脈經鈔

Mài Jīng Chāo 脈經鈔

A Critical Extract from the Pulse Classic by 孫鼎宜 (Sūn Dǐngyí, zì Zhòngshān 仲山, 1868–1934, 清末民國)

About the work

A two-juan / twenty-five-篇 late-Qing philological reconstruction of Wáng Shūhé’s Mài jīng KR3eb011 by the Húnán medical kǎojù 考據 scholar Sūn Dǐngyí. The project takes Wáng Shūhé’s preface to the Mài jīng as authority — zì Qí Bó yǐlái dǎi yú Huá Tuó 自岐伯以來逮於華佗 — and asks what is original to Wáng in the received text. Sūn’s procedure is to collate the received Mài jīng against the Nèijīng, Nànjīng, the Mài fǎ zàn 脈法贊, the Yī lǜ 醫律, the Bing yuán hòu lùn 病源候論, the Qiān jīn yào fāng, and the works of Biǎn Què (扁鵲), Huá Tuó (華佗), and Zhāng Jī (張機), identifying the un-attributed passages as Wáng’s own and reordering the result into twenty-five piān “preserved in the Suí zhì’s catalog name Xǔ Jiànwú zhī míng 許建吳之名.” It is one of the more rigorous late-Qing applications of Confucian kǎojù methodology to a medical text.

Prefaces

KR3eb029_001.txt carries Sūn’s own preface — a programmatic statement about the project — dated Jǐyǒu bā yuè zhōng qiū hòu sān rì 己酉八月中秋後三日 = three days after the Mid-Autumn Festival, eighth lunar month of 1909, signed Sūn Dǐngyí xù 孫鼎宜序. The preface engages with Xú Dàchūn’s 徐大椿 dismissal of pulse books and counter-argues that even an imperfect Mài jīng is preferable to the wholesale pulse scepticism Xú’s followers had developed.

Abstract

Sūn Dǐngyí 孫鼎宜 (1868–1934, zì Zhòngshān 仲山) was a late-Qīng / early-Republican Húnán physician and classical scholar — a graduate of the Yuèlù Academy 嶽麓書院 — who applied Qing kǎojù methods systematically to the early-medieval medical corpus. His Sūn shì yī xué cóng shū 孫氏醫學叢書 includes critical editions of the Sùwèn, the Língshū, the Nànjīng, the Shānghán lùn, and the present Mài jīng chāo. The pulse-book project was conceived during his medical practice in Húnán and Húběi and published in 1909; it was followed in the 1910s and 1920s by his other classical reconstructions. The work is one of the more philologically interesting late-Qing pulse texts and a useful counterweight to the orthodox curriculum-oriented Mài-curriculum manuals (such as KR3eb024 and the KR3eb004 imperial-academy text).

The dating 己酉 = 1909 (rather than the earlier jǐyǒu of 1849) is fixed by Sūn’s known biography (b. 1868) and by his discussion of late-19th-century pulse-textual scholarship in the preface.

Translations and research

• No Western-language translation exists.
• The work is mentioned in passing in Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Seattle: Eastland Press, 2007), as part of the late-Qing Hunanese medical reformist movement.
• Sūn Dǐngyí’s broader project is the subject of a chapter in Lǐ Jīng-wěi 李經緯 (ed.), Zhōng wài yī xué jiāo liú shǐ 中外醫學交流史 (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu, 1998).

Links

• Parent classic: KR3eb011 Mài jīng.
• Wikidata: not assigned.
• 脈經鈔 jicheng.tw
• Kanseki DB