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馬王堆簡帛

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Text ID
KR3ea066
Date
-300–-168
Dynasty
戰國末至西漢

Mǎwángduī jiǎnbó 馬王堆簡帛

The Mawangdui Bamboo-Slip and Silk Manuscripts anonymous (multiple Warring-States to early-Hàn medical texts)

About the work

The Mǎwángduī jiǎnbó of the Kanripo catalog is a composite modern entry for the fifteen excavated medical texts recovered from Mǎwángduī tomb 3 (Chángshā 長沙, Húnán), interred in 168 BCE. The tomb of the marquis of Dài 軑侯 Lì Cāng 利蒼’s son contained, alongside its better-known philosophical silks (the dual Lǎozǐ manuscripts, the Yìjīng manuscripts, the Wǔxíng 五行, the HuángLǎo documents), thirteen medical texts on silk plus two more — one on bamboo slips, one on wooden slips — totalling roughly 22,314 characters or about 18% of the total text recovered from the tomb (Wilkinson, Chinese History, §41.2). The constituent works are:

  1. Wǔshí’èr bìngfāng 五十二病方 — Recipes for Fifty-Two Diseases, the largest text; pharmacological and exorcistic-medical recipes.
  2. Zúbì shíyī mài jiǔjīng 足臂十一脈灸經 — Classic of Moxibustion for the Eleven Vessels of the Feet and Arms.
  3. Yīnyáng shíyī mài jiǔjīng 陰陽十一脈灸經 — Classic of Moxibustion for the Eleven YīnYáng Vessels (two near-parallel recensions exist).
  4. Màifǎ 脈法 — Methods of Vessel Examination.
  5. Yīnyáng mài sǐhòu 陰陽脈死候 — Mortal Signs of the YīnYáng Vessels.
  6. Quègǔ shíqì 卻穀食氣 — Avoiding Grains and Ingesting Vital Breath.
  7. Dǎoyǐn tú 導引圖 — Diagrams of Guiding and Pulling (the famous illustrated calisthenics chart).
  8. Yǎngshēng fāng 養生方 — Recipes for Nurturing Life.
  9. Záliáo fāng 雜療方 — Miscellaneous Therapeutic Recipes.
  10. Tāichǎn shū 胎產書 — Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth.
  11. Shíwèn 十問 — Ten Questions (sexual cultivation dialogues).
  12. Héyīnyáng 合陰陽 — Joining Yīn and Yáng (sexual cultivation).
  13. Tiānxià zhìdào tán 天下至道談 — Discussion of the Supreme Way under Heaven.
  14. (bamboo slips) ditto.
  15. (wooden slips) — short prophylactic-pharmaceutical recipes.

Tiyao

KR3ea066_001.txt contains only the org-mode placeholder header — no body text is transcribed in this directory. The Kanripo entry is essentially a bibliographic stub pointing to the standard editions (Mǎ Jìxīng 1992; Harper 1998). There is no Sìkù tíyào (the texts were excavated in 1973, nearly two centuries after the Sìkù).

Abstract

The tomb burial date is 168 BCE (twelfth year of 漢文帝 Wéndì, attested by tomb tally), giving a firm terminus ante quem for all the texts. Composition dates are necessarily earlier; on internal lexical and conceptual grounds the channel-and-moxibustion texts (Zúbì and Yīnyáng) are the oldest layer, probably late Warring States (c. 300–250 BCE), preceding the Sùwèn 黃帝內經素問 (KR3ea001) systematization by a century or more. The Wǔshí’èr bìngfāng and the sexual-cultivation texts are likely early Hàn. The Dǎoyǐn tú survives in a single illustrated copy and is the earliest known illustrated calisthenics manual in any tradition.

