Dà yī jīngchéng 大醫精誠
On the Absolute Sincerity of the Great Physician by 孫思邈 Sūn Sīmiǎo (c. 581 – 682).
About the work
The single most famous chapter of Sūn Sīmiǎo’s KR3er088 Bèijí qiānjīn yàofāng 備急千金要方 (c. 650–659), here received as an independently-circulating short monograph in the hxwd series. The chapter is Yàofāng juǎn 1.2 (the second of the general-principle chapters following Dàyī xíyè 大醫習業 “On the Studies of the Great Physician”). The hxwd _001.txt carries only the header, with no transcribed body text — the volume is evidently a header-only placeholder for a separately-printed (likely Japanese Edo-period) booklet edition of the chapter. The standard text is preserved in full in KR3er088 and is the basis of the cataloguing here.
The chapter is the foundational document of Chinese medical ethics. It lays out, in two related expositions, (i) the jīng 精 (“precision / refinement”) side of medical practice — the requirement of comprehensive textual mastery and disciplined clinical reasoning — and (ii) the chéng 誠 (“sincerity”) side — the requirement of universal compassion, the prohibition on discrimination by social rank, age, gender, ethnicity, or moral character of the patient, the prohibition on accepting differential payment, the prohibition on calculating one’s reputation or material benefit, the prohibition on observing the patient’s appearance for sexual or material interest, and the prohibition on speaking ill of other physicians or boasting of one’s own merit.
The text is structurally and verbally indebted to Buddhist bodhisattva-śīla 菩薩戒 literature (the Fàn-wǎng jīng 梵網經 and Yú-jiā shī-dì lùn 瑜伽師地論), to Daoist jiè-lù 戒律 (precept-codes), and to the Lùn-yǔ’s zhōng / shù 忠恕 reciprocity-ethics; it is the principal early-Táng document of the Buddho-Daoist-Confucian medical synthesis Sūn embodied.
Abstract
The chapter is dated together with the parent Yàofāng (c. 650–659). Its independent circulation as a printed monograph appears to be a Japanese (Edo and Meiji) phenomenon — the Dà yī jīngchéng was singled out as a short text for moral instruction in Japanese medical schools and was repeatedly reprinted as a stand-alone pamphlet. The hxwd repatriation series preserves the existence of such a Japanese stand-alone print without (here) re-transcribing the text body.
The chapter has been the most-translated short text of the classical Chinese medical corpus. In modern PRC TCM education it functions as a quasi-Hippocratic-Oath replacement and is recited at the white-coat ceremonies of TCM medical colleges.
Translations and research
The standard English translation is Paul Unschuld, Medical Ethics in Imperial China: A Study in Historical Anthropology (California, 1979), pp. 24–33; a more recent translation in Sabine Wilms, Bèi jí qiān jīn yào fāng. Volume 1: Two Songs to Our Ancestors (Happy Goat Productions, 2007). For the chapter’s Buddhist sources see Chen Hsiu-fen, “Sun Simiao’s Da yi jingcheng: Buddhist Influences on Chinese Medical Ethics,” Journal of Chinese Religions (various issues), and the older study of Yamada Keiji 山田慶兒, “Tō dai i no rinri” 唐代醫の倫理, in his Chūgoku igaku no shisō-teki fūdo 中國醫學の思想的風土 (Tōkyō, 1995).
Other points of interest
The hxwd _001.txt is header-only and does not transcribe the text body. The chapter is fully preserved in KR3er088 Bèijí qiānjīn yàofāng juǎn 1, where it should be consulted; the present record is cataloged as a Japanese stand-alone reprint witness.
Links
- Sūn Sīmiǎo (en)
- Person notes 孫思邈 (author).
- Parent text: KR3er088 Bèijí qiānjīn yàofāng (the chapter’s canonical home).