祝由科諸符祕

Zhùyóu kē zhū fú mì 祝由科諸符祕

Secret Talismans of the Incantational Department by 張繼先 Zhāng Jìxiān (1092–1127, posthumously Xūjìng zhēnrén 虛靖真人 — the form under which the catalog meta and this manuscript title cite him as 張虛靖), thirtieth Celestial Master of the Lónghǔshān 龍虎山 Zhèngyī lineage. The attribution is pseudepigraphic — see the Abstract.

About the work

A single-fascicle folk-medical talismanic manual representing the Zhùyóu kē 祝由科, one of the 十三科 (Thirteen Departments) of state-recognised medicine under the Yuán imperial medical bureau (太醫院, instituted 1268 and reconfirmed under the early Míng, where zhùyóu held the twelfth rank alongside 大方脈, 小方脈, 婦人, 瘡瘍, 鍼灸, 眼, 口齒, 咽喉, 傷折, 金鏃, 按摩 and 禁科). The work is a compendium of healing-talismans (符 fú) paired with spoken incantations (祝 zhù) for the principal complaint categories of late-imperial folk practice — fevers, abdominal pain, headache, eye disease, sores and abscesses, fright in children, parturition difficulties, snake-bite and dog-bite, demonic possession (xiébìng 邪病), and the various 十三科 disease-divisions. The text circulated as a manuscript in the Qīng and Republican periods within the popular ritual-healing milieu that combined Zhèngyī Daoist liturgy, léifǎ 雷法 (Thunder Rites) talismanic technique, and itinerant village medicine; the KR-edition is sourced from the jicheng.tw (漢學文典) digital corpus, whose underlying physical witness is the zhū-mò chāo-běn 朱墨鈔本 (cinnabar-and-ink manuscript copy) held at the U.S. Library of Congress. The same manuscript family was independently reprinted in the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫善本古籍叢書 (hxwd) under the editorial direction of Zhèng Jīnshēng 鄭金生.

Prefaces

No substantive preface preserved in the source file: the LoC manuscript transmits only the talismanic body of the work and lacks the front-matter conventions (序, 跋, 凡例) that would be expected for a literate-tradition medical work. The attribution to 張虛靖 occurs in the manuscript’s running title and is treated below as a nominal claim.

Abstract

The text is a representative of the late-imperial Daoist-medical zhùyóu literature, a body of practice that descended in part from the Sùwèn 移精變氣論 (“transferring the jīng and transforming the qì”) tradition cited at Huángdì nèijīng · Sùwèn (KR3e0001) 13 — “in remote antiquity, when treating illness, one had only to transfer the jīng and transform the qì: one called it zhùyóu 祝由 and that sufficed” (毒藥治其內、鍼石治其外; 古之治病, 惟其移精變氣, 可祝由而已). By the Yuán the field had been bureaucratised: the Yuán Tàiyīyuàn curriculum codified the Zhùyóu kē as a thirteenth examinable specialty (see the Yuán Mìshūjiān zhì 秘書監志 and the Míng Dà Míng huìdiǎn · Tàiyīyuàn 大明會典 entries on the 十三科), and a small specialist literature followed — much of it pseudepigraphically ascribed to canonical Daoist talisman-masters such as Zhāng Dàolíng (張道陵), Zhāng Jìxiān 張繼先, and the Tàishàng dòngyuān shénzhòu jīng 太上洞淵神咒經 (KR5b0019) tradition.

The attribution of the present work to Zhāng Jìxiān (Xūjìng zhēnrén, 1092–1127) is best understood within this pseudepigraphic convention. Zhāng Jìxiān was the thirtieth Celestial Master of the Lónghǔshān lineage, a major figure in the rise of léifǎ under Sòng Huīzōng, and the recipient of the imperial title 虛靖先生 (later expanded posthumously to 虛靖玄通弘悟真君). He is a frequent nominal author of late-Sòng and Yuán-Míng ritual texts in the Daoist canon (cf. KR5b0272 Sānshídài tiānshī Xūjìng zhēnjūn yǔlù 三十代天師虛靖真君語錄, KR5b0306 Xūjìng chōnghé Xiānshēng Xú Shénwēng yǔlù 虛靖沖和先生徐神翁語錄, KR5c0379 Míngzhēn pòwàng zhāngsòng 明真破妄章頌, KR5h0021 Sānshídài tiānshī Xūjìng zhēnjūn yǔlù in another recension, and KR5g0058), and the Zhèngtǒng dàozàng preserves several genuine Zhāng-Jìxiān works, principally on Thunder Rites and exorcism. The Zhùyóu kē zhū fú mì, however, is a manuscript whose external evidence (manuscript codicology, lexical features, the medical-classificatory frame, and the very designation 祝由科 — a term unattested before the Yuán reorganisation of the Tàiyīyuàn) places it firmly in the Míng-Qīng folk-Daoist transmission; no Sòng or Yuán bibliographic catalog records it. The date bracket 1500–1900 reflects the recension-evidence rather than any plausible compositional date of the lost Sòng exemplar (if any) on which the manuscript professes to depend.

The manuscript itself thus stands as an artefact of the late-imperial popular medico-religious ritual repertoire, witnessing the practical synthesis of state-medical categorisation (the Yuán-Míng shísān kē framework), Daoist talismanic technology (the léifǎ and zhèngyī talisman corpus), and oral incantational practice. It belongs to the same LoC-manuscript group as KR3en002 Zhùyóu kē 祝由科 and KR3en003 Zīfú děng Qítiānyī shísān kē zhìbìng yì zōng 資福等齊天醫十三科治病一宗 — together the three principal zhùyóu manuals returned to circulation through the jicheng.tw digital channel and (in parallel) through the hxwd Hǎiwài-huíliú series.

Translations and research

• 鄭金生 et al. (eds.), Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫善本古籍叢書 (Běijīng: Rénmín wèishēng chūbǎnshè, 2003 — series introduction and codicological description of the three KR3en zhùyóu manuscripts).
• Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, rev. 2010), chapter 2 on demonic-aetiology and chapter 8 on the Daoist-Buddhist medical legacy — locates the zhùyóu tradition within the longue durée.
• Hinrichs and Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 18–24 (Shāng exorcistic medicine), 63–69 (Celestial-Masters healing), 87–93 (Six-Dynasties talismanic medicine), 99–101 (incantational practice within Daoist self-cultivation) — the standard English background.
• Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), chapters 1, 2, and 6 — on talismanic-incantational medicine and its dynastic transformations; pp. 58–88 on the Celestial-Master ritual healing system that the present manual continues in attenuated form.
• Mark Csikszentmihalyi, “Zhuyou 祝由”, in Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.), Encyclopedia of Taoism (London: Routledge, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 1278–1279.

Other points of interest

The retention of Zhùyóu kē as a separate department within Yuán-Míng state medicine is the bureaucratic-historical pivot on which the existence of this body of literature depends. Although zhùyóu was demoted under the Qīng (the Qīngcháo wénxiàn tōngkǎo · Tàiyīyuàn 清朝文獻通考 records its eventual deletion from the Tàiyīyuàn curriculum), the practice flourished in the village-level ritual-healing economy, and the present LoC-held manuscript is among the few surviving direct witnesses to that practice in late-Qīng form. The text’s identification of itself as belonging to a “scientific” departmental specialty (kē 科) — rather than as Daoist liturgy proper — is itself the chief evidence of its post-Yuán composition.

Links

• 祝由科諸符祕 (jicheng.tw 漢學文典)
• Kanseki DB
• Wikipedia: 祝由, 張繼先
• Wikidata: Q15921055 (zhùyóu)