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銅人腧穴鍼灸圖經

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Text ID
KR3ee056
Date
1026–1027
Dynasty
宋

Tóngrén shūxué zhēnjiǔ tújīng 銅人腧穴鍼灸圖經

Illustrated Canon of Acupoints for Acupuncture and Moxibustion on the Bronze Mannequin by 王惟一 Wáng Wéiyī (奉敕撰)

About the work

The Tóngrén shūxué zhēnjiǔ tújīng in three juan is the foundational Northern-Sòng acupuncture monograph commissioned by 宋仁宗 Sòng Rénzōng 仁宗 of the Shàngyào fèngyù 尚藥奉御 (Imperial Pharmacy Officer) 王惟一 Wáng Wéiyī (fl. 1023–1031), compiled between 1023 and 1026 and presented to the throne on the rénchén day of the 10th month of Tiānshèng 5 (= October–November 1027) alongside the two life-sized bronze acupuncture mannequins (the tóngrén 銅人) that the commission also produced. Following the imperial commission, the Hànlín Scholar 夏竦 Xià Sǒng wrote the preface, the Tóngrén mannequins were placed one at the Imperial Medical Court (Tàiyī jú 太醫局) and one at the Rénjì diàn 仁濟殿 of the Dà Xiàngguó Temple, and the textual companion was printed and distributed widely (王應麟 Wáng Yīnglín’s KR3k0032 Yùhǎi preserves the chronology). The hxwd source files for KR3ee056 — like those for KR3ee055 and KR3ee057 — are placeholder-only, so the present note draws on the well-attested external record.

The three-juan structure of the original presentation is the most important formal feature: juan 1, the twelve regular channels (shǒu tàiyīn fèi through zú juéyīn gān); juan 2, the Conception and Governing vessels (rèn 任 and dū 督) plus the channel-collateral system; juan 3, an indexed catalog of acupoints organized by body region (head, neck, chest, abdomen, back, extremities) with their precise locations in cùn, their channel affiliations, indications, and proper needling depths and moxa-cone counts. The text covers 354 named acupoints; the Tóngrén mannequin tradition gave canonical authority to the point-locations Wáng Wéiyī specified.

Abstract

The Tóngrén shūxué zhēnjiǔ tújīng is the most consequential single work in the post-Táng history of Chinese acupuncture. Its significance is fourfold: (1) it is the first imperially-commissioned standardization of acupoint location and indication, replacing the divergent and contested transmissions of the Hàn-Suí-Táng tradition (notably the Huángdì Míngtáng jīng 黃帝明堂經 and the Zhēnjiǔ jiǎyǐ jīng KR3e0005) with a single state-authorized map; (2) it accompanied and authorized the two bronze acupuncture mannequins of 1027, the most famous medical pedagogical instrument in Chinese history, used for centuries to examine candidates for the Imperial Medical Court (the famous 周密 Zhōu Mì Qídōng yěyǔ KR3j0134 description: the mannequin sealed with yellow wax over the points, filled with water, and the student passing only if his needle drew the water out — see KR3e0017 for the full anecdote); (3) it became, through its inscriptions on the two stone steles later erected in the Kāifēng Dàxiàngguó Temple precinct (1030, by imperial command), one of only a handful of medical texts ever to receive jīngshí 經石 stele-inscription status, parallel to the Confucian Wǔjīng steles — fixing the standardized text in permanent stone form; (4) it is the textual basis for acupuncture pedagogy for the next nine centuries, retransmitted through the Jīn (1186) augmented recension KR3ee057 and through countless Yuán-Míng-Qīng reprints and commentaries.

The bronze mannequins themselves had a turbulent later history: one is reported to have been carried north as Jīn plunder following the 1126 fall of Kāifēng; the other was placed in the southern Sòng capital at Línān 臨安 and survived into the Yuán, when it was likewise lost or melted down. A Míng replica was made under the Zhèngtǒng 正統 reign (1436–1449) and survives in modern collections, with subsequent Qīng copies. The textual record in the Tújīng itself is therefore the principal evidence for the original 1027 standardization.

The work is also famous for its two stone-stele inscriptions at the Dàxiàngguó Temple — paired stelae carved in 1030 (per the Sòng huìyào jígǎo) at imperial command, fragmentary remnants of which were recovered in the 20th century from the Kāifēng archaeological site and are preserved in the Henan Provincial Museum. These fragments allow direct collation of the SKQS recension against the Sòng-period stone-engraved text — Mǎ Jìxīng’s Tóngrén shūxué zhēnjiǔ tújīng kǎo gives the principal collation.

The catalog meta for KR3ee056 lists no juan count; the historical record is unambiguous that the work as presented in 1027 was in three juan (Wáng Yīnglín, Yùhǎi; 晁公武 Cháo Gōngwǔ, Dúshū hòu zhì). The seven-juan KR3e0017 / KR3ee055 versions represent a later editorial subdivision of the same text.

Translations and research

  • Goldschmidt, Asaf. The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200, London: Routledge, 2009 — esp. ch. 3 on the bronze-man and Wáng Wéi-yī’s commission.
  • Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham. Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
  • Hinrichs, T.J. and Barnes, Linda L. (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, esp. 105.
  • Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Tóng-rén shū-xué zhēn-jiǔ tú-jīng kǎo 銅人腧穴鍼灸圖經考 — standard modern textual study; collates the SKQS recension against the recovered Dà-xiàngguó stele fragments and the 1186 Jīn-augmented edition.
  • Huáng Lóngxiáng 黃龍祥, Zhōngguó zhēnjiǔ shǐ tú-jiàn 中國針灸史圖鑒, 2 vols., Qīngdǎo: Qīngdǎo Chūbǎnshè, 2003 — standard mainland history of acupuncture, with extensive treatment of the bronze-man and the Tújīng.
  • Despeux, Catherine. “The Body Revealed: The Contribution of Forensic Medicine to Knowledge and Representation of the Body in China.” In Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China, ed. Bray, Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, and Métailié, Leiden: Brill, 2007 — treats the mannequin in the context of Sòng medical visualization.

Other points of interest

The opening of the Tújīng — “the bronze-man is the model, the diagrams are the supporting evidence, the text carries the meaning” (銅人為法，圖為證，文為義) — is a striking statement of the three-medium pedagogical theory the work embodies: a three-dimensional metal instrument (the mannequin), a two-dimensional visual rendering (the diagrams), and a one-dimensional textual exposition (the prose), each medium giving authority to the others. This is one of the most articulate statements of image-and-text medical pedagogy from any premodern tradition.

The two Dàxiàngguó stone steles of 1030 — set up in the Kāifēng temple precinct so that travelers, scholars, and medical students could consult the standardized point-list at any time without owning the printed book — represent one of the most ambitious public-information installations of the Northern Sòng. Their partial recovery in the 20th century gave the modern field its only first-hand witness to the original Sòng-period text untransformed by later editorial subdivision.

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