目經大成

Mùjīng dàchéng 目經大成

Great Compendium of the Ophthalmological Canon by 黃庭鏡 Huáng Tíngjìng (hào Yāntái 燕臺, zì Bùchén 不塵, zháimíng Pǔyī jū 不塵居 / Cuīshuǐzǐ 濉水子; Mǐnzhōng 閩中 / Shàngráo 上饒, mid-Qīng); the work was first drafted in the Qiánlóng period and underwent four major revisions; printed only posthumously, after the manuscript had come into the hands of his student 鄧學禮 Dèng Xuélǐ (zì Zànfū 贊夫, of Xūjiāng 旴江), and was finally issued in Jiāqìng 10 (1805).

About the work

A six-juǎn Qīng ophthalmological treatise — divided into lùn 論 (theory), zhèng 症 (syndromes), and fāng 方 (prescriptions), each in upper and lower books — by the mid-Qīng physician-scholar Huáng Tíngjìng of Mǐnzhōng (Fújiàn) and Shàngráo (Jiāngxī). The work is the most-revised Qīng ophthalmological monograph: per the prefaces, Huáng drafted it in his late thirties, revised it four times over his lifetime (“四易其稿”), and was never able to print it himself. After his death the manuscript passed to his student Dèng Xuélǐ 鄧學禮 (zì Zànfū 贊夫), who printed it — but under the falsified title 《目科正宗》 Mùkē zhèngzōng and falsely signed as his own work. The family’s later recovery and re-publication of the work (with Dèng’s preface intact but the cover restored) is the principal narrative of the surviving prefaces and is one of the most well-documented cases of Qīng-medical pseudepigraphy and the family’s counter-action against it. The work is theoretically distinctive for its anti-five-wheel-eight-quadrant stance — Huáng (like the Edo physician Honjō Fuichi of KR3em005, though independently) regards the wǔlún bākuò schema as scholastic fiction and organises eye disease around clinical-empirical principles.

Prefaces

Multiple prefaces survive. The principal authorial zìxù 自序 explains Huáng’s path into medicine: as a young scholar he had hoped to enter the examination system (制科), but the death of his father caused him grave emotional distress (xuézhí dùnhuāng 學殖頓荒) and his eyesight nearly failed. Vowing not to be “a useless growth in the universe,” he turned to ophthalmological self-study, eventually apprenticing with the Péifēng shānrén 培風山人 — a “Jiāngxià old-family” practitioner of high reputation — and only after years of trial and the master’s transmission did he feel his technique was complete. He drafted the work in xīnyǒu 辛酉 (most plausibly Qiánlóng 6 = 1741, given his other internal-dating references) and dedicated it to the censor 魏定國 Wèi Dìngguó (魏相國), whose preface follows.

The 孫璧峰瑛 Sūn Bìfēng Yǐng preface (the author’s grandson, who arranged the final 1818 re-publication) is the most historically valuable: it narrates how the manuscript passed from Huáng to his student 鄧學禮 Dèng Xuélǐ — “the Xūjiāng gentleman Dèng Zànfū knocked at the door requesting instruction; my late grandfather, taking joy in fostering talent, did not begrudge giving it to him, taking out what he had written and lending it to him to copy out” — and how, after Huáng’s death, Dèng printed the work in the eleventh year of Jiāqìng (= 1806) under the falsified title Mùkē zhèngzōng and the falsified attribution to himself. When Sūn Bìfēng Yǐng was travelling on the Xìnjiāng 信江 in guǐyǒu / jiǎxū 甲戌 (1814) and met Dèng, he discovered the imposture; he then arranged a counter-edition through his clan-uncle Xiāngquán xiānshēng 香泉先生 of Ráo 饒, who supplied the funds and printers to issue the work under its proper title and attribution. The Xiāngquán 香泉 preface (族祖香泉序), dated Jiāqìng wùyín 嘉慶戊寅 = 1818, formally introduces the corrected edition; the 魏定國 Wèi Dìngguó preface, by the censor (相國) who patronised Huáng in his old age — when Huáng was already 72 and had been granted yīpǐn 一品 honorary rank — describes Huáng as “a poor Confucian of Cuīshuǐ who sustained twenty-odd dependents through eye-medicine” and praises him as the “high-minded recluse of the Eight-Mǐn” (八閩高士). The 李明 Lǐ Míng preface (同學兄李明) provides further confirmation of Huáng’s earlier ambition in gǔwéncí 古文詞 (literary prose) and his late turn to medicine. A preface by Huáng’s elder brother 冶子裘 Yězǐ Qiú (同懷兄冶子裘序) supplies further biographical detail: Huáng was the eighth of his father’s children and a polymath who travelled “from Yù 豫 (Henan) to Wú 吳 (Jiāngsū) for five years on business” before returning to his medical writing.

