Chuánxìn Shìyòng Fāng 傳信適用方
Trust-Worthy and Practically Useful Recipes by 吳彥夔 (Wú Yánkuí, hào Zhuō’ān 拙菴, fl. 淳熙庚子 1180, 南宋)
About the work
The Chuánxìn shìyòng fāng in 2 juǎn is a Southern-Sòng physician’s recipe collection completed in 淳熙庚子 (1180). Wú Yánkuí’s distinctive editorial feature is that each prescription is accompanied by an explicit source-transmitter attribution (傳自某人), making the work an unusual witness to Sòng-period recipe-circulation networks: the recipes are not anonymous but indexed by the person who transmitted them to Wú. The collection includes contributions from senior officials (e.g. Xīngguó sīfǎ Jiāng Tāo 興國司法姜濤), prefects, hermits, and physicians, plus a 38-recipe appendix by Xià Zǐyì 夏子益 covering unusual conditions.
The work was little circulated in Sòng and Yuán; Mǎ Duānlín’s Wénxiàn tōngkǎo records it under the corrupted title Chuándào shìyòng fāng 傳道適用方 (a 道 / 信 transmissional error). Chén Zhènsūn’s Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí preserves the correct title. The work survived in private collections through the Ming and was incorporated into the Sìkù quánshū in the abridged 2-juǎn form.
Prefaces
The hxwd transmission opens directly into the recipe text without an extended preface section; the source-transmitter attribution structure of the work supplies the editorial framing recipe-by-recipe.
Abstract
Wú Yánkuí 吳彥夔 (hào Zhuō’ān 拙菴, “Clumsy Hermit,” fl. 1180; not in CBDB) was a Southern-Sòng physician whose biographical record is entirely confined to the 1180 prefaces and colophons of his own work. His self-deprecating Zhuō’ān sobriquet — borrowed from Sū Shì’s 蘇軾’s well-known Zhuō essays — places him in the literati-medical cultural register of the late Northern – early Southern Sòng transition.
The work’s significance is principally prosopographic and bibliographic: its source-transmitter attributions document otherwise unrecorded Sòng-era physicians, officials, and hermits as recipe-contributors, providing a partial map of the social network of pharmaceutical knowledge in late-12th-century South China. Several of the contributors named — Jiāng Tāo of Xīngguó 興國, Lǐ Yī 李醫 of Lóngxīng 隆興 (mentioned in the recipe for Wēnnǎo sǎn 溫腦散 for migraine), Xià Zǐyì (whose 38-recipe appendix is attached) — are otherwise unattested in the standard medical histories.
The recipe content covers standard internal medicine (general “all-elements” stroke and paralysis remedies, headache, epilepsy, rheumatism) with a strong emphasis on fùzǐ (aconite) and cǎowū (草烏) preparations. The signature recipe Dàshèng yīlì jīndān 大聖一粒金丹 (also Bǎomìng jīndān 保命金丹) for general windstroke is a classic Sòng aconite-cinnabar-musk-frankincense polypharmacy preparation.
Translations and research
- Hé Shíxī 何時希 (coll.). 1959. Chuánxìn shìyòng fāng 傳信適用方 (punctuated edition).
- Goldschmidt, Asaf. 2009. The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200. Routledge.
- Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §41.3.2.
Other points of interest
The recipe-attribution format (“傳自某人”) of the Chuánxìn shìyòng fāng is a useful contrastive case to the Sòng / Yuán anonymous-recipe tradition (where recipes circulate without explicit human attribution). It documents the social anchoring of pharmaceutical knowledge in a way that most Sòng formularies obscure.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- Wikipedia (zh): 傳信適用方.
- 傳信適用方 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB