Yījīng sùhuí jí 醫經溯洄集
A Collection Tracing Back Up the Medical Canon by 王履 Wáng Lǚ (zì Āndào 安道, hào Qíshōu shēng 畸叟生 / Bàojíwēng 抱獨翁, c. 1332–c. 1391), Yuán / early-Míng physician-painter of Kūnshān 崑山 (Sūzhōu region, Jiāngsū).
About the work
A one-juǎn collection of twenty-one critical-doctrinal essays — Wáng Lǚ’s foundational late-Yuán / early-Míng work on the proper interpretation of the Hàn medical canon, regarded by modern Chinese medical historiography as the bridging work between the JīnYuán Four Masters synthesis and the early-Míng programme of return to the Zhāng Zhòngjǐng classical-formula tradition. The work’s twenty-one essays each take up a specific doctrinal-textual problem in the Sùwèn / Língshū / Nánjīng / Shānghán lùn canon and resolve it by careful classical-textual exegesis. Wáng’s most-cited contributions include: (a) the distinction between Shānghán and Wēnbìng, arguing that the spring-and-summer wēnrè fevers are aetiologically distinct from the winter cold-damage and require a different therapeutic approach — a position that anticipates the late-Míng / Qīng wēnbìng school by some 250 years; (b) the systematic critical re-engagement with 王冰 Wáng Bǐng’s Táng-era Sùwèn commentary, identifying interpolations and proposing alternative readings on philological grounds; (c) the rigorous defence of 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng against the Júfāng 局方 formulary tradition that had displaced him in the high Sòng. Wáng was also a major YuánMíng landscape painter (the Huàshān tú 華山圖 album in the Palace Museum is his); his medical scholarship is unusually integrated with classical-literary and visual-art training.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw header file carries only the header line in the present digital exemplar; the work’s substantive body content was not transcribed into the present digital file. The work’s standard cuts (the YuánMíng yīshū dàchéng 元明醫書大成 anthology and the modern critical editions) carry Wáng’s own preface dated to the late-Hóngwǔ era and supplementary prefaces by 汪機 Wāng Jī of the Mid-Míng 1530s (paralleling his preface to KR3eq026 Tuīqiú shīyì 推求師意).
Abstract
Wáng Lǚ 王履 (Āndào, c. 1332–c. 1391), Yuán / early-Míng yīzhě of Kūnshān 崑山, was the principal pupil of Zhū Zhènhēng 朱震亨 in his late years — a discipular relationship that gave him direct transmission of the JīnYuán Four Masters synthesis but also positioned him to identify its limits. The catalog meta dates him conventionally to the Yuán; the standard lifedates c. 1332–c. 1391 (with the precise dates uncertain) follow modern Chinese reference works including the Zhōngguó yījí dàcídiǎn 中國醫籍大辭典. The composition window 1368–1378 reflects the post-Yuán-fall composition of the work (Wáng’s main intellectual maturity falls in the early Míng, after the 1368 founding of the dynasty) and the conventional dating of the work to Wáng’s late forties.
Historiographical significance: the Yījīng sùhuí jí is the single most important late-Yuán / early-Míng work in re-orienting Chinese medical scholarship away from the partisan doctrinal commitments of the JīnYuán Four Masters and toward the philological-textual recovery of the Hàn medical canon. Wáng’s distinction between Shānghán and Wēnbìng — though not immediately taken up by his contemporaries — became the doctrinal foundation of the entire late-Míng / Qīng wēnbìng school, with 吳又可 Wú Yòukě in 1642 and 葉桂 Yè Tiānshì in the early-Qīng each independently arriving at positions that Wáng had anticipated in the 1370s. The work is also methodologically important as one of the earliest Chinese medical works to deploy systematic xiàozhèng 校證 (textual collation) on the medical canon — a practice that the late-Qīng kǎozhèng yīxué movement of 徐大椿 and 莫枚士 would canonise.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Yījīng sùhuí jí located. Wáng Lǚ is treated in Robert Hymes, “Not Quite Gentlemen? Doctors in Sung and Yuan”, Chinese Science 8 (1987), and in TJ Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard, 2013), ch. 6, on the Jīn-Yuán Four Masters and their reception. For Wáng’s parallel painting career see Kathlyn Liscomb, “Wang Lü’s Mt. Hua: An Investigation of the Critical Texts and Pictorial Materials” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1986).
Links
- Wáng Lǚ (zh)
- Wáng Lǚ’s Mt. Huá painting album — Palace Museum, Běijīng.
- Kanseki DB
- 醫經溯洄集 (jicheng.tw)