Tàisù xīnyào 太素心要
Heart-Essentials of the Tradition of Grand Simplicity edited by 胡文煥 Hú Wénhuàn; transmitted under the Tàisù 太素 (Grand Simplicity) divinatory-pulse tradition.
About the work
A companion piece to Tàisù màijué mìshū 太素脈訣秘書 (KR3eo018), transmitting the more prognosticatory material of the Tàisù mài tradition: pulse-readings keyed to social rank (guìjiàn 貴賤), to ancestral fortune (zǔfù gēnjī 祖父根基), to fraternal-and-progeny prospects, and to the staged prediction of disasters at given calendrical intervals (liùshíjiǎzǐ nàyīn 六十花甲子納音 cycles, with the cùn 寸, guān 關 and chǐ 尺 sectors of the wrist correlated to early / middle / late life stages). The work proceeds through the cosmographic wǔxíng 五行 pulse-form correlations (the gold pulse “flowing like a bright pearl”; the wood pulse like a tree-branch-tip, “soft, long, xián”; the water pulse “soft, slippery, moist”; the fire pulse “great, like flame leaping from a finger-flick”; the earth pulse “rising and falling temperately, slow”) and through the integration with the Twelve Hours of the day and the Ten Stems / Twelve Branches matrix.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw recension transmits only juan 1 and juan 3 (the middle juan is missing from the source files); no separate xù is preserved. The opening sentence — fán rén liùbù, ruò jiē dé jūnjìng tiáohé, bù jué bù cháng, bù dà bù xiǎo, bù gāo bù sàn, gè guī cìwèi, bìng wéi jímài, biàn zhī shì ānlè rén 凡人六部、若皆得均淨調和、不絕不長、不大不小、不高不散、各歸次位、併為吉脈、便知是安樂人 — sets the divinatory framework explicitly: a “harmonious” six-sector pulse signals not merely health but personal good-fortune.
Abstract
The Tàisù xīnyào is the more explicitly divinatory pole of the two-text Hú Wénhuàn Tàisù corpus — where the Tàisù màijué mìshū (KR3eo018) presents the diagnostic-pulse framework, the Xīnyào presents its application to fortune-telling. Hú Wénhuàn’s editorial activity has brought the two strands into joint Wànlì print circulation in Hángzhōu within his Géjí cóngshū programme. The doctrinal alignment is the same: the cosmogonic Sùwèn doctrine of tàisù as the phase of first form-crystallisation licenses the inference from manifest qì-pulse back to underlying constitutive principles — extended here to social and karmic destiny.
The work shows the typical Wànlì popular-Daoist syncretism of medical yīnyáng wǔxíng doctrine with the liùshíjiǎzǐ nàyīn almanac-divination system — placing it culturally adjacent to the contemporaneous popular almanacs and to the later Zǐwēi dòushù 紫微斗數 fate-calculation tradition.
The catalog meta records 胡文煥 Hú Wénhuàn as author; this is correctly read as editorial publisher (校刊). The underlying textual transmission is to be assigned to the late-Sòng / Yuán-Míng-transition Tàisù tradition (pseudepigraphically associated with 張太素 Zhāng Tàisù, but in its received form a late-Yuán to mid-Míng formation). The date bracket 1590–1602 reflects Hú’s editorial window.
Note on transmission: the jicheng.tw source files preserve KR3eo019_001.txt and KR3eo019_003.txt but not _002 or _000 — the middle juan of the work is missing from the transmitted recension, and the present record describes the surviving juan 1 + 3 only.
Translations and research
- See KR3eo018 Tài-sù mài-jué mì-shū for the shared bibliographic framework.
- Hilary Smith, Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (Stanford, 2017).
- Elisabeth Hsu, Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine (Cambridge, 2010).
- Stephen R. Bokenkamp, “Time after Time: Taoist Apocalyptic History and the Founding of the T’ang Dynasty”, Asia Major 3rd ser. 7.1 (1994), 59–88 — for the broader Daoist temporal-divinatory framework.
Other points of interest
The integration of the medical pulse-reading with the liùshíjiǎzǐ nàyīn almanac-divination cycle — explicitly programmatic in the Xīnyào — is one of the more striking late-imperial manifestations of the convergence of medicine and fate-calculation, and bears comparison with the broadly contemporary Sānmìng tōnghuì 三命通會 (KR3g0042) of 萬民英 Wàn Mínyīng (1578).
Links
- Companion: KR3eo018 太素脈訣秘書.
- 胡文煥 DILA
- Kanseki DB
- 太素心要