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軒轅黃帝治病秘法

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Text ID
KR3eo028
Date
1100–1900
Dynasty
宋(?)

Xuānyuán Huángdì zhìbìng mìfǎ 軒轅黃帝治病秘法

Secret Methods of Treating Illness Attributed to the Yellow Emperor Xuān-yuán attributed to 陳直 Chén Zhí (Northern Sòng) — but the attribution is to be read as pseudepigraphic (see Abstract).

About the work

A one-juan talismanic-medical manual: a collection of monosyllabic fú 符 (charm-characters) — each a single specially-formed graph compounded of standard radicals into a fú-form — with associated written-ritual instructions for the treatment of specific complaints. The work opens with the Shìlì 事例 (“Ritual Form”) prescribing the zhāijiè (ritual purification) and the formal jìbài (sacrificial salutation) to be performed before Xuānyuán 黃帝 Huángdì’s spirit-tablet on the yuándàn (New Year’s day) — opening with the practitioner’s invocation: “I, the disciple [name], truly admire the Dào and aspire to the cinnabar essence; I wash my breast and clarify my mind, in the hope of lightly ascending to save people and assist the state, to establish merit as priority. — All my prayers, may they obtain immediate response; from heaven above to heaven below, may all know this.” A formal charm is then chanted over a new brush and ink-stick — “hè hè yángyáng, rìchū dōngfāng, shénbǐ zài shǒu, wànbìng xiāowáng 赫赫陽陽、日出東方、神筆在手、萬病消亡 (“brilliant and resplendent, the sun rising in the east; the spirit-brush in [my] hand, all diseases dispelled”) — and the brush is purified by being passed through incense-smoke.

The body of the work consists of a sequence of single-character charm-graphs, each headed with the disease it treats and instructions for application:

  • 飡飠看 (composite “eat”-radical graph): for unnamed swellings and toxins — written on the affected area.
  • 飡飯 (composite): for scorpion-sting — written on the affected area.
  • 飡食 (composite): for fùrén 婦人 / shìnǚ 室女 menstrual blockage and breast tumour — both ingested (as ash-water) and topically applied.
  • 飡者食 (composite): for tiger-bite — written on paper, burned to ash, ingested with jīngjiè tea.
  • 飡雍食 (composite): for snake-bite — written on the painful area; for women’s chuīrǔ (breast inflammation) — ingested as ash-tea or topically applied.
  • And a long sequence of further charm-graphs for: snake-bite (second formula), dog-bite, abdominal pain, breast inflammation (second), general body pain, etc.

Prefaces

The jicheng.tw reprint preserves the Shìlì ritual-form as the opening section in lieu of a separate xù.

Abstract

The work is a representative of the late-imperial zhùyóu 祝由 / talismanic-medical tradition — the same genre as KR3en001 Zhùyóu kē zhū fú mì, KR3en002 Zhùyóu kē, and KR3en003 Zīfú děng Qítiānyī shísān kē. It belongs to the small body of single-fascicle fú / zhòu (charm and spell) manuals reprinted in the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū from manuscript witnesses recovered from overseas holdings.

The attribution to 陳直 Chén Zhí is pseudepigraphic. Chén Zhí (Northern Sòng, fl. 1078–1085, Magistrate of Xīnghuàxiàn — the same author of KR3eo001 / KR3eo016 Yǎnglǎo fèngqīn shū) was a literate-tradition physician whose surviving authentic work is a dietetic geriatric-care treatise grounded in Sùwèn doctrine — entirely incompatible with the talismanic-ritual register of the present text. The catalog meta’s attribution to Chén Zhí reflects the work’s late-imperial popular-medical practice of borrowing the prestige of canonical Sòng medical authors for talismanic manuals, by way of a colophon or interpolation. The same convention attaches the broader zhùyóu corpus pseudepigraphically to 張道陵 Zhāng Dàolíng, 張繼先 Zhāng Jìxiān, and the Tàishàng dòngyuān shénzhòu jīng 太上洞淵神咒經 (KR5b0019) tradition.

The composition date is therefore not Northern Sòng but late-imperial (15th–19th c.), within the post-Yuán zhùyóu kē tradition. The date bracket 1100–1900 reflects the wide uncertainty in the underlying composition window, with the practical likelihood concentrated in the 16th–19th centuries.

Translations and research

  • See the KR3en001 entry for the broader bibliography of the zhù-yóu tradition (Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine; Csikszentmihalyi’s “Zhuyou” entry in Pregadio, Encyclopedia of Taoism).
  • No substantial Western-language secondary literature specifically on the present manuscript located.
  • Catherine Despeux, “Talismans and Sacred Diagrams”, in Kohn (ed.), Daoism Handbook (Brill, 2000).

Other points of interest

The work is a striking witness to the pseudepigraphic claim by which late-imperial talismanic-medical manuals reached for legitimacy: by ascribing themselves to Xuānyuán 黃帝 Huángdì in the title and to a canonical Sòng medical author in the colophon, the editor stakes the work’s legitimacy on both the supreme medical mythos and the most authoritative recent professional tradition.

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