Abstract

The textual history is unusually well-documented and the dating bracket therefore unusually tight. The xīnyǒu 辛酉 manuscript draft date — taken as Qiánlóng 6 = 1741 — is the earliest defensible terminus a quo for the work proper; the four cycles of revision occupy Huáng’s middle and later life; the Dèng Xuélǐ pirated print of the corrupted Mùkē zhèngzōng dates to Jiāqìng 10 (1805) according to the catalog meta; the corrected family edition (the proper Mùjīng dàchéng) dates to Jiāqìng 23 (1818). The composition window is here given as 1741–1805 to span draft through pirated print. Huáng Tíngjìng’s lifedates are not in CBDB and the standard biographical sources (《福建通志》, 《上饒縣志》, 《饒州府志》) do not register a precise birth or death year; the internal evidence places him c. 1700–1780, with active medical practice from c. 1730 onwards and at least one period of imperial-court engagement late in life (the censor Wèi Dìngguó’s preface notes he was 72 and received yīpǐn honours on his retirement).

The book is structurally tripartite: lùn (theoretical essays — five-wheel critique, anatomy, physiology, aetiology), zhèng (a syndromic catalogue, but organised by anatomical site rather than by wǔlún correlations), and fāng (a substantial formulary with named prescriptions). The author writes in a notably literary register — the prefaces and theoretical essays are full of gǔwén parallelism, classical allusion, and the kind of polemical wit that earned him the censor’s praise. The clinical content is mid-Qīng standard with a strong empirical-anatomical streak: the work is one of the earliest Chinese ophthalmologies to argue systematically against the five-wheel / eight-quadrant correlations as a scholastic rather than clinical schema. In this respect it parallels — and was almost certainly read by Honjō Fuichi in writing — the comparable polemic in KR3em005 Yǎnkē jǐnnáng.

Translations and research

• No Western-language translation or substantial monograph is located.
• Modern Chinese critical edition: 《目經大成校釋》 (王明傑、李熊飛, eds., 北京：人民衛生出版社, 1987).
• For the broader Qīng ophthalmological tradition and Huáng’s place in it see 馬伯英 et al., 《中國醫學文化史》 (1994), pp. 612–615; 范行準, 《中國醫學史略》 (1986), §眼科.
• No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.

Other points of interest

The Dèng Xuélǐ pirating affair is one of the best-documented cases of Qīng-period medical-text appropriation, both because the family’s counter-publication preserved the imposture’s record (Dèng’s preface admitting receipt from “Mr. Huáng” is, in the corrected edition, paired with the family’s narrative of what really happened) and because it illustrates the physical-economy of medical-book transmission in the mid-Qīng: the cost of cutting woodblocks for a six-juǎn work was beyond the means of an individual scholar-physician, and a student-disciple in possession of the manuscript was therefore in a real position to alienate the work from its author. The family’s recovery, through the wealth of the clan-uncle Xiāngquán, is the family’s successful counter-mobilisation.

Huáng’s theoretical claim — that the eye is “not bound by the five-wheel and eight-quadrant” — places him in the same anti-correlative late-imperial reform current as the Edo-Japanese Honjō (cf. KR3em005), the Qīng physician 王清任 Wáng Qīngrèn (author of Yīlín gǎicuò 醫林改錯), and the empirical-anatomy current in Qīng medicine generally. He should be read in this broader context rather than as an isolated ophthalmological idiosyncrat.

Links

• 目經大成 (jicheng.tw 漢學文典)
• Kanseki DB
• 王明傑、李熊飛 校釋 《目經大成校釋》 (北京: 人民衛生出版社, 1987).