Qíxiào Jiǎnbiàn Liángfāng 奇效簡便良方
Extraordinarily Efficacious Simple-and-Convenient Good Formulas by 丁堯臣 (Dīng Yáochén, fl. mid-19th c., Qīng); reprinted with revisions in 1924 by the Jílín Guāngyùtáng 光裕堂
About the work
A late-Qīng popular emergency-and-clinical formulary in 4 juǎn, organised by body-region (tóumiàn head and face, yǎnmù eyes, kǒu mouth, yānhóu throat, zhītǐ limbs, bèijí emergency rescue, xiǎoér paediatrics, etc.), giving simple-and-convenient recipes drawn from many sources. The work is in the same popular-formulary stream as KR3ed103 Jíjiù biànfāng, KR3ed108 Yànfāng xīn biān, and KR3ed109 Jǐshì shényàn liángfāng — anonymous- or modestly-attributed compilations distributed by shàntǎng (charitable societies) and republished repeatedly through the late-Qīng and Republican periods.
Prefaces
Postface (bá), signed at the Guāngyùtáng 光裕堂 of Jílín 吉林, summer 1924 (民國十三年甲子夏曆五月).
“Medicine is the discipline of life-and-death; what is precious is the ability to carefully discern the pulse-pattern and disease-mechanism, and only then to match the syndrome and administer the drug. — But the arts of [Biǎn] Què and [Huá] Tuó are extinct, and good physicians are difficult to find: people often die not of the disease but of the physician. How sad! And in the poor villages and remote countryside, those who know medicine are even rarer; if there is one or two profit-greedy mediocre fellows, how can one expect them to save lives — that they not actively kill people, at the moment between survival and extinction, is already a stroke of luck.
“This book’s publication is truly convenient for the poor, remote villages. Whenever illness arises suddenly — whether the physician cannot be called in or the medicines cannot be readied — applying the formulas-as-treatment, they each yield their effect. Rescuing people’s suffering, none is better than this. But because the formulas have not been widely circulated, we — colleagues of one mind — have together undertaken this fresh printing for public use.
“However, in comparison with the original copy, we have made slight additions and corrections. In particular, all those [recipes] that involve the taking of animals’ lives to cure human disease — whenever there was another formula available to replace them, we have removed them. For the cause of our own survival to harm those other lives’ lives, how can the heart bear it? Heaven’s way delights in life; the Buddha’s teaching is compassionate; the workings of cause-and-effect retribution are not off by a hair…”
The 1924 reprinters explicitly mark the work’s textual revisions: the deletion of all animal-sacrifice formulas for which substitutes were available, on Buddhist-cum-Confucian moral grounds. This editorial intervention substantially distinguishes the 1924 Guāngyùtáng edition from earlier woodblock printings of the same work.
Abstract
A late-Qīng popular formulary by Dīng Yáochén of whose biography little is known beyond the work’s title-line. The original Qīng publication is not precisely datable; given the work’s circulation pattern, an earliest composition window of approximately 1846–1880 is plausible. The KR text is the 1924 Guāngyùtáng reprint, which postface clearly marks as a revised republication with animal-sacrifice recipes deleted for moral reasons.
The 1924 edition is of particular interest as a documented example of Buddhist-influenced editorial revision of late-Qīng popular pharmacology: the Guāngyùtáng circle, evidently of explicit Buddhist orientation (the postface invokes “the Buddha’s teaching is compassionate” — fófǎ cíbēi — as the editorial principle), systematically removed recipes calling for animal slaughter where substitutes existed. This documents a hitherto-under-studied dimension of Republican-period popular medical publishing: the moral-religious editing of inherited formularies in line with revivalist Buddhist sensibilities of the 1920s.
The work circulated in the early-Republican Manchurian and North-Chinese popular-charity book trade; the Guāngyùtáng of Jílín was one of the principal Manchurian Buddhist charitable publishers of the period.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located on this specific recension. The genre is treated in:
- Bian, He. Know Your Remedies (Princeton, 2020).
- Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949 — for the religious-philanthropic publishing context.
Other points of interest
The 1924 Guāngyùtáng postface’s explicit defense of non-violent pharmacological reform (“for the cause of our own survival to harm those other lives — how can the heart bear it?”) is an interesting Republican-era datum on the interpenetration of Buddhist ethics and popular pharmacology. The postface is rhetorically a bá but functionally an editorial-policy statement.
Links
- See 丁堯臣 for biographical record.
- Cognate Qīng popular formularies: KR3ed103, KR3ed108, KR3ed109.
- 奇效簡便良方 (jicheng.tw)
- Kanseki DB