Jīnguì gōu xuán 金匱鉤玄
Fishing-Out the Mystery of the “Golden Cabinet” by 朱震亨 Zhū Zhènhēng (Dānxī 丹溪, 1281–1358), edited by his disciple 戴思恭 Dài Sīgōng (1324–1405).
About the work
A three-juǎn clinical handbook organised by disease-category, presenting Dānxī’s mature clinical doctrine in the compressed-aphoristic form characteristic of his teaching. The title — Jīnguì gōu xuán — literally “fishing-out the mystery from the Golden Cabinet” — frames the work as an extraction of essential clinical wisdom from Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Jīnguì yàolüè 金匱要略, the canonical Hàn-period miscellaneous-disease treatise. In practice the work presents Dānxī’s own clinical reformulation of Zhòngjǐng’s framework, organised by disease-category and infused with Dānxī’s characteristic xiānghuǒ 相火 (ministerial-fire) doctrine and his programme of yīn-nourishing therapeutics. The work opens with Dānxī’s celebrated essay on fire and the five emotions (huǒ qǐ jūnxiàng wǔzhì jùyǒu lùn 火豈君相五志俱有論) — a foundational statement of the Dānxī fire doctrine that argues all five emotions can incite the xiānghuǒ and therefore all five emotions can produce huǒbìng 火病 (fire-disease).
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens directly with the huǒ qǐ jūnxiàng wǔzhì jùyǒu lùn — an integral part of the work itself rather than a separable preface. The essay distinguishes (1) the jūnhuǒ 君火 (lordly fire) of the human / man’s-fire (人火), which is the fire that “obeys the Way” and is governed by the heart-officer; (2) the xiānghuǒ 相火 (ministerial fire) of the dragon’s fire (龍火), which operates in the sānjiāo 三焦 and is much more dangerous when it goes astray; and (3) the juéyīn zàngfǔ zhī huǒ 厥陰臟腑之火 incited by the liùyù qīqíng 六慾七情 (six desires, seven emotions). The doctrinal payoff: anger sets fire to the liver, drink and surfeit to the stomach, lust to the kidney, grief to the lung; the heart as the jūnzhǔ must not catch fire or the patient dies (心為君主，自焚則死矣).
Abstract
Zhū Dānxī (1281–1358) is one of the four canonical Jīn–Yuán masters and the founding figure of the yīn-nourishing (滋陰) tradition. His clinical doctrine — succinctly articulated as yáng cháng yǒu yú, yīn cháng bù zú 陽常有餘陰常不足 (“yáng is always in surplus, yīn is always deficient”) — turns the xiānghuǒ 相火 from the canonical Sòng Mìngmén lifegate-fire into a perennially dangerous internal pathogen requiring constant yīn-nourishing counter-balance. The Jīnguì gōuxuán is one of the principal vehicles for this doctrine, alongside the Géyú lùn 格致餘論 (Dānxī’s most famous theoretical statement) and the Júfāng fāhuī 局方發揮. The work was edited and brought to print by Dài Sīgōng (CBDB, 1324–1405), Dānxī’s principal disciple and the bearer of the Dānxī lineage into the early Míng (Dài served as Court Physician to the Hóngwǔ emperor). Modern Chinese-medicine scholarship dates the original composition to the late-Yuán period (Dānxī died in 1358; the work must therefore have been substantively complete before that); the Dài-edited recension belongs to the early Míng, c. 1370s–1380s. The composition window is set to Dānxī’s adult life (the notBefore 1281 and notAfter 1358 reflect the upper bounds of his lifetime); the work was certainly compiled in his later decades.
Translations and research
The Dān-xī corpus is partially translated and extensively discussed. The principal scholarly treatment is Yu Yong 余瀛鰲, Zhū Dān-xī yī-xué jīng-yào 朱丹溪醫學精要 (Rénmín wèishēng, 2007); for the xiāng-huǒ doctrine 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. 3, which discusses the gendered implications of the yīn-nourishing programme. For the Dān-xī school’s later influence on the late-Míng wēn-bǔ 溫補 (warming-tonifying) tradition see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007).