Shíshì mìlù 石室秘錄
Secret Records from the Stone Chamber by 陳士鐸 Chén Shìduó (zì Jìngzhī 敬之, hào Yuǎngōng 遠公 / Dàshān 大山, c. 1627 – c. 1707, Shānyīn 山陰 / Shàoxīng).
About the work
A six-juǎn clinical compendium framed by Chén Shìduó as the transcription of an oral teaching received from the spirit-physician Tiānshī Qíbó 天師岐伯 (Heavenly Master Qíbó), with subsidiary contributions from Zhāng Zhòngjǐng 張仲景 and Huá Tuó 華佗. The work is one of the principal monuments of Chén’s revelation-corpus, the central conceit of which is that Chén encountered Qíbó in spirit at the Tiāntán 天壇 cliff of his native Shānyīn on Kāngxī dīngmǎo 康熙丁卯 = 1687 and was vouchsafed a comprehensive transmission of the medicine of the Nèijīng sages.
The work is organised under 128 therapeutic-mode headings (fǎ 法), each presented as a Q&A dialogue: the disciple poses a clinical problem, Tiānshī gives the diagnostic principle and the corresponding formula, and Chén (“陳遠公曰”) supplies the post-revelation commentary, often grounding the spirit-master’s prescription in Nèijīng or JīnYuán precedent and supplying clinical illustrations from his own practice in Shānyīn. The 128 fǎ cover the full clinical spectrum — internal medicine, women’s medicine, paediatrics, shānghán 傷寒, wēnbìng 溫病, surgery, eye disease, throat disease — and include several modes of therapy unique to Chén (tuánzhì fǎ 摶治法, zhěnzhì fǎ 鎮治法, etc.) that draw on a quasi-Daoist vocabulary of shénqì manipulation.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt preserves only a short publishing postface signed Yǐmóu 以謀 (otherwise unidentified, presumably a literary collaborator from Chén’s Shānyīn circle), narrating that the editor was Chén’s fellow-villager and shénjiāo 神交 (spiritual friend), and that the editor took the liberty of mild stylistic emendation while leaving every prescription untouched (“至定方用藥之間，總不敢增減一字”). The substantive prefaces of the original printing (chiefly Chén’s own account of the Tiāntán encounter) are not preserved in this _000.txt; the standard text accessible elsewhere dates the spirit-encounter and the work’s composition to Kāngxī 26 / 1687.
Abstract
The work is securely dated by Chén’s own internal narrative to Kāngxī 26 / 1687. The frame-narrative — explicit spirit-revelation from Qíbó in the 17th century — places the Shíshì mìlù outside the standard Confucian-Imperial medical genealogy and led the SKQS editors to exclude the entire Chén corpus from the imperial collection on grounds of pseudepigraphy and “magical” content. The work was preserved chiefly through the popular printed-book market, where it enjoyed continuous Qīng and Republican reprintings, and through Japanese reprintings (the route by which the present hxwd recension descends).
Chén’s spirit-revelation framing should be read in continuity with his contemporary 陸西星-style Daoist textual-revelation practices and with the late-Míng / early-Qīng vogue for fēiluán 飛鸞 (spirit-writing) divinatory literature; doctrinally, however, the prescriptions are recognisably late-Míng warming-tonifying with characteristically large doses of huángqí 黃耆 and rénshēn 人參. The work is a sister-volume to Chén’s Biànzhèng lù 辨證錄 (KR3er077), also of 1687, which has the same Qíbó revelation framing.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation located. Chén Shì-duó and his pseudepigraphic corpus are treated in Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007), ch. 4; the revelation-framing context is treated in Vincent Goossaert, Bureaucratie et salut: Devenir un dieu en Chine (Labor et Fides, 2007), and broadly in late-Imperial spirit-writing scholarship.
Links
- Person notes 陳士鐸 (author). The editor-postface is signed Yǐmóu 以謀 (unidentified); the spirit-source Tiānshī Qíbó is mythological and not catalogued as a separate person.