Mìchuán Liú Bówēn jiācáng jiēgǔ jīnchuāng jìnfāng 秘傳劉伯溫家藏接骨金瘡禁方
Secretly Transmitted Forbidden Prescriptions for Bone-Setting and Wounds from the Family Library of Liú Bówēn attributed to 劉基 Liú Jī (Liú Bówēn 劉伯溫, 1311–1375); preface by 體仁子 Tǐrénzǐ.
About the work
A single-juǎn late-Míng manual of military traumatology — wound-medicine (jīnchuāng 金瘡), bone-setting (jiēgǔ 接骨), and the treatment of fall-blows (diēpū 跌僕) and combat-strike injuries — transmitted under the prestige-name of the early-Míng founding-counsellor 劉基 Liú Jī (Liú Bówēn). The preface (the only paratext preserved in _000.txt) is dated Xuāndé 2 (1427) and signed by an otherwise unknown 體仁子 Tǐrénzǐ, who recounts being given the manuscript by Liú’s descendant 松石翁 Sōngshí Wēng. The bulk of the text is a head-to-foot catalogue of acute injuries (skull-fracture, broken throat, eviscerated intestines, dislocated joints, sword-wounds), each followed by manipulation, dressing, splinting, and herbal prescriptions for “upper-, middle-, lower-body” mòyào 末藥 powders, a signature jiēgǔ dān 接骨丹 bone-setting elixir, internal/external anaesthetics (máyào 麻藥), and the school’s three core dressings Táohuā sǎn 桃花散 (haemostatic), Hēilóng sǎn 黑龍散 (closing/anti-inflammatory), and Fēngliú sǎn 風流散 (filling open wounds).
Prefaces
The preface frames the work as imperial-secret military medicine of the founding Hóngwǔ era: Tǐrénzǐ explains that after the Míng conquest of the Mongols, Tàizǔ 太祖 (the Hóngwǔ emperor 朱元璋) — pained at his soldiers’ wounds and “tasting their suffering as if cut from his own skin” — had assembled the empire’s wandering specialists in bone-setting, arrow-extraction (chūzú 出鏃), internal injury, and jīnchuāng prescription-medicine, tested their methods, and compiled the verified recipes into a single restricted register kept inside the palace (jìnzhōng 禁中) for use in war. Liú Jī, “as a counsellor in state affairs of weight, with sovereign and minister bound as fish to water,” was permitted to keep a copy at home; this copy descended through the Liú clan to 松石翁 Sōngshí Wēng, with whom the preface-writer had been a friend for “several decades.” On a casual conversation about medicine the descendant produced “a volume of forbidden prescriptions … not lightly shown to anyone, but used always with marvellous result” and passed it to Tǐrénzǐ, who declares his intent to “treasure it for generations and not lose it.” The title-word jìn 禁 (“forbidden”) is glossed against the alternative bì 秘 (“secret/closed”): the book is named jìn because it issued from the palace’s jìnzhōng 禁中 (Forbidden Precinct), not because it is to be withheld from circulation.
Abstract
The Liú-Bówēn attribution is pseudepigraphic. Liú Jī’s standard bibliographies (Míng shǐ 128; Goodrich-Fang 1:932-938) record no medical writings; the Sìkù preface to his collected works (KR4e0005) and the SBCK 《太師誠意伯劉文成公集》 (KR4e0006) both confine his corpus to statecraft, divination, and belles-lettres. The work belongs instead to the well-attested late-imperial genre of military-tradition shāngkē mìchuán 傷科秘傳 manuscripts that circulated under prestige-attributions (cf. KR3el002 Jiēgǔ shǒufǎ, KR3el003 Jīnchuāng mìchuán jìnfāng, KR3el008 Shàolín zhēnchuán shāngkē mìfāng). The earliest defensible date is Xuāndé 2 (1427), the date of the preface; terminus ante quem is the fall of the Míng (1644), since the framing rhetoric (“our reigning Tàizǔ Gāo huángdì 我朝太祖高皇帝”) presupposes the Míng dynasty. The composition window is here given as 1427–1644.
The text is structurally a single continuous prose stream rather than a juan-divided treatise. It opens with rules for diagnosis-prognosis (the “five fatal signs” of trauma: insensibility with shivering; fracture of the tiānzhù 天柱 vertebra or tàiyáng 太陽 temples; severed perineum or scrotum; injury to the alimentary tract; sweat “running like oil” with helpless screaming), then proceeds head-to-foot: skull-crush, throat-laceration, evisceration (with the famously colourful manoeuvre of having a bystander spit cold water in the patient’s face so that the shock makes the protruding bowel retract), severed fingers, broken ribs, dislocated shoulders, blows to the “blood-sea” (xuèhǎi 血海) acupoints and so on. A long doggerel Yòngyào gē 用藥歌 (closing with the line “as for whoever composed this song, it was 張良 Zhāng Liáng of the Hàn court”) and a substantial formulary of more than fifty prescriptions follow. The systematic three-fold partition (upper-body / middle-body / lower-body powdered drugs mòyào 末藥, with parallel decoctions) and the dressing-trio Táohuā sǎn / Hēilóng sǎn / Fēngliú sǎn are characteristic of the late-Míng martial-arts shāngkē school, and the same triad recurs in KR3el002, KR3el003, and KR3el007 — strongly suggesting a shared transmission stratum.
The KR-edition transmits the text via the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫善本古籍叢書 (漢學文典) re-print of an overseas-preserved manuscript.
Translations and research
- The text is unstudied in Western-language scholarship.
- For the broader martial-arts wound-medicine genre to which it belongs see Hinrichs and Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard, 2013), pp. 326–328 (“Therapeutic Massage, Dit Da Jow, and Bone Setting”) — situates the genre in the lineage-protected family-knowledge tradition of military dǎ-shāng practice.
- No standalone modern critical edition or monographic study located.
Other points of interest
The Yòngyào gē 用藥歌 attribution to 張良 Zhāng Liáng (the founding-Hàn strategist) — paralleling the work’s main attribution to 劉基 Liú Bówēn (the founding-Míng strategist) — is an instructive specimen of the genre’s prestige-economics: both attributions claim that the secret of healing battle-wounds is the secret transmission of the founding strategist of the dynasty.