Shòuqīn yǎnglǎo shū 壽親養老書
Book of Long-Life-for-Parents and Caring-for-the-Elderly by 陳直 Chén Zhí (fl. Yuánfēng era, 1078–1085, Northern Sòng, Magistrate of Xīnghuàxiàn in Tàizhōu).
About the work
The same Northern-Sòng geriatric-care monograph as the Yǎnglǎo fèngqīn shū (catalogued in the corpus as KR3eo001), transmitted under the alternate title that became standard once 鄒鉉 Zōu Xuàn’s Yuán expansion added three further juan to make the Shòuqīn yǎnglǎo xīn shū 壽親養老新書 (KR3eo031 / KR3e0021) — by which point the original four juan came to be known as Shòuqīn yǎnglǎo shū (without xīn “new”). The present jicheng.tw recension preserves the four-juan original-only stratum of the text. Editorially the work is identical in content to KR3eo001 (it opens with the same Chén Zhí preface and the same 食治養老益氣方 dietary-therapy section); the distinction is one of recension and title.
Prefaces
The transmitted opening text is the same Chén Zhí xù as preserved in KR3eo001 — beginning “The sages distributed pharmaca to treat the various diseases because the Five Viscera root in the Five Phases…“. The jicheng.tw reprint is anonymous in editorial framing; the title-block identifies the work as “Sòng Xīnghuàlìng Chénjūn Zhí zhù” 宋興化令陳君直著 (“Composed by His Honour Chén Zhí, Magistrate of Xīnghuà under the Sòng”). One detail of the present recension differs from the KR3eo001 version: the opening Shízhì yǎnglǎo yìqì fāng 食治養老益氣方 (“Food-therapy for nourishing the elderly and benefiting qì”) is presented in slightly different fāng-order, with the Niúrǔ fāng 牛乳方 (Cow’s-milk recipe) appearing first rather than third — a recension marker that is shared with the Shòuqīn yǎnglǎo xīn shū (and absent from KR3eo001).
Abstract
The present recension transmits Chén Zhí’s original four-juan work under the title Shòuqīn yǎnglǎo shū — the title-form preserved in the editorial frame of Zōu Xuàn’s expansion and subsequently widely adopted in late-Yuán and Míng reprintings of the original. The jicheng.tw recension follows the Yuán Zhìzhèng 1341–1370 Zhèjiāng print that is also the basis of the Sìkù quánshū transmission of the expanded work (KR3e0021); but it presents only the original four juan, deliberately excising Zōu Xuàn’s three additions.
The double witness — KR3eo001 (Yǎnglǎo fèngqīn shū recension) and KR3eo016 (Shòuqīn yǎnglǎo shū recension), with KR3eo031 transmitting the full expanded work — is one of the principal modern philological witnesses to the recension history of Chén Zhí’s foundational geriatric text, and is the primary value of the jicheng.tw reprint to historians of Sòng-Yuán medicine. The variation in the order of opening prescriptions between the two original-only recensions (KR3eo001 vs. KR3eo016) is suggestive of two parallel Yuán transmission streams of the Chén Zhí text — one through the Yǎnglǎo fèngqīn shū title-form (KR3eo001), one through the Shòuqīn yǎnglǎo shū title-form (KR3eo016 / KR3eo031 stratum).
Translations and research
- See KR3eo001 Yǎng-lǎo fèng-qīn shū for full bibliography.
- 陳直 / 鄒鉉, Shòu-qīn yǎng-lǎo xīn shū (Tiān-jīn: Tiān-jīn kē-xué jì-shù chū-bǎn-shè, 1988), with introductory note on the recension history.
- Pierce Salguero (ed.), Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) — for the broader Sòng dietary-therapy context (the Shí-yī xīn-jìng cited by Chén Zhí is partly Buddhist-origin).
Other points of interest
The double-witness preservation in the jicheng.tw corpus is a significant philological event: while the Sìkù tradition preserves only the Xīn shū expanded form, jicheng.tw makes both Chén Zhí’s original recensions independently visible, allowing for the first time a textual stemma of the four-juan original. (See KR3eo001 for the parallel recension.)