Huángdì Nèijīng Tàisù 黃帝內經太素
The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, Greatly Pristine by 楊上善 (Yáng Shàngshàn, fl. 666–683, 唐) — commentator; 蕭延平 (Xiāo Yánpíng, fl. 1897–1924, 清–民國) — modern collator
About the work
The Huángdì nèijīng Tàisù is the earliest surviving systematic re-arrangement and commentary of the Huángdì nèijīng, by Yáng Shàngshàn 楊上善, a Táng court physician active under the Gāozōng 高宗 and early Wǔ Zétiān 武則天 reigns (the work is conventionally dated Líndé 麟德 = 664–666 or shortly thereafter; the bureau title 通直郎守太子文學 in the Liǎng Táng zhì fixes his floruit to 666–683). Yáng selects passages from both halves of the Nèijīng (the Sùwèn and Língshū / Zhēnjīng) and re-distributes them under nineteen thematic categories — 攝生, 陰陽, 人合, 臟腑, 經脈, 腧穴, 營衛氣, 身度, 診候, 五體, 設方, 九鍼, 補瀉, 傷寒, 邪論, 風論, 氣論, 雜論, and an appendix — in thirty juan, with original commentary throughout. This is the earliest extant version of the Nèijīng and predates 王冰 Wáng Bīng’s 762 recension by nearly a century.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw source carries the modern collator’s postface by Xiāo Yánpíng 蕭延平 (KR3ea031_000.txt) — a remarkable document for the transmission history. It records that: (i) the Tàisù is bibliographically attested in both Táng standard-history catalogs but progressively disappeared after the Northern Sòng (the Sòng shǐ records only three juan extant); (ii) in the mid-Guāngxù era, the great Qīng bibliographer 楊守敬 Yáng Shǒujìng (1839–1915, zì Xīngwú 惺吾) acquired a Táng-manuscript copy of the Tàisù in 23 juan during his 1880s mission in Japan and brought a photographic transcript back to China; (iii) the Tónglú gentleman Yuán Zhōngjié 袁忠節 (= Yuán Chāng 袁昶) hastily printed it without proper collation, producing a faulty editio princeps; (iv) Xiāo Yánpíng of Xiàogǎn (蕭延平 of 孝感) — zì Běichéng 北承, a Qing-Republican philologist and physician — spent twenty years systematically collating multiple textual witnesses; (v) the resulting collated text is the basis of the present jicheng.tw transmission. Xiāo’s collation work concluded around 1924 and was first printed by Lánlíngtáng 蘭陵堂 in 1924.
Abstract
The Tàisù is the most important single textual witness for the pre-Wáng-Bīng state of the Huángdì nèijīng. Because Yáng Shàngshàn quoted the underlying classic in extenso (he commented on rather than abridged the text), the Tàisù preserves chapter sequences, line readings, and vocabulary that differ systematically from the Wáng Bīng / 林億 Lín Yì 校正 line — including substantial portions of chapters that Wáng Bīng marked as “lost” (e.g. the opening of Shàng gǔ tiān zhēn lùn in the form 黃帝問曰 rather than the literary Yáodiǎn-style expansion Xī zài Huángdì shēng ér shén líng of the received text; see KR3ea012 for the famous textual-critical argument based on this evidence).
Yáng Shàngshàn’s commentary is itself important: the earliest surviving substantive commentary on the Nèijīng, predating Wáng Bīng’s by a century. His glosses are rich in LǎoZhuāng Daoist terminology and integrate the Yìjīng and the Hétú / Luòshū in a manner characteristic of early-Táng eclectic learning. The Ninnaji 仁和寺 (Kyoto) manuscript discovered by Yáng Shǒujìng was Bunken (文獻) of Heian-era date (probably 9th or 10th c. copy of a Táng original); subsequent Japanese discoveries (the 1981 Asakawa Mura 浅川村 fragments, the Maedake Sonkeikaku 前田家尊経閣 holdings) have expanded the surviving text to about two-thirds of the original 30 juan.
The catalog meta gives 楊上善 with dynasty 唐 — correct. The jicheng.tw recension is Xiāo Yánpíng’s 1924 critical edition, not the proto-edition printed by Yuán Chāng; the function annotations 注 (Yáng) and 校正 (Xiāo) reflect this two-stage production.
Translations and research
- Yamada Keiji 山田慶兒, Kōkyū kō 黄帝内経太素の研究 (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1972).
- Qián Chāochén 錢超塵, Nèijīng Tàisù yánjiū 內經太素研究 (Beijing: Renmin Weisheng, 1999).
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠, “Tàisù and its Japanese Survival” — articles in Nihon ishi-gaku zasshi 日本醫史學雜誌.
- Donald Harper, “The Wang Tzu-ch’iao Stele Inscription and the Discovery of the Tai-su jing” — for the lineage of Yáng Shàngshàn’s redaction.
Other points of interest
The Ninnaji manuscript itself is designated a Japanese National Treasure (国宝) and is the oldest extant manuscript of any portion of the Huángdì nèijīng. Its rediscovery by Yáng Shǒujìng was the single most important event in modern Nèijīng philology and underpins all subsequent critical work on the text.