Tiáojí yǐnshí biàn 調疾飲食辯
Discrimination on Eating and Drinking in Regulating Illness by 章穆 Zhāng Mù (zì Xìngyún 杏雲, mid-Qīng physician).
About the work
A six-juan integrated dietary-medical treatise combining classical-philological scholarship (drawing on astronomical, calendrical, and natural-historical reference works), pharmacopoeial information, and clinical observation. The work surveys foodstuffs systematically, providing for each: its cosmological-natural-philosophical context (its place in the five-phase system, its relation to the seasons and stars), its nature and taste, its therapeutic indications, and the precise quantity in which it should be consumed. The text-genre is the literati polymath dietary treatise, parallel to but more philologically rigorous than the same period’s 老老恒言 Lǎolǎo héngyán of 曹庭棟 Cáo Tíngdòng (1773).
Prefaces
The transmitted xù (by a later editor) narrates the composition’s context: “Eating-and-drinking is humanity’s great desire; without it [the will] is in turmoil, indulged it [becomes] runaway. Truly one cannot but discriminate. — Observing the records in the canonical-and-commentarial literature, and proceeding through the Běncǎo, the Zhífāng, and the various-schools-and-hundred-thinkers, those who speak of eating-and-drinking are very many. The ancients said: there are three ways to preserve life — one is to discriminate clearly the measure of what the abdomen receives. — My township’s elder, the eminent Zhāng Xìngyún 章杏雲, was a refined-and-elegant scholar; on top of his profound steeping in classical scholarship, he personally established the Yǐnshí biàn in one book.”
The preface describes the work’s range: “Upward exhausting astronomical phenomena — sun and stars, year-sequence, calendrical reckoning; downward investigating herbs and trees, insects and fishes, mountain-and-sea precious-and-rare. Every essence of the Five-Phase Hundred-Products, every minutiae of single drink and single food — none does not have its origin traced and its branches followed, discriminating its nature for hardness-softness, dryness-moistness, with the proper measure of its use for loss-and-benefit weighed. Itemised and analysed strand by strand: comparable in tune-and-effect to Zhōng Bójìng’s [Zhōng Xīng] Zūnshēng bājiān.” (The reference to Zūnshēng bājiān 遵生八牋 is editorial: that work is by 高濂 Gāo Lián, not 鍾惺 Zhōng Xīng — this is a slip in the preface.)
The preface continues: Zhāng was a polymath of considerable book-collection, never ceasing his studies from youth into old age; medically gifted, he attended even the poorest patients in person with no hesitation. He completed the work after long preparation, drawing from wide reading, careful classification, and personal verification. Because of his limited financial means and his refusal to “complete with another’s help” (因人成事), only half the volume was engraved during his lifetime. After his death, the surviving manuscript half and the partial engraving were recovered; “a good-doer sought the latter manuscript and continued the engraving into a complete book”, with the preface-writer providing the preface upon publication.
Abstract
章穆 Zhāng Mù (zì Xìngyún 杏雲, fl. late Qiánlóng to mid Dàoguāng, c. 1770s–1830s), Qīng polymath-physician of the Jiāngzhè region, was the type of late-imperial literati-medical figure who combined wide classical learning with active rural medical practice. The Tiáojí yǐnshí biàn is his principal work, drawing on his extensive private library and on three decades of personal clinical observation. The work’s distinctive feature is its integration of astronomical and calendrical scholarship into the dietary-medical framework — placing it within the broader Qīng kǎozhèng 考證 (evidential-research) movement’s application to medicine.
The work was published in two stages: the first half during Zhāng’s lifetime (under financial constraint), the second half posthumously by an anonymous hǎoshàn (good-doer) sponsor. The dating bracket 1810–1830 reflects this two-stage publication period, with the lifetime portion plausibly dating to the Jiāqìng late period and the posthumous completion to the early Dàoguāng.
Translations and research
- Zhōng-guó yī-jí dà-cí-diǎn, s.v. 調疾飲食辯.
- 章穆, Tiáo-jí yǐn-shí biàn, in Sì-kù wèi-shōu shū jí-kān 四庫未收書輯刊 series.
- Eugene Anderson, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (Philadelphia, 2014).
- No substantial Western-language treatment specifically of this title located.
- 馬烈光, Zhōng-yī yǎng-shēng kāng-fù xué cí-diǎn (Běijīng, 2007).
Other points of interest
The preface-writer’s slip — attributing Zūnshēng bājiān to Zhōng Bójìng (Zhōng Xīng, 1574–1624) when it is in fact by Gāo Lián — is a useful reminder that even late-Qīng literati prefaces can carry textual-bibliographical errors. (Preserved as a typographical slip; not silently corrected here, per the project’s editorial principle.)