is a late-Míng anthology-commentary on the Huángdì nèijīng Sùwèn compiled by Hú Wénhuàn 胡文煥 (zì Défǔ 德甫 / 德父, hào Quánān 全菴), the prolific Hángzhōu bookseller-scholar best known as the editor of the encyclopaedic late-Míng Bǎijiā míngshū 百家名書 series and the Gézhì cóngshū 格致叢書. The work selects key Sùwèn passages on health-cultivation and disease prevention (養生 / 病能), arranges them under twenty-two topical headings, and supplies brief glosses drawn from 王冰 Wáng Bīng, the Sòng校正, and the YuánMíng commentators. The jicheng.tw source presents the work as part of a small set of three short medical anthologies (素問心得 / 靈樞心得 KR3ea028 / 醫家千字文 KR3ea033) all bearing Hú’s compiler signature.
Prefaces
The preface (KR3ea020_000.txt) — by an anonymous Míng scholar — opens with a cosmological lament: heaven and earth are a great forge in which all forms are eventually melted away; the multitude of poisons (五毒) and disturbances of the seven emotions (七情) wear down the human form, so that what is “neither metal nor stone” cannot last. Only by retrieving the Yùbǎn zhēnquán 玉版真詮 and the Línglán mìdiǎn 靈蘭秘典 (mythical foundational medical revelations) can the principle of life and death be grasped. The preface introduces Hú Wénhuàn (here Hǔzǐ Défǔ 鬍子德甫 [sic — probably 胡子]) as a young man of “extraordinary talent” who became a Sùwèn student through his own illness (“長嬰鼽衄之疾”). The preface frames Hú’s compilation as both private medical self-cultivation and public benefaction.
Abstract
Hú Wénhuàn was active in Hángzhōu from the 1580s through the early Wànlì 萬曆 reign and ran one of the major commercial publishing houses of late-Míng Jiāngnán, the Wényǎtáng 文雅堂 and Wénhuìtáng 文會堂 imprints. He compiled and published more than a hundred small books and several large cóngshū, often using existing scholarly material and supplying his own light editorial framing. His medical publications — of which Sùwèn xīndé, Língshū xīndé (KR3ea028), Yījiā qiānzì wén (KR3ea033), and several formularies are part — should be understood within this commercial-anthology context: they are accessible digests aimed at the general educated reader rather than original works of medical scholarship. The jicheng.tw source likely descends from one of Hú’s Wényántáng prints of the late 1590s.
Catalog meta gives 胡文煥 (Hú Wénhuàn); the homophone 胡文渙 (with 渙 for 煥) appears in KR3ea028 and is the same person — a frequent late-Míng typographical variant.
Translations and research
- Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian, 11th–17th Centuries (Harvard, 2002) — for the commercial context of Hú’s Hángzhōu imprints.
- Inoue Susumu 井上進, Chūgoku shuppan bunkashi 中国出版文化史 (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku, 2002) — § on Hú’s Bǎijiā míngshū.