Shèshēng jílǎn 攝生集覽
Comprehensive Survey for Regulating Life edited by 胡文煥 Hú Wénhuàn (fl. Wànlì era, Hángzhōu publisher).
About the work
A compact one-juan synthesis of the classical shèshēng doctrine, presenting the standard threefold programme — (i) yǎngshén 養神 (nourishing the shén), (ii) xīqì 惜氣 (sparing the qì), (iii) dījí 堤疾 (damming illness) — as the editorial backbone of an anthology of canonical yǎngshēng maxims. Hú’s exposition is methodologically conservative: he reproduces the Sòng and Yuán received doctrine on the five-phase / five-taste correspondences (each qì generates a wèi and each wèi nourishes a viscus) and offers the work as a household-level introduction.
Prefaces
No separate xù is preserved; the work opens with a zhèngwén 正文 (“main text”) section that functions as its own introduction: “Heaven and Earth take giving-birth-and-completing as virtue; what is most prized among the born is the body; the body has security and joy as its root; security and joy are achievable only with preservation-and-nourishment as the root. The world’s people must therefore seek the root, and the root will be firm; the root being firm, whence shall illness arise, whence shall premature death come? The way of shèshēng exceeds nothing of this.” The exposition then proceeds with the threefold method (qí shù yǒu sān 其術有三): “the first is to nourish the shén: forget passion, dispel cleverness, be quiescent and empty, leave affairs and complete zhēn, with nothing lodged inside or outside — thus shén does not inwardly exhaust itself and the boundary does not outwardly deceive, zhēnyī unmixed, shén of itself rests… the second is to spare the qì: embrace the singular root, secure the zhēnqì that returns jīng, settle the three jiāo in their stations, forget the form of the six robbers — perception-realms emptied, the dàtóng contracted to — and qì of itself settles… the third is to dam illness: time the food and drink, regulate temperature and coolness, leave-and-arrive without offending the eight evils, sleep and waking incapable of being forced — and the body of itself is at ease.”
Abstract
The work belongs to the Wànlì-era Hú Wénhuàn editorial programme (cf. Lèixiū yàojué 類修要訣 (KR3eo011), Tàisù màijué mìshū 太素脈訣秘書 (KR3eo018), Tàisù xīnyào 太素心要 (KR3eo019), Xiānglián rùnsè 香奩潤色 (KR3eo020), Yīxué quányú (KR3eo027), Yǎngshēng dǎoyǐn mìjí (KR3eo034), Yǎngshēng dǎoyǐn fǎ (KR3eo036), Yǎngshēng shíjì (KR3eo042)) — a corpus of small editorial compilations issued as separate fascicles and also as integrated parts of the Géjí cóngshū. The Shèshēng jílǎn’s three-method (sānshù 三術) framework is itself drawn from 陶弘景 Tāo Hóngjǐng’s Yǎngxìng yánmìng lù 養性延命錄 (KR5c0235), but presented here in a simplified Míng popular-pedagogical register.
The work’s principal historical interest lies in its classification within the Hú Wénhuàn editorial system: alongside the more specialised yǎngshēng fascicles, the Shèshēng jílǎn serves as a general theoretical preface in Hú’s overall publishing programme. The date bracket 1590–1602 reflects Hú’s principal Wànlì publishing window in Hángzhōu.
Translations and research
- Catherine Despeux, Taoïsme et corps humain: le Xiuzhen tu (Paris, 1994).
- 周一謀, Yǎng-shēng wén-xiàn tōng-kǎo (Shàng-hǎi, 2008).
- Zhōng-guó yī-jí dà-cí-diǎn, s.v.
- For the Hú Wénhuàn editorial corpus: K. T. Wu, “Ming Printing and Printers”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7 (1942–43), 203–260.
Other points of interest
The triple framework (nourish shén / spare qì / dam illness) is one of the most memorable compressions of late-imperial yǎngshēng doctrine and is widely quoted in modern Chinese yǎngshēng literature.