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新刊補註銅人腧穴鍼灸圖經

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Text ID
KR3ee057
Date
1186–1186
Dynasty
金

Xīnkān bǔzhù Tóngrén shūxué zhēnjiǔ tújīng 新刊補註銅人腧穴鍼灸圖經

Newly Printed and Supplemented Illustrated Canon of Acupoints for Acupuncture and Moxibustion on the Bronze Mannequin originally by 王惟一 Wáng Wéiyī (原著, Northern Sòng, 1027); newly cut and supplemented by 閉邪瞶叟 Bìxiéguìsǒu (增補, Jīn, 1186)

About the work

The five-juan Jīn-period augmented and annotated recension of Wáng Wéiyī’s KR3ee056 Tóngrén shūxué zhēnjiǔ tújīng — the principal post-Sòng witness to the bronze-man acupuncture tradition and one of the most important transmitted forms of the Sòng standardization. The augmented edition was cut and printed in Jīn Dàdìng 26 = 1186 by an editor who signs himself Bìxiéguìsǒu 閉邪瞶叟 (“The Closed-Off-Evil Blind Old Man”) — a transparent self-deprecating pen-name whose civil identity is not preserved. The hxwd source file for KR3ee057 is placeholder-only (only the header #+TITLE: 新刊補註銅人腧穴鍼灸圖經), so the present note draws on the well-attested external record of the work and its later reception.

The five-juan structure of the Jīn augmented edition adds two new juan to the original three: juan 1–3 reproduce Wáng Wéiyī’s twelve-channel + rèn/dū + body-region original; juan 4 supplies a needling-technique manual with depth-and-angle tables, moxa-count tables, and prohibited-point lists; juan 5 supplies a disease-and-symptom indexed point-list giving the standardized point prescriptions for the principal clinical syndromes. The augmentations are the editor’s own additions, drawing on the Jīn-period acupuncture-pedagogical tradition centred on the Imperial Medical College at Yānjīng 燕京 (modern Beijing).

Abstract

The 1186 Jīn-augmented Xīnkān bǔzhù is one of the two principal pre-modern recensions of the Tóngrén (alongside the SKQS three-juan original KR3ee056 / seven-juan subdivided KR3e0017 / KR3ee055) and is the form in which the Tóngrén tradition continued to circulate in North China after the 1126 fall of Kāifēng and the loss of one of the original bronze mannequins to Jīn plunder. Its significance is threefold: (1) it is the principal Jīn-period transmission of the Sòng acupuncture standardization, demonstrating the continuity of the imperial medical canon across the Jurchen conquest; (2) it adds technical needling-instruction apparatus absent from the 1027 original, making the work usable as a complete acupuncture textbook rather than only a point-location reference; (3) it preserves the woodblock-printed line illustrations of the bronze mannequin and the channel diagrams that became canonical in the Yuán-Míng tradition — the 1909 Liúshì Xuántǒng jìyuán 劉氏宣統紀元 reproduction of the 1186 Jīn edition (held at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge) is the principal modern reproduction (reproduced in Hinrichs & Barnes 2013, fig. 4.2).

The editor’s pseudonym Bìxiéguìsǒu 閉邪瞶叟 has resisted positive identification. Bìxié 閉邪 (“close-off-the-evil”) is a Yìjīng Wényán 文言 commentary phrase (閉邪存其誠 — “close off the evil and preserve one’s sincerity”), and guìsǒu 瞶叟 (“blind old man”) is a topos of self-deprecation used by Jīn scholars under the dynasty. The pseudonym is consistent with an Imperial Medical College physician of the Jīn court who chose to conceal his name when reissuing the canonical Sòng work under the new dynasty — a not-uncommon Jurchen-period editorial practice. The work is registered in the Jīnshǐ Yìwén zhì and in subsequent bibliographies.

The 1909 Xuántǒng photo-lithographic reproduction (Hinrichs & Barnes 2013, 105; Wang Weiyi’s 1023 work … reproduction of 1186 C.E. Jin Dynasty republication … Guichi: Liushi Xuantong jiyuan, 1909) is the standard modern access form; collated by Mǎ Jìxīng against the SKQS recension and the recovered Dàxiàngguó stele fragments. The Jīn augmented edition’s diagrammatic conventions — front-view, back-view, and side-view of the body with point-marks at the canonical 354-point inventory — became the visual standard for all subsequent acupuncture pedagogy and are the direct ancestor of the modern acupuncture chart.

Translations and research

  • Hinrichs, T.J. and Barnes, Linda L. (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, 105 (fig. 4.2 reproduces the 1186 edition’s channel-starting-points diagram).
  • Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Tóng-rén shū-xué zhēn-jiǔ tú-jīng kǎo 銅人腧穴鍼灸圖經考 — collates the Jīn augmented edition against the SKQS recension and the stele fragments; the standard modern textual study.
  • Huáng Lóngxiáng 黃龍祥, Zhōngguó zhēnjiǔ shǐ tú-jiàn 中國針灸史圖鑒, 2 vols., Qīngdǎo: Qīngdǎo Chūbǎnshè, 2003.
  • Goldschmidt, Asaf. The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200, London: Routledge, 2009, esp. ch. 3.
  • Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham. Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Other points of interest

The Jīn 1186 augmented edition is one of the few extant medical works that bear a Jīn-period imprint with full editorial apparatus; the standard Jīnshǐ Yìwén zhì records very few free-standing medical printings under the Jurchens, and the Xīnkān bǔzhù is the chief surviving witness to the imperial-medical-college book culture of the Jīn court at Yānjīng. Its survival into the modern period via Qīng-Republican reproduction is therefore one of the most important pieces of evidence for continuity of medical canon-formation across the Jīn-Yuán transition.

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