Jīnzhēn mìchuán 金針秘傳
Secret Transmission of the Golden Needle by 方慎庵 Fāng Shèn’ān (撰)
About the work
A single-juan early Republican-period acupuncture manual by 方慎庵 Fāng Shèn’ān (1893–1962, of Sūzhōu 蘇州), based on his family’s late-Qīng acupuncture transmission and on his own decades of clinical practice. The opening essay — “Lùn zhēnjiǔ xué zhī yuānyuán jí zhēnchuán zhī nándé” 論針灸學之淵源及真傳之難得 (“On the origins of acupuncture and moxibustion, and the difficulty of acquiring the genuine transmission”) — gives a long historical survey of acupuncture from the Sùwèn and Nànjīng through 皇甫謐 Huángfǔ Mì’s Jiǎyǐ jīng (KR3ee005), 王惟一 Wáng Wéiyī’s bronze figure (KR3ee056), the Yuán-Míng acupuncture revival, and the late-Qīng / Republican decline; Fāng’s polemical claim is that the genuine acupuncture lineage was almost lost in the late Qīng — the imperial Yīxuéguǎn having abolished its acupuncture department in 1822 — and that the surviving “secret transmission” of the jīnzhēn (golden needle) survives only in a handful of southern Jiāngnán family lineages, including his own.
Abstract
The Jīnzhēn mìchuán was composed between Fāng Shèn’ān’s first publications in 1928 and the Sino-Japanese war disruption of 1937; the precise dating is uncertain but the work is widely cited in the Republican period and was first lithographed in Shanghai in the late 1920s or early 1930s. The catalog meta dynasty 清 should be read in the loose sense “Late-imperial / early Republican Jiāngnán” — Fāng himself was born under the Qīng (1893) and lived well into the People’s Republic. The text consists of three parts: (1) a long apologetic essay defending the historicity and clinical efficacy of acupuncture against modern critics; (2) a systematic presentation of point-locations, indications, and Fāng’s family manipulation techniques; (3) a substantial chapter of clinical cases (醫案) drawn from Fāng’s Sūzhōu practice. The manual is one of the principal Republican-era sources on which the post-1949 reconstitution of Chinese acupuncture education was based.
Translations and research
- Wú Yán 吳燕 et al., “Fāng Shèn’ān Jīnzhēn mìchuán xuéshù tèdiǎn yánjiū” 方慎庵《金針秘傳》學術特點研究, Zhōnghuá zhōngyīyào xuékān 中華中醫藥學刊 (multiple issues, 2000s).
- Scheid, Volker, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Seattle: Eastland Press, 2007) — for the Republican-period lineage transmission context in which Fāng worked.
Other points of interest
The Jīnzhēn mìchuán preserves the technical vocabulary of the late-Qīng Sūzhōu acupuncture milieu and is one of the principal modern witnesses for the “Cāngzhōu 滄洲 / Wújùn 吳郡 school” of manipulation technique.