Huang Di nei jing su wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text (review)

Huangdi neijing suwen (translated "Huang Di's Inner Classic, Basic Questions" by Paul Unschuld on p. 21) preserves ancient medical writings associated with the name of the legendary culture hero Huangdi (conventionally rendered Yellow Emperor). In rough chronological terms, a Huangdi neijing (HDNJ) corpus existed by the first century AD; the Basic Questions is the edition of this corpus produced by Wang Bing in the eighth century, and it became the most influential edition in subsequent centuries down to the present. Unschuld's aim in his newest contribution to scholarship on traditional Chinese medicine is to recover the medical ideas of the ancient HDNJ from Wang Bing's medieval edition. He adopts a two-part textual strategy: First, the seven treatises on the "five periods and six qi," which are known to have been added to the Basic Questions by Wang Bing and are not part of the ancient text, are examined in an appendix to the book. Second, in collaboration with Hermann Tessenow, Unschuld has made a thorough text-critical analysis of the remaining treatises to identify distinctive layers in the text, layers that reflect contrasting medical ideas in the original process of formation of the HDNJ. The book under review summarizes Unschuld's conclusions about the ancient HDNJ and introduces the contents of the Basic Questions treatises. Given Unschuld's many new insights on ancient Chinese medicine as represented in the HDNJ, we may hope that his full translation of the Basic Questions will soon be published in a companion volume.

As befits meticulous textual study, Unschuld begins with the earliest evidence of the HDNJ corpus, the textual history of the Basic Questions, commentaries, and the transmission of the edition we have today (pp. 22–75). I recommend these pages even to readers who are eager to move quickly on to the "Survey of the Contents of the Su Wen" (pp. 76–318), for they reveal the multiplicity of purposes behind the activities of physicians, commentators, and editors who each played a role in shaping the HDNJ. Note, for example, the ideological implications of medical ideas about the heart (pp. 37–39): inasmuch as the heart was the physiological counterpart to the ruler of the state, acknowledgment of its fragility in a theory of pathology could not be made in ignorance of potential political consequences.

Nevertheless, this book's most valuable and provocative contribution to scholarship on traditional Chinese medicine is the careful documentation of divergent voices in the contents of the Basic Questions: on issues of physiology, pathology, nosology, diagnosis, and therapy we find different approaches, sometimes within the same treatise. As Unschuld notes in the discussion of yin-yang physiology: "by the time the Su wen was compiled several systems existed applying yin-yang categorization to physiology, diagnosis, treatment, and so on. The editors of the Su wen brought these systems together. They may never have striven to create a homogeneous system. . . . Hence numerous internal contradictions and inconsistencies, as well as divergencies among the various treatises, mark the application of yin and yang categorization to physiology, pathology, and diagnosis in the Su wen" (p. 96). Unschuld has performed a double service as a historian of ideas: we see more clearly the elements of contest in the formative period of ancient Chinese medicine that are embedded in the Basic Questions; and the view that we gain necessitates rethinking the place of the HDNJ as the key medical classic in Chinese tradition, as well as in the reception of traditional Chinese medicine in the West.

For a comparative perspective on traditional Chinese and Western medical ideas, I particularly recommend Unschuld's discussion of "The Body and Its Organs" (pp. 124–44), with its emphasis on the body...