Píngzhì huì cuì 平治會萃
Gathered Quintessence of Peaceful-Regulation Medicine attributed to 朱震亨 Zhū Zhènhēng (Dānxī 丹溪, 1281–1358); edited by 薛己 Xuē Jǐ (zì Xīnfǔ 新甫, 1487–1559, mid-Míng).
About the work
A three-juǎn clinical handbook attributed to Zhū Dānxī and presented in the editorial form of Xuē Jǐ, the mid-Míng Court Physician and founding figure of the warming-tonifying (wēnbǔ 溫補) tradition. The title Píngzhì 平治 is the Confucian Dàxué phrase for the “peaceful regulation of the empire”; applied to medicine it denotes a clinical programme of moderate, balancing therapeutic intervention — neither the aggressive cooling of Liú Héjiān nor the aggressive purging of Zhāng Cóngzhèng, but a yīn-nourishing balancing programme characteristic of Dānxī’s mature doctrine. The work covers internal-medicine and gynaecology under disease-categories, with characteristic Dānxī formulae and case-records interleaved. The Xuē Jǐ editorial intervention introduced characteristic wēnbǔ annotations and reorganisations that bring the Dānxī material into closer alignment with Xuē’s own clinical doctrine — a transformative editorial intervention whose extent has been the object of considerable later scholarly debate.
Abstract
The hxwd _000.txt is empty; the body of the work opens directly without a transmitted preface. The Dānxī authorship is doctrinally plausible: the title and the clinical-categorical structure are consistent with the Dānxī corpus, and there are multiple textual parallels with the Géyú lùn 格致餘論 and Dānxī xīnfǎ (KR3er018). The Xuē Jǐ editorial recension is securely datable to the Xuē family’s productive editorial period, c. 1530–1559, during which Xuē produced editorial recensions of a wide range of SòngYuán medical classics (Nǚkē biànyí 婦科辨疑, Bǎoyīng jīnjìng lù 保嬰金鏡錄, Xuēshì yīàn 薛氏醫案 and others). The Píngzhì huìcuì is therefore best understood as the Xuē-edited Míng recension of Yuán Dānxī material, with the notBefore / notAfter fields set to Dānxī’s lifedates (the underlying material) and the dynasty field left as 元 for catalogue consistency; the recension itself belongs to the Jiājìng era (1522–1566). The work circulated through the Míng and Qīng principally through the Xuē-recension transmission and is preserved in the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū through Japanese collections.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Píng-zhì huì-cuì located. For Xuē Jǐ and the late-Míng warming-tonifying tradition see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007); for the Dān-xī corpus see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin (California, 1999), ch. 3.