Bāshíyī Nànjīng 八十一難經
The Classic of Eighty-One Difficulties attributed to 秦越人 (Qín Yuèrén, conventionally Biǎn Què 扁鵲, fl. Warring States, but pseudepigraphically)
About the work
The Bāshíyī Nànjīng — usually known simply as the Nànjīng 難經 (“Classic of Difficulties”) — is the principal early Chinese medical companion-classic to the Huángdì nèijīng 黃帝內經 (KR3ea001 Sùwèn). It comprises eighty-one numbered nán 難 (“difficulties” or “problems”), each posing a focused question on a passage or doctrine of the Nèijīng and supplying a brief authoritative answer. The eighty-one topics fall in conventional order into six clusters: pulse diagnosis (1–22), channels and points (23–29), viscera and bowels (30–47), pathology (48–61), shū-points (62–68), and acupuncture method (69–81). The work’s most influential doctrinal contributions are the cùnguānchǐ 寸關尺 pulse system (extracted from the bilateral qìkǒu 氣口 by analytical division), the doctrine of the right kidney as the mìngmén 命門 (n. 36), and a coherent five-element schematization of the viscera with practical clinical applications.
Tiyao
The jicheng.tw dataset has only a placeholder file (KR3ea054_001.txt with no body content) — the canonical text is not transcribed into this directory. There is no Sìkù quánshū tíyào for this recension; the WYG tíyào on the Nànjīng tradition is attached to 滑壽 Huá Shòu’s KR3ea060 Nànjīng běnyì.
Abstract
The traditional attribution to Qín Yuèrén (Biǎn Què) is pseudepigraphic: 司馬遷 Sīmǎ Qiān’s Shǐjì 史記 j. 105 biography of Biǎn Què (Warring-States physician) makes no mention of a written Nànjīng, and the Hàn shū yìwén zhì 漢書藝文志 (1st c. CE) does not list it. The earliest external attestation is Lǚ Guǎng 呂廣 (Wú imperial physician, 3rd c.), who wrote the first commentary; the Suí shū jīngjí zhì 隋書經籍志 is the first standard-history bibliographic catalog to record it. Modern scholarly consensus, following Liào Yùqún 廖育群 (1992), Paul U. Unschuld (1986), and Catherine Despeux, dates the composition to the late Eastern Hàn (c. 1st–2nd century CE), well after the Sùwèn nucleus but before the early WèiJìn commentarial period. The text is thus a late-Hàn doctrinal synthesis that systematizes and in places revises the Nèijīng doctrines (the Nèijīng pulse system, for example, is bilateral and many-point; the Nànjīng radically reduces it to the cùnguānchǐ triple at the wrist alone).
The transmitted text exists in multiple recensions, distinguished principally by which commentaries are present. The major Chinese commentarial witnesses are: Lǚ Guǎng (Three Kingdoms / Wú), Yáng Xuáncāo 楊玄操 (Táng), Dīng Dérún 丁德用 (北宋), Yú Shù 虞庶 (Sòng), Yáng Kāngdí 楊康迪 (Sòng), Lǐ Jiōng 李駉 (南宋, KR3ea065), Huá Shòu 滑壽 (元末明初, KR3ea060 / KR3ea061), Wáng Jiǔsī 王九思 (元, 集註 anthology — see KR3e0003 in the canonical division), Xú Dàchūn 徐大椿 (清, KR3ea059), Dīng Jǐn (清, KR3ea055 and KR3ea057), Huáng Yuányù 黃元御 (清, KR3ea063), Yè Lín 葉霖 (清, KR3ea058), and the Japanese Tamba circle (Tamba no Motoin 丹波元胤, KR3ea062). For the canonical Sìkù witness see KR3e0004; the present jicheng.tw entry stands as the bare-text reference within the jicheng.tw dataset.
Translations and research
- Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: Nan-ching, the Classic of Difficult Issues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). The standard English translation, with extensive commentary tracing each nán through Lǚ Guǎng → Yáng Xuáncāo → Dīng Dérún → Huá Shòu → Xú Dàchūn → Tamba.
- Liào Yùqún 廖育群, QíHuáng yīxué dàolùn 岐黃醫學導論 (Shànghǎi: Kējì, 1991); idem, Chónggòu Nànjīng 重構難經 (Tāiběi: 中央研究院, 2002) — the most thorough modern Chinese-language philological treatment.
- Catherine Despeux, “The System of the Five Circulatory Phases and the Six Seasonal Influences”, in Elisabeth Hsu (ed.), Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) — for the broader cosmological context.
- ICS concordance no. 61 (Hong Kong: ICS, 1995) — concordance edition for philological work.
Other points of interest
The Nànjīng’s shift of the mìngmén 命門 from the eyes (where the Língshū “根結” places it) to the right kidney (n. 36, n. 39) is the single most consequential doctrinal innovation in the Chinese pulse-and-viscera tradition. The mìngmén doctrine drives much of late-Míng / early-Qing medicine, particularly the fēnzhī 分治 (right-kidney-as-fire / left-kidney-as-water) reading developed by 張介賓 Zhāng Jièbīn (KR3ea036) and the jiāwèi shènqì wán clinical tradition. Wilkinson, Chinese History, §41.3.1 #2, treats the Nànjīng as “probably compiled in its present form in the Han in the questions and answers style” and lists Huá Shòu’s běnyì as the early-Míng standard annotated edition.
Links
- Wikidata Q3017945 (Nan jing).
- CTEXT 《難經》
- Wikipedia 難經 (中文).