Nan Jing: The Classic of Difficult Issues

649 Pages·2016·71.08 MB·English

by  Paul U. Unschuld

The Chinese Medical Classics
Nan Jing
The Classic of Difficult Issues
With commentaries by Chinese and Japanese authors
from the Third through the Twentieth century
The Complete Chinese Text with
an Annotated Translation
by Paul U. Unschuld

University of California Press
Nan Jing

The Chinese Medical Classics
Nan Jing
The Classic of Difficult Issues
With commentaries by Chinese and Japanese authors
from the Third through the Twentieth century
The Complete Chinese Text with
an Annotated Translation
by Paul U. Unschuld

University of California Press
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in
the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939466
Manufactured in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
Part I.
Prolegomena / 1
Introductory Remarks / 1
Historical Significance of the Nan jing / 6
The Contents of the Nan jing / 10
The Origin of the Nan jing / 21
The Reception of the Nan jing in Later Centuries / 27
Part II
Text, Translation, Commentaries, and Notes / 47
Preliminary Note / 47
Chapter One
The Movement in the Vessels and Its Diagnostic Significance / 49
The First Difficult Issue / 49
The Second Difficult Issue / 63
The Third Difficult Issue / 71
The Fourth Difficult Issue / 80
The Fifth Difficult Issue / 91
The Sixth Difficult Issue / 96
The Seventh Difficult Issue / 100
The Eighth Difficult Issue / 107
The Ninth Difficult Issue / 115
The Tenth Difficult Issue / 121
The Eleventh Difficult Issue / 130
vi Contents
The Twelfth Difficult Issue / 135
The Thirteenth Difficult Issue / 141
The Fourteenth Difficult Issue / 151
The Fifteenth Difficult Issue / 168
The Sixteenth Difficult Issue / 184
The Seventeenth Difficult Issue / 200
The Eighteenth Difficult Issue / 205
The Nineteenth Difficult Issue / 218
The Twentieth Difficult Issue / 226
The Twenty-First Difficult Issue / 230
The Twenty-Second Difficult Issue / 235
Chapter Two
The Conduits and the Network vessels / 240
The Twenty-Third Difficult Issue / 240
The Twenty-Fourth Difficult Issue / 253
The Twenty-Fifth Difficult Issue / 262
The Twenty-Sixth Difficult Issue / 268
The Twenty-Seventh Difficult Issue / 272
The Twenty-Eighth Difficult Issue / 276
The Twenty-Ninth Difficult Issue / 281
Chapter Three
The Long-Term Depots and the Short-Term Repositories / 286
The Thirtieth Difficult Issue / 286
The Thirty-First Difficult Issue / 291
The Thirty-Second Difficult Issue / 300
The Thirty-Third Difficult Issue / 302
The Thirty-Fourth Difficult Issue / 307
The Thirty-Fifth Difficult Issue / 313
The Thirty-Sixth Difficult Issue / 320
The Thirty-Seventh Difficult Issue / 324
The Thirty-Eighth Difficult Issue / 331
The Thirty-Ninth Difficult Issue / 335
The Fortieth Difficult Issue / 339
The Forty-First Difficult Issue / 345
The Forty-Second Difficult Issue / 349
Contents vii
The Forty-Third Difficult Issue / 357
The Forty-Fourth Difficult Issue / 359
The Forty-Fifth Difficult Issue / 363
The Forty-Sixth Difficult Issue / 370
The Forty-Seventh Difficult Issue / 374
Chapter Four
On Diseases / 377
The Forty-Eighth Difficult Issue / 377
The Forty-Ninth Difficult Issue / 383
The Fiftieth Difficult Issue / 398
The Fifty-First Difficult Issue / 403
The Fifty-Second Difficult Issue / 406
The Fifty-Third Difficult Issue / 408
The Fifty-Fourth Difficult Issue / 414
The Fifty-Fifth Difficult Issue / 417
The Fifty-Sixth Difficult Issue / 420
The Fifty-Seventh Difficult Issue / 429
The Fifty-Eighth Difficult Issue / 433
The Fifty-Ninth Difficult Issue / 444
The Sixtieth Difficult Issue / 448
The Sixty-First Difficult Issue / 454
Chapter Five
Transportation Holes / 459
The Sixty-Second Difficult Issue / 459
The Sixty-Third Difficult Issue / 464
The Sixty-Fourth Difficult Issue / 467
The Sixty-Fifth Difficult Issue / 471
The Sixty-Sixth Difficult Issue / 473
The Sixty-Seventh Difficult Issue / 482
The Sixty-Eighth Difficult Issue / 487
viii Contents
Chapter Six
Needling Patterns / 492
The Sixty-Ninth Difficult Issue / 492
The Seventieth Difficult Issue / 497
The Seventy-First Difficult Issue / 502
The Seventy-Second Difficult Issue / 505
The Seventy-Third Difficult Issue / 510
The Seventy-Fourth Difficult Issue / 514
The Seventy-Fifth Difficult Issue / 521
The Seventy-Sixth Difficult Issue / 529
The Seventy-Seventh Difficult Issue / 532
The Seventy-Eighth Difficult Issue / 536
The Seventy-Ninth Difficult Issue / 541
The Eightieth Difficult Issue / 545
The Eighty-First Difficult Issue / 547
Appendices / 551
Appendix A
Survey of Commentated Nan jing Editions by Chinese Authors from the Third
through Twentieth Century / 553
Appendix B
Chinese Twentieth-Century Essays on the Nan jing / 563
Appendix C
Commentated Nan jing Editions by Japanese Authors in the Takeda and Fujikawa
Libraries, as well as Lost Titles of Past Centuries / 567
Appendix D
Zhang Zhixian’s Graphs Depicting the Eighty-One Difficult Issues (1510) / 573
Glossary of Technical Terms in the Nan Jing / 595
Index to Prolegomena, Commentaries, and Notes / 619
Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care / 639
PART I.
PROLEGOMENA
Introductory Remarks
The Nan jing (cid:19731)(cid:13251) is an ancient Chinese medical classic; it was compiled, proba-
bly, at some time during the first or second century CE. For the past eight or nine
centuries, the Nan jing has been overshadowed by the reputation and authority of
the “original” classic, the Huang Di nei jing (cid:21747)(cid:5197)(cid:1973)(cid:13251) (“The Yellow Thearch’s Inner
Classic”) with its two largely different segments, the Huang Di nei jing Su wen (or
Su wen (cid:13136)(cid:2943)) and the Huang Di nei jing Ling shu (or Ling shu (cid:19832)(cid:8270)). The present
edition of the Nan jing combines a translation of its textus receptus and of selected
commentaries by twenty Chinese and Japanese authors of the past seventeen cen-
turies with an interpretation by this author. One of its goals is to demonstrate that
the Nan jing should once again (as was the case until early the second millennium)
be regarded as a significant and innovative work that marks the apex, and also the
conclusion, of the developmental phase of the conceptual system known as the
medicine of systematic correspondence.
The contents of the Nei jing texts, in contrast, should be appreciated as a collec-
tion of extremely valuable transitory stages in this developmental phase—valuable
because they reflect various historical steps as well as a wide range of diverging
(and even contradictory) theoretical arguments.1 These arguments characterize the
genesis of a system of therapeutic ideas and practices which has a formative period
that can be traced from its first extant documented sources (the so-called Ma wang
dui texts of about the late third century BCE) to the heterogeneous contents of the
1 For further details on the heterogeneous nature of the Huang Di nei jing texts, and a
preliminary analysis of historical developments reflected in these texts, see Paul U. Un-
schuld, Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese
Medical Text. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006 (second printing).
1