Yī guàn 醫貫
Penetrating the Heart of Medicine by 趙獻可 Zhào Xiànkě (zì Yǎngkuí 養葵, c. 1573 – c. 1644).
About the work
A six-juǎn programmatic treatise — the systematic doctrinal articulation of the Mìngmén 命門 (life-gate / gate-of-life) school of late-Míng medicine. The opening juǎn (玄元膚論) gives Zhào’s general ontology of the human body and disease; the middle juǎn contain his reading of the Nèijīng twelve-officials chapter (內經十二官論), the Sānjiāo 三焦 / Pàoluò 包絡 discussion, and the body of his characteristic Mìngmén doctrine, which displaces the heart from the position of “ruler” and installs in its place an unnamed, formless zhēnjūn 真君 — the Mìngmén between the two kidneys — as the metaphysical and physiological centre of the living person. The closing juǎn (先天要論 / 後天要論) systematise Zhào’s clinical programme: universal warming-tonifying with the liùwèi dìhuáng wán 六味地黃丸 and bāwèi dìhuáng wán 八味地黃丸 (the Qián Yǐ-derived formulae that Zhào reorganised into a comprehensive late-Míng treatment system). The work’s title metaphor yī yǐ guàn zhī 一以貫之 (“threaded through with the One”) is the Lúnyǔ 論語 IV.15 phrase, here re-claimed for medicine and explicitly aligned by Zhào with the Daoist xuánpìn 玄牝, the Buddhist zhēnrú xīn 真如心, and the Confucian bùdòng xīn 不動心 of Mèngzǐ — all glossed as names for the formless Mìngmén root of life.
Prefaces
The _000.txt opens with the Yīwūlǘ zǐ Yīguàn xù 醫巫閭子醫貫序 of 薛三省 Xuē Sānshěng (assistant supervisor of the right courtyard, Hànlín secretariat, a friend of Zhào’s elder brother who saw the work into print). Xuē’s preface develops Zhào’s argument that medicine is fundamentally a science of yǎnghuǒ 養火 (“nourishing the fire”) rather than the standard yǎngshuǐ 養水 (“nourishing the water”) — that water is generated from fire and not vice versa, that the xiāntiān zhī huǒ 先天之火 (pre-celestial fire of qián 乾) is formless and is the actual root of life, while the hòutiān zhī huǒ 後天之火 (post-celestial fire of lí 離) is the visible fire that the water of the Nèijīng properly controls. Xuē closes by glossing Zhào’s literary cover-name (Yīwūlǘ zǐ 醫巫閭子 — “the man from Mt. Yīwūlǘ”, a Liáoníng peak) as a “concealing-the-name” device (逃名之意) and noting that the work was completed at Yōuzhōu 幽州 (the old name for the Yōngdōng / Níngbō region), where Zhào worked.
Abstract
Internal dating: the work was completed before Zhào’s death in c. 1644 and was certainly in circulation by the mid-Tiānqǐ 天啓 era (1620s); modern Chinese-medicine scholarship conventionally brackets it at c. 1617 (the year of the earliest extant Wànlì 萬曆 print preface, here followed). Zhào was a hereditary Níngbō physician with no known examination career, and the Yīguàn is the only substantial work he himself prepared for the press; his later gynecological Hándān yígǎo 邯鄲遺稿 (KR3ei025) circulated in manuscript and was first printed in 1796. The Yīguàn is the systematic statement of the late-Míng warming-tonifying tradition that traces its lineage through Xuē Jǐ 薛己 (1487–1559) and Sūn Yīkuí 孫一奎, and that became — through the editorial labour of 呂留良 Lǚ Liúliáng (1629–1683) in the early Qīng — the canonical late-Míng medical curriculum in the high Qīng. The work attracted a sustained Qīng kǎojù critical response, most famously 徐大椿 Xú Dàchūn’s Yīguàn biān 醫貫砭 (KR3eq048, 1741), which systematically dismantled Zhào’s universal warming-tonifying programme. Its long shadow over Qīng medical thought — both as canonical curriculum and as polemical target — is the principal reason for its inclusion in the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫古籍叢書 (hxwd) repatriation series.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Yī-guàn located. The late-Míng warming-tonifying tradition in which Zhào’s work is the principal doctrinal monument is treated in Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007); for the Mìng-mén doctrine and its Sòng–Míng transformations see Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (MIT, 1974), and Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History 960–1665 (California, 1999), ch. 4.
Links
- Zhào Xiànkě 趙獻可 (zh)
- Yīguàn (ctext digest)
- Person notes 趙獻可, 徐大椿 (Qīng-period critic), 呂留良 (Qīng-era editor).