Historical significance. The Mawangdui medical manuscripts are the single most important corpus of pre-imperial / early-imperial Chinese medical evidence, transforming the field of early Chinese medicine after their 1973 discovery. Three principal contributions:

  1. The pre-Huángdìnèijīng channel system has eleven channels, not twelve. The Mawangdui texts describe eleven mài 脈 (vessels) on the body — six 足 (foot) plus five 手 (hand) — not the twelve regular channels of the canonical Sùwèn / Língshū tradition. The “missing” twelfth channel is the hand-shào-yīn / heart channel, which is absent from the Mawangdui inventory. The standard twelve-channel system is therefore a Hàn-period synthetic development, not the Warring-States substrate. (See Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 1998, §I.4–I.6 for the full argument.)
  2. Body-centered rather than spirit-centered medicine. The Mawangdui texts confirm Wilkinson’s observation (§41.2) that “a more this-worldly, body-centered approach to medicine than that of the Shang” had become dominant by late Warring States, displacing the exorcistic tradition (which nonetheless survived as alternative medicine into the modern period). Where the Shang oracle-bone medicine treats disease as ancestral or demonic affliction, the Mawangdui texts treat it as imbalance of qì, channel obstruction, dietary defect, or exhaustion of vital essence.
  3. The Mǎwángduī medical lexicon overlaps substantially with the Hàn shū yìwén zhì medical bibliography. Several titles in the Yìwén zhì’s medical yījīng 醫經 and jīngfāng 經方 categories have probable Mawangdui parallels, suggesting that the Yìwén zhì inventory is — at least for the medical branch — a list of texts circulating from the late Warring States onward, with the Mawangdui silks witnessing what was lost in transmission.

Standard editions and translations: Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (Routledge, 1998; rev. 2009, illustrated edn. 2013); Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Mǎwángduī gǔyīshū kǎoshì 馬王堆古醫書考釋 (Hunan kexue jishu, 1992); Wèi Qǐpéng 魏啟鵬, Mǎwángduī hànmù yīshū jiàoshì 馬王堆漢墓醫書校釋 (Chéngdū, 1992; 2 vols, with modern Chinese translation). The Zhāngjiāshān 張家山 Hàn bamboo-slip texts (excavated 1983, transcribed Gāo Dàlún 1992) supplement the Mawangdui evidence for early Hàn medicine.

Translations and research

  • Donald J. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts, Translation and Study, Sir Henry Wellcome Asia series 2 (London: Kegan Paul / Routledge, 1998; rev. 2009; illustrated edn. 2013). The standard English translation and the indispensable foundational study, with a 200-page introduction to early Chinese medicine. Translates all 15 texts; collated with the Zhāngjiāshān Hàn bamboo slips.
  • Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Mǎwángduī gǔyīshū kǎoshì 馬王堆古醫書考釋 (Chángshā: Húnán kējì, 1992). The standard collation and transcription, principal Chinese-language critical edition.
  • Wèi Qǐpéng 魏啟鵬 et al., Mǎwángduī hànmù yīshū jiàoshì 馬王堆漢墓醫書校釋 (Chéngdū: BāShǔ shūshè, 1992), 2 vols, with modern Chinese translation.
  • Mǎwángduī Hànmù bóshū 馬王堆漢墓帛書 (Wénwù chūbǎnshè, 1985), vol. 4 — the official photographic reproduction and transcription published by the Mǎwángduī Hànmù bóshū zhěnglǐ xiǎozǔ.
  • Gāo Dàlún 高大倫, Zhāngjiāshān Hàn jiǎn Maishu jiàoshì 張家山漢簡『脈書』校釋 (Chéngdū, 1992) — for the parallel Zhāngjiāshān witness.
  • Catherine Despeux, La moelle du phénix rouge: santé et longue vie dans la Chine du XVIe siècle (Paris: Trédaniel, 1988) — pp. 12–35 for the Dǎoyǐn tú and its descendants.
  • Vivienne Lo, “Crossing the Nèiguān 內關 ‘Inner Pass’: A Nèi/Wài 內外 ‘Inner/Outer’ Distinction in Early Chinese Medicine”, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 17 (2000): 15–65.

Other points of interest

The Dǎoyǐn tú silk is the earliest illustrated Chinese-medical manuscript of any kind, predating by approximately a millennium the next major illustrated medical work (the late-Tang acupuncture point charts). The 44 surviving figures (originally an estimated 50) depict standing, sitting, and twisting therapeutic postures with brief Chinese captions, several of which are recognizable as ancestors of postures preserved in the Ming Wǔqín xì 五禽戲 and later qigong traditions. The chart was reproduced in a now-classic Beijing facsimile in 1979 (Mǎwángduī hànmù bóshū vol. 4 part 2) and has been the subject of substantial subsequent paleographic and exercise-history literature, summarized in Despeux (1988) and Harper (1998, ch. 6).

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