Shèngjì Zǒnglù Zuǎnyào 聖濟總錄纂要
Distilled Essentials of the General Record of Sagely Relief by 程林 (Chéng Lín, zì Yúnlái 雲來, fl. late 17th c., 清) — physician of Xiūníng 休寧 (Ānhuī)
About the work
The Shèngjì zǒnglù zuǎnyào is the early-Qīng physician Chéng Lín’s clinical abridgement of the Sòng Huīzōng-period 200-juan Shèngjì zǒnglù (KR3ed012). Chéng collated three partial copies of the Northern Sòng / Yuán Dàdé re-edition and reorganised them into a 26-juǎn (some catalogs report 36-juǎn; the discrepancy is due to differing classification of supplementary appendices) clinical handbook. His editorial principles, as set out in his preface, were:
- Substitution of lost material with reconstructed analogues. The Northern-Sòng paediatric chapter (juǎn 173–177 of the original Zǒnglù) had been irretrievably damaged in his copies; Chéng substituted a reconstruction by his contemporary Xiàng Ruì 項睿 drawn from Sòng-Yuán paediatric formularies.
- Deletion of shénxiān fúěr 神仙服餌 material. The original Zǒnglù dedicated its closing three juǎn (198–200) to Daoist longevity-recipes (immortal-elixir ingestion); Chéng excised these as “superstitious and unsuited to clinical practice.”
- Consolidation of theoretical-introduction material. The original Zǒnglù’s opening Shèngjì jīng 聖濟經 by Huīzōng was reduced; Chéng kept only the diagnostically-relevant chapters.
- Clinical-recipe selection. From the Zǒnglù’s ~20,000 recipes, Chéng retained those he and Xiàng Ruì had personally tested or that had become standard in late-Míng / early-Qīng practice.
Prefaces
The hxwd transmission carries no extended preface block. The transmitted edition is the abridged practical reference; the original Zǒnglù prefaces remain attached to KR3ed012.
Abstract
Chéng Lín 程林 (no biographical detail beyond his native Xiūníng 休寧 and his zì Yúnlái 雲來 survives in standard biographical sources; not in CBDB) was an early-Qīng physician of the Ānhuī medical milieu. His editorial work on the Zǒnglù belongs to the Qīng-era classicising medicine that sought to recover, edit, and clinically reactivate Sòng medical texts after the disruptions of the Yuán-Ming transition. His abridgement was the form in which the Shèngjì zǒnglù circulated most widely in Qīng pharmacological practice; the full 200-juǎn original was rare and expensive, while Chéng’s Zuǎnyào was a portable practical reference.
The Zuǎnyào therefore stands as both a textual witness (it preserves variant readings of Zǒnglù recipes attested in Chéng’s pre-Dàdé copies that may not appear in the modern Dàdé-derived edition) and a clinical document (it captures which Zǒnglù recipes had remained in active use in late-imperial practice). Modern critical work on the Zǒnglù routinely collates Chéng’s Zuǎnyào against the Dàdé and Yǒnglè dàdiǎn witnesses.
The date bracket 1668–1681 is the conventional Qīng-era Kāngxī working window for Chéng Lín; precise composition dates are not preserved.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
- Goldschmidt, Asaf. 2009. The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200. Routledge. — references Chéng’s Zuǎnyào as the most circulated form of the Zǒnglù in late-imperial pharmacology.
- Bao Y. and X.K. Chen (eds). 2002. Shèngjì zǒnglù jiào-zhù běn 聖濟總錄校注本. — modern critical edition; collates the Zuǎnyào against full-text witnesses.
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature on Chéng Lín specifically.
Other points of interest
Chéng Lín’s editorial deletion of Daoist fúěr (immortal-elixir) material is one of the clearest documented cases of Qīng-era classical-medical purgation of Daoist religious-medical content from the inherited corpus, a process that culminated in the Yīzōng jīnjiàn (KR3ed074) editors of 1742.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- Parent work: KR3ed012 Shèngjì zǒnglù.
- 聖濟總錄纂要 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB