Tàisù màijué mìshū 太素脈訣秘書
Secret Book of Pulse-Formulae in the Tradition of Grand Simplicity edited by 胡文煥 Hú Wénhuàn (fl. Wànlì, Hángzhōu publisher); attributed under the editorial title to the Tàisù 太素 (“Grand Simplicity”) tradition, ultimately a Sòng- and Yuán-era Daoist-medical formation.
About the work
A two-juan manual of the divinatory pulse-reading (tàisù mài 太素脈) tradition — the late-imperial yībǔ hybrid in which the diagnostic pulse-examination of the Màijīng 脈經 / Nánjīng 難經 lineage is recoded as a system of pulse-readings that reveal not only present illness but the subject’s lifelong fortune, lifespan, social rank, intellectual quality, character, and ultimate destiny. The work is organised around two principal pulse-typology schemes: (i) the Five-Yáng / Five-Yīn pulses — fú 浮 (floating), huá 滑 (slippery), shí 實 (full), xián 弦 (string-like), hóng 洪 (overflowing) for yáng; wēi 微 (faint), chén 沉 (sunken), huǎn 緩 (slow), sè 澀 (rough), fú 伏 (hidden) for yīn — each correlated with the deficiency of a specific functional system (心, 肝, 脾, 肺, 腎); and (ii) the Four Properties (sìyíng 四營) of qīng 清 / zhuó 濁 / qīng 輕 / zhòng 重, by which a person’s fortune (guìjiàn pínfù shòuyāo 貴賤貧富壽夭) can be read out of the pulse-quality. The text opens with the unusual Five Notes / Ten Stems / Day-and-Hour correlation table (五音看時順逆／十干所主日辰), aligning pulse-reading with the calendrical-musical gānzhī matrix.
Prefaces
No separate xù is preserved; the work opens directly with the Wǔyīn kànshí nìshùn shígān suǒzhǔ rìchén table and proceeds to the pulse-type expositions. The editorial title “Tàisù màijué mìshū” is itself a label drawn from the broader 太素脈法 Tàisù màifǎ literature.
Abstract
The Tàisù pulse-reading tradition is a complex hybrid form that emerged most clearly in the Sòng-Yuán transition. Its philosophical basis is the assimilation of the Sùwèn 素問 cosmogonic doctrine of the “Four Phases of Cosmic Generation” (tàiyì 太易 → tàichū 太初 → tàishǐ 太始 → tàisù 太素), in which the tàisù is the phase at which form first crystallises out of qì. Within the medical-divinatory tradition this is read as licensing the inference from bodily form (qì-pulse) back to its underlying generative principles — including, in the most extreme position, the subject’s whole life-trajectory. The most influential pre-Hu Wenhuan transmission of the tradition is the 太素脈法 Tàisù màifǎ attributed (pseudepigraphically) to 張太素 Zhāng Tàisù of the late Sòng, but most plausibly compiled in the Yuán-Míng transition.
Hú Wénhuàn’s editorial intervention — both here and in the companion text Tàisù xīnyào 太素心要 (KR3eo019) — was to bring this divinatory-medical hybrid into print circulation under his Géjí cóngshū 格致叢書 publishing programme in late-Wànlì Hángzhōu. The work’s authorial attribution is therefore properly to the Tàisù tradition as edited by Hú Wénhuàn: Hú is editorial publisher and likely jiàokān 校刊 redactor, not original author. The jicheng.tw reprint preserves Hú’s editorial frame.
The date bracket 1590–1602 reflects Hú’s principal publishing window in Hángzhōu.
Translations and research
- Catherine Despeux, “The Six Healing Sounds”, in Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden: Brill, 2000) — for the cosmogonic tài-yì → tài-chū → tài-shǐ → tài-sù framework that underlies the tradition.
- Elisabeth Hsu, Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) — for the classical-medical pulse-reading background.
- Hilary Smith, Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017) — for the late-imperial pulse-reading culture more broadly.
- 馬繼興, 《脈經校注》 (Běijīng, 1991) — standard Chinese critical edition of the principal pulse-classic that the Tài-sù tradition deviates from.
- No substantial English-language treatment of the Tài-sù mài divinatory tradition specifically located.
Other points of interest
The Tàisù mài tradition occupies an uncomfortable position in the modern historiography of Chinese medicine — repudiated as “superstition” by the early-Republican medical reformers, but recognised by recent historians as a major late-imperial extension of pulse-reading into the fortune-divination economy. The jicheng.tw-reprinted Hú Wénhuàn editorial witnesses are accordingly among the more important sources for the study of this tradition.
Links
- Companion: KR3eo019 太素心要 (likewise edited by Hú Wénhuàn).
- 胡文煥 DILA
- Kanseki DB
- 太素脈訣秘書