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I Bibliographic History of the Su wen 1. SOME SCHOLARLY VIEWS ON THE ORIGIN OF THE SU WEN The Huang Di nei jing su wen ¿“∫g¿› and the Huang Di nei jing ling shu¿“∫gFœ form a textual corpus generally known as the Huang Di nei jing.1 Popular accounts of the history of Chinese medicine tend to locate the origin of this text in a distant past, several millennia b.c. Voices refuting authorship by the legendary