Zhōu Shènzhāi yí shū 周慎齋遺書
The Posthumous Writings of Zhōu Shèn-zhāi by 周之幹 Zhōu Zhīgàn (hào Shènzhāi 慎齋, late Míng / early Qīng), redacted by his disciples, further edited by the GōuWú būrén 勾吳逋人 named Qiú 球 (球, fl. mid-eighteenth century), and brought to print by Zhào Shùyuán 趙樹元 of Rénhé 仁和 in Qiánlóng 39 (乾隆甲午 = 1774).
About the work
A ten-juǎn compilation of the clinical teaching of Zhōu Zhīgàn (Shènzhāi) of late-Míng / early-Qīng Sūzhōu / Wúxiàn, transmitted in disciples’ notebooks and brought to print only in the mid-Qīng. The body of the work is organised around yīnyáng and zàngfǔ doctrine, qìyùn 氣運 (climatic phase), colour-and-pulse diagnostics (色脈), discussions of jīngjiě 經解 (canonical commentary) and fāngjiě 方解 (formula commentary), and a substantial section of case-records and prescriptions for miscellaneous disorders (病機方案). The principal interest of the work to Qīng medical historiography lies in the editor Qiú’s positioning of Zhōu as the direct heir of Zhāng Zhòngjǐng 張仲景 — Qiú argues that the four Jīn–Yuán masters (Lǐ Dōngyuán warming, Liú Héjiān cooling, Zhū Dānxī yīn-nourishing, Zhāng Zǐhé purging) each captured “one limb” of Zhòngjǐng’s body, whereas Zhōu Shènzhāi alone “obtained the marrow” 獨得仲景之精髓. The work is therefore both a clinical handbook and a programmatic statement of mid-Qīng Shānghán-traditionalist polemic against the Jīn–Yuán synthesis.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with two prefaces. The first, by Zhào Shùyuán 趙樹元 (hào Shítáng 石堂) of Rénhé, is dated Qiánlóng 39 winter (1774); Zhào recounts that he received the manuscript and the publication mandate from his maternal-uncle’s-grandfather Wáng Zhuóyá 王琢崖 (a.k.a. Zàihán 載韓, Zàiān 載庵, Xūshān lǎorén 胥山老人), who at 79 had begun the publication and ordered Zhào to complete it. Zhào notes that Wáng’s original manuscript was incomplete and that the missing volumes were filled out from a copy held by Zhāng Dōngfú 張東扶. The second preface is the author-editor’s own statement by GōuWú būrén 勾吳逋人 (the recluse of Wú, named Qiú 球), dated yǐyǒu shēnyuè 乙酉申月 (most plausibly the 7th month of 1765 = Qiánlóng 30, on the basis of internal consistency with the Wáng / Zhào publication chronology); Qiú here states his programme of pruning the discursive disciple-notes into a definitive ten-juǎn recension as an appendix-wing (翼) to Zhòngjǐng’s Jīnguì yùhán jīng 金匱玉函經.
Abstract
Zhōu Zhīgàn (Shènzhāi) was a late-Míng / early-Qīng physician of Sūzhōu (DōngWú 東吳); the standard reception of his clinical thought is through this Yíshū and through citations in 張璐 Zhāng Lù’s Zhāngshì yītōng 張氏醫通 (1695, KR3ek020) — Zhào Shùyuán’s preface explicitly notes that Yītōng had already quoted Zhōu’s doctrines. Zhōu’s lifedates are not securely datable; he flourished in the late-Wàn-lì / Chóngzhēn era and probably died in the early Qīng — the editorial framing as “Míng Jiāngdōng Zhōu Shènzhāi” 明季江東周慎齋 in Qiú’s preface, the late-Míng style of the disciple-notebook transmission, and the absence of any reference to mid-Qīng events all support this. The composition window for the work as we now have it is therefore the editorial recension of Qiú (c. 1765) brought to print by Zhào (1774); the original disciple-notebooks may be a generation or more earlier. The work was kept in circulation through the late Qīng as a Shānghán-traditionalist counter-weight to the dominant Jīn–Yuán synthesis and entered the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū through Japanese collections.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. The mid-Qīng Shāng-hán-traditionalist movement to which Qiú’s editorial framing belongs is treated in Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007), and in Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011).