Qiānjīn yìfāng 千金翼方
The Supplementary Formulae Worth a Thousand Gold by 孫思邈 Sūn Sīmiǎo (c. 581 – 682).
About the work
A thirty-juǎn supplement to Sūn Sīmiǎo’s KR3er088 Bèijí qiānjīn yàofāng (c. 650–659), composed by Sūn in extreme old age and conventionally dated Yǒngchún 永淳 1 / 682 — the year of Sūn’s death. The title-metaphor yì 翼 (“wing / supplementary appendix”) explicitly figures the work as a companion to the parent Yàofāng: as Sūn says in the self-preface, “I had still feared that — Mt. Dài before the eye obscures the autumn-hair’s tip; thunder in the ear obliterates the jade-and-stone resonance — so I have composed a further Fāngyì sānshí juǎn 方翼三十卷, that together they may form a single school’s learning, like the ní 輗 and the yuè 軏 (chariot-yoke pins) mutually supporting, or like wings in flight together.” Sūn invokes the analogy of the Yìjīng’s Shíyì 十翼 (commentaries by Confucius) and Lù Jì 陸績’s Xuányì 玄翼 (supplement to Yáng Xióng’s Tàixuán).
The contents of the Yìfāng are partly a deepening of topics undertreated in the Yàofāng and partly a wholly new presentation of subjects the earlier work had handled inadequately. The most consequential single innovation is juǎn 9–10 (Shānghán shàng 傷寒上 / Shānghán xià 傷寒下) — Sūn’s restored systematic presentation of 張機 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Shānghán lùn 傷寒論 in the Tàiyángzhèng / sānyīn sānyáng yíjì 三陰三陽宜忌 / huòluàn 霍亂 / fāhàn tùxià hòu 發汗吐下後 / yīnyì láofù 陰易勞復 sixteen-chapter organisation, which is the principal medieval witness for the pre-Sòng Shānghán lùn text. Modern Shānghán philology relies heavily on the Yìfāng juǎn 9–10 as evidence for the early-medieval text against the SòngLín recension that came down to us as the standard Shānghán lùn. The SòngLín editorial postface (the Jiàozhèng Qiānjīn yìfāng hòuxù 校正千金翼方後序, also preserved in the hxwd _000.txt) explicitly notes that Sūn’s Shānghán presentation in the Yìfāng — “specifically taking Zhòngjǐng’s treatise, classing-and-attaching the Tàiyáng method-symptoms by category” — was Sūn’s deliberate correction of his earlier Yàofāng coverage, “wherein the shānghán alone was [collected as] decoction-powder-paste-pill clusters, the detail of which had not been fully gathered.”
Other major sections include: juǎn 1–4 materia medica (extended pharmacopoeia of c. 800 drugs, with substantial new additions from Daoist alchemical sources); juǎn 5–8 (women’s medicine and xūláo 虛勞 deficiency-taxation); juǎn 11–15 (consolidated Shānghán materials and shǎoxiǎo 少小 paediatrics); juǎn 16–17 (small surgery); juǎn 18–20 (eye, ear, fǔjiǔ 浮疽 abscesses, qīqiào 七竅); juǎn 21–24 (wànbìng 萬病 / general internal-medicine extensions, bèijí 備急 emergencies, zhèngdú 中毒 poisoning); juǎn 25–26 (yǎngxìng 養性 Daoist longevity practice, including the famous chapters on fúshí 服食 / jìfáng 忌房 / ànmó 按摩 and the Dàolín 道林 qìgōng programme); juǎn 27–28 (acupuncture); juǎn 29–30 (the jīnshí língbǎo 禁石靈寶 talismanic-magical materia and rites — the most extensively preserved Táng-era medical-Daoist ritual corpus).
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries Sūn’s own self-preface (parallel in style and vocabulary to the Yàofāng self-preface) and the Sòng-period Jiàozhèng Qiānjīn yìfāng hòuxù (Northern-Sòng Jiàozhèng yīshū jú postface, c. 1066, anonymous but probably by Lín Yì 林億 and Gāo Bǎohéng 高保衡). The Sòng postface gives the principal early evaluation of the Yìfāng’s significance — that the three medical emergencies are shānghán, zhōngfēng, chuāngyōng (cold-damage / wind-strike / abscess); the Yàofāng had treated the latter two well but shānghán inadequately; the Yìfāng’s explicit refoundation of shānghán studies on Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s authority “is for the Qiānjīn the supplement of greatest depth.” The postface also flags as spurious a then-circulating Qiānjīn suǐ 千金髓 ascribed to Sūn (“on examining its language and meaning, it is decidedly not Sūn’s, but the work of some hàoshì zhě meddler”).
Abstract
The 681–682 dating is established by internal references (Sūn cites events of Yǒngchún 1 / 682) and by the traditional account of Sūn’s death in the same year. The work was edited by the Sòng Jiàozhèng yīshū jú together with the Yàofāng and the Wàitái mìyào in the Zhìpíng 治平 to Xīníng 熙寧 years (c. 1066–1069); the SòngLín recension is the textus receptus. The hxwd recension descends from a Japanese reprint of a Sòng or Yuán print.
The Yìfāng is, after the Yàofāng, the second-most-important monument of the early-Táng medical synthesis. Its Shānghán materials specifically constitute one of the three principal medieval witnesses to Zhāng Zhòngjǐng (alongside the standalone SòngLín Shānghán lùn and the Wàitái mìyào); see modern Shānghán-textual studies by Okanishi Tameto 岡西為人 and Ma Jixing 馬繼興.
Translations and research
For Sūn Sī-miǎo and the Yì-fāng see references at KR3er088 Yào-fāng. Sabine Wilms’s Qiān-jīn fāng translation project covers principally the Yào-fāng gynaecology; the Yì-fāng has not yet received a full English translation. For the Yì-fāng’s shāng-hán materials see Nathan Sivin and Shigehisa Kuriyama’s discussions in their respective monographs, and the Japanese critical-edition tradition (Ma Jixing 馬繼興 and others). For the Yì-fāng’s yǎng-xìng / Daoist longevity materials see Catherine Despeux, “Gymnastics: The Ancient Tradition,” in Livia Kohn ed., Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques (Michigan, 1989), and Vivienne Lo, The Quivering Brush: Body and Self in Medieval Chinese Medical Manuscripts (Singapore, forthcoming).