達生編

Dáshēng biān 達生編

Treatise on Easy Childbirth by 亟齋居士 (Jízhāi Jūshì, “Lay Buddhist Jizhai”, fl. early 18th c.)

About the work

A three-juǎn popular obstetrical handbook of 1715 (Kāngxī 54) — by far the most widely-circulated and most-reprinted Qīng obstetrical text. Its central thesis is plainly stated: childbirth is a natural process and the key to safe delivery is to allow labour to follow its own innate rhythms (“臨產但上床安睡，切忌用力 — comparable to a brooding hen, which knows of its own accord when to peck open its egg”). The work’s plain-language register, addressed to both men and women alike, distinguishes it sharply from the more technical fùkē literature, and made it the principal vehicle by which Qīng-period obstetrical orthodoxy reached lay readers. Its core conceptual repertoire — shuì-zhe shēng (“birthing in one’s sleep”), shēnghuà tāng as universal post-partum master-formula, the catalogue of yùnfù wǔjì (Five Things the Pregnant Woman Must Avoid) — became standard furniture of Chinese popular medical culture and is still echoed in contemporary lay obstetrical writing.

Abstract

First published in 1715. The hxwd recension preserves the typical extended Qīng edition: the core text in three juǎn on the huáitāi (pregnancy), bǎochǎn (parturition), and quányīng (neonate-care) sections; plus the Bǎochì biān 保赤編 appendix on neonate qífēng tetanus and fēizhèng miscellanies. The text is widely reprinted from 1715 onwards by charitable printers across the empire — the explicit merit-accumulation (gōngdé) framework of the work, in which donors are recorded as having printed 100, 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, or 3000 copies in exchange for divine favour, drove its diffusion to a degree no other obstetrical work approaches. Hinrichs & Barnes (2013, p. 161, drawing on Wu 2010) call it “one of the most famous and ubiquitous medical works of the Qing.”

The author identifies himself only by the studio-pseudonym Jízhāi Jūshì 亟齋居士 (“Lay Buddhist of the Studio of Anxious Concern”), in conformity with the Buddhist charity-printing ethic — Yi-Li Wu (2010) describes him as a lower-level literatus. The author’s secular identity is not securely established. The dating window for the original text composition is therefore set to 1715, the date of first printing.

The work is notable for its synthesis of three strands: (i) Zhū Dānxī obstetrical pharmacology (Āntāi yǐn and Shēnghuà tāng as master-formulae); (ii) Buddhist-laity ethical instruction on the avoidance of meat-eating, the prohibition of sexual congress during pregnancy, jièshā compassion for animals, and the cultivation of merit; (iii) practical neonate first-aid (the qífēng tetanus protocols, the masticatory cleansing of the newborn’s mouth, the umbilical-cord cauterisation method). The Dáshēng biān is the single most-cited prior work in the late-Qīng obstetrical literature — both the Tāichǎn mìshū (KR3ei054) and Hèchuān Genetsu’s Sǎn lùn (KR3ei062) define their methodological position in explicit dialogue with it.

The Japanese obstetrician Hèchuān Genetsu 賀川玄悅 (1700–1777) read the Dáshēng biān and rejected its quietist stance — his Sǎn lùn 產論 (KR3ei062) of 1765, by contrast, advocates active obstetrical manipulation (the huíshēng (“回生”) and gōubāo (“鉤胞”) manoeuvres) and explicitly condemns the zhèndài abdominal-binding promoted in the Chinese tradition that includes the Dáshēng biān.

Translations and research

• Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 — central monograph; chapter 6 contains extended analysis of the Dáshēng biān’s reception.
• T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds., Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 161, 184 — characterises the work as “one of the most famous and ubiquitous medical works of the Qing.”
• Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 — pre-history of the genre.
• No standalone English translation located.

Other points of interest

The text is cited by Hèchuān Genetsu’s son-in-law Okamoto Kishi 岡本起 in the Sǎn lùn yì 產論翼 (KR3ei066) of 1775, where its abdominal-binding doctrine is directly criticised — “I lament that no one has been able to cross the sea to tell those people of their error” (恨無人航海，為彼民一告此者耳). This is one of the few documented points of Sino-Japanese obstetrical exchange in the early-modern period.

Links

• 海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書 (Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū).
• 達生編 jicheng.tw
• Kanseki DB