Yǎnkē mìjué 眼科秘訣
Secret Instructions of Ophthalmology ultimately attributed to 孫思邈 Sūn Sīmiǎo (Sūn Zhēnrén 孫真人), transmitted in a chain through the otherwise unattested Dàpiáo qīméi xiānshēng 大瓢七眉先生 (“Great-Gourd Seven-Eyebrows Master”) → 王覆萬 Wáng Fùwàn → 馬雲從 Mǎ Yúncóng (the actual early-Qīng compiler), and printed under the patronage of 隋平 Suí Píng (hào Kūntiě 昆鐵) of Dōngwǔ 東武.
About the work
A two-juǎn practical-physician ophthalmology of the early Qīng, redacted by the Shāndōng physician 馬雲從 Mǎ Yúncóng from a manuscript he received from his teacher 王覆萬 Wáng Fùwàn in Jiāngnán. Following the Lóngmù lùn 龍木論 family-tradition layout (cf. KR3em003), it treats the seventy-two ophthalmological syndromes (孫真人眼科總理七十二症秘訣) one by one, each with cause, signs, prognosis, internal decoction, eye-drop, and dressing. The internal idiom is unambiguously Qīng folk-physician — short, paratactic, recipe-paired, with frequent first-person clinical anecdotes (“一時或暴赤之發，多因失調…用沖和湯”) — and the work is one of the principal witnesses to the way the Lóngmù lùn / SūnZhēnrén corpus was actually being applied in eighteenth-century Shāndōng popular practice. The signature prescriptions are the Chōnghé tāng 沖和湯 (for sudden red-eye), Yùlíng / Xuánlíng shèngyào diǎn 玄靈聖藥點 (a tùnǎo lúgānshí 兔腦爐甘石 calamine-based eye-drop), and a sequence of differentially-named jīngmíng / huánjīng internal prescriptions. The work is sometimes circulated together with a companion Yǎnkē chǎnwēi 眼科闡微 (KR3em008) — the preface by Suí Píng documents the two were printed together.
Prefaces
Two prefaces survive in _000.txt. The first is by 隋平 Suí Píng (hào Kūntiě 昆鐵, of Qiānshèng 千乘 / Zhūféng 諸馮), dated gēngchén (almost certainly 1700, the early-Kāngxī period in which the relevant figures’ floruits align). Suí Píng recounts how he had heard of Mǎ Yúncóng (zì Yúncóng 雲從, of Wéixī 濰西) as a young man, and met him decades later — “an old man already fallen on hard times” — who explained that he had had to abandon the imperial-examination track because of an eye disease that left him “near to blindness.” Mǎ then narrates a frame-story: in his desperation he prayed at the Chénghuáng 城隍 city-god shrine and was given in a dream four bound fascicles “bean-green in colour, with the punctuation marked in vermilion”; the next morning a wandering Jiāngnán physician named 王覆萬 Wáng Fùwàn arrived and presented him a manuscript identical to what he had seen in the dream — Sūn Zhēnrén Yǎnkē mìjué. Mǎ cured himself, then cured others, but lacked the funds to print the work; Suí Píng supplied the print-fund “from his own inkstone purse” (硯田金) and saw the book through to publication.
The second preface is by 李煥章 Lǐ Huànzhāng (zì Xiàngxiān 象先, of Qiānshèng 千乘; born 1614). Lǐ frames Mǎ’s reception of the text as a piece of providential transmission (“非有大功德者，弗能求之” — only those of great merit can attain such a thing) and explicitly emphasises that the work descends ultimately from Sūn Zhēnrén (孫思邈 Sūn Sīmiǎo).
Abstract
The Sūn Sīmiǎo attribution is pseudepigraphic, of the same prestige-economical pattern as KR3em002 Míngmù zhìbǎo and KR3em011 Yínhǎi jīngwēi. The intermediate transmitters — Dàpiáo qīméi xiānshēng 大瓢七眉先生 (literally “Great-Gourd-Seven-Eyebrows Master,” a stylised wandering-immortal figure) and 王覆萬 Wáng Fùwàn — are not attested in any other source; they are the late-imperial-Daoist literary scaffolding of the work’s “secret transmission” claim. The actually-historical compiler is the early-Qīng Shāndōng physician 馬雲從 Mǎ Yúncóng, and the actually-historical funder of the print edition is 隋平 Suí Píng of Dōngwǔ. Internal evidence (the Suí Píng preface’s mention of his having taken the Qīngzhōu 青州 examinations forty years earlier as a tóngzǐ 童子, his contemporary Lǐ Huànzhāng’s birth-date of 1614 placing him at 86 in 1700, and Lǐ’s reference to “皇清丁君” — the use of huáng Qīng 皇清 marking late-Kāngxī rhetoric) places the composition window at the late seventeenth century, most plausibly between 1660 and 1700.
The textual content is the standard Lóngmù lùn seventy-two-syndrome catalogue, but expressed in markedly more colloquial Qīng-period clinical idiom than the comparable KR3em002 Míngmù zhìbǎo or KR3em003 Mìchuán yǎnkē Lóngmù lùn. Each of the seventy-two entries opens with the syndromic name, gives an aetiological gloss, and proceeds straight to a numbered prescription with operating instructions (decoctions, eye-drops, hot compresses, blade-procedures for pterygium, ní jiāo 泥膠 dressings). The work is therefore best read as a Qīng-period practical adaptation of the Míng-period Lóngmù lùn compendia — the symptomatic taxonomy is preserved, but the prescriptions have been substantially updated and the prose simplified for popular-physician use.
Translations and research
- No Western-language translation or substantial study has been located.
- Modern critical edition: included in 鄭金生 (ed.), 《海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書》 (Renmin Weisheng, 2003 ff.), where the Yǎnkē mìjué is typically printed together with its companion volume KR3em008 Yǎnkē chǎnwēi 眼科闡微 (the Mìjué + Chǎnwēi pair being the standard Mǎ Yúncóng ophthalmological corpus).
- No further substantial secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The preface narrative — recovery of a “secret transmission” via dream-prayer at a Chénghuáng 城隍 shrine, followed by an itinerant Jiāngnán physician arriving the next morning with the matching manuscript — is a textbook specimen of the late-imperial-Daoist “xíngjīn ér chuán” 行金而傳 (secret-transmission-by-providence) trope. It also doubles as a credential for the printer Suí Píng, who as the temporal patron and second-prefacer effectively underwrites the manuscript’s authenticity. Mǎ Yúncóng’s own report that he was forced to abandon the examination track because of an eye disease — which the manuscript then cured — is the structural inverse of the yī rǔ rù shì 醫儒入仕 ideology of the Qīng literate physician: blocked from office by eye-disease, he recovers via secret transmission and becomes the local medical authority.