Mài Jué Kǎo Zhèng 脈訣考證
Critical Verification of the Pulse Songs by 李時珍 (Lǐ Shízhēn, zì Dōngbì 東璧, hào Bīnhú shānrén 瀕湖山人, 1518–1593, 明)
About the work
A one-juan critical philological polemic by Lǐ Shízhēn against the pseudo-Wáng-Shūhé Mài jué 脈訣 attributed in Song-Yuan-Ming circulation to Gāo Yángshēng 高陽生 — a Sòng-period mnemonic-verse pulse manual that had displaced the genuine Mài jīng of Wáng Shūhé (see KR3eb011) in popular medical pedagogy. The book is in four sections: (1) Mài jué fēi Shūhé shū 脈訣非叔和書, demonstrating from internal evidence (the genre of gēkuò 歌括 mnemonic verse was unknown to Western Jìn; the discriminations of pulse-types in the Mài jué contradict the Mài jīng) that the work is a Sòng fabrication; (2) Qī biǎo bā lǐ jiǔ dào zhī fēi 七表八里九道之非, refuting the Mài jué’s tripartite classification of pulses into “seven exterior, eight interior, nine pathways”; (3) Nán nǚ mài wèi qí 男女脈位齊, refuting Chǔ Chéng’s 褚澄 doctrine that the pulse-positions are mirror-inverted for women; (4) Zàng fǔ bù wèi 臟腑部位, summarising the Wú Chéng 吳澄 / Lǐ Shízhēn corrective position that all six wrist-positions are projections of the Lung channel rather than localised “windows” onto the five viscera.
Prefaces
KR3eb019_000.txt runs directly into the polemical content without separate paratext. The text appears to have been composed around or shortly after the Bīnhú mài xué (1564, see KR3eb014) and is conventionally treated as its companion volume; the Kǎo zhèng assembles the destructive arguments against the pseudo-Mài jué that the Mài xué presupposes.
Abstract
The book is a virtuoso piece of medical philology assembled by Lǐ Shízhēn from previous critical literature: he quotes Zhū Xī 朱熹 (Huì’ān 晦庵, on a colophon to Guō Chángyáng’s book), Liǔ Guàn 柳貫 of Dōngyáng, Xiè Jǐnwēng 謝縉翁 of Lúlíng, Wáng Shìxiàng 王世相 of Hédōng, Qián Pǔ 錢溥 of Yúnjiān, Dài Qǐzōng 戴起宗 of Jīnlíng (see KR3eb026 Mài jué kān wù), Huá Shòu 滑壽 (yīngníng 攖寧, see KR3eb023), Wú Chéng 吳澄 (cǎolú 草廬), Chǔ Chéng 褚澄, Chǔ Yǒng 儲泳 (huágǔ 華谷), Zhū Zhènhēng 朱震亨 (dānxī 丹溪), and Wáng Zōngzhèng 王宗正 of Shàoxīng. Lǐ’s own contribution is the synthesis and the decisive treatment of the male/female pulse-position issue: by Lǐ’s argument, women and men have the same pulse anatomy (in disagreement with both the pseudo-Mài jué and with Chǔ Chéng’s Chǔ shì yí shū). The text was reproduced as the front-matter of many late-Ming and Qing pulse handbooks; the Sì zhěn jué wēi of Lín Zhīhàn KR3eb003 quotes it directly.
The dating is bracketed by the Bīnhú mài xué (1564) on the early side and Lǐ’s death (1593) on the late; the work is conventionally treated as a Jiājìng / early-Wàn-lì composition.
Translations and research
- No full Western-language translation exists. The polemic is discussed in Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興 (ed.), Lǐ Shízhēn yī xué quán shū 李時珍醫學全書 (Beijing: Zhōngguó zhōngyīyào, 1999).
- Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley: UC Press, 1986), discusses Lǐ Shízhēn’s critical-philological method as a precursor of kǎojù 考據 medical scholarship.
Other points of interest
The Mài jué kǎo zhèng is one of the earliest and clearest applications of “Confucian classical philology” (kǎojù) methodology to a medical text. Lǐ’s procedure — collecting authority-witnesses, ranking them, and adjudicating by internal evidence — is the same Sòng-Yuan-Ming kǎojù practice that Yán Ruòqú 閻若璩 and Hú Wèi 胡渭 would later apply to the Shàngshū and the Hé tú / Luò shū respectively. It is thus a significant document for the history of Chinese textual scholarship as well as of medicine.
Links
- Wikidata: not assigned.
- Constructive complement: KR3eb014 Bīn Hú Mài Xué.
- Cf. KR3eb026 Mài jué kān wù by Dài Qǐzōng (earlier Yuan-period critique of the same pseudo-Mài jué).
- 脈訣考證 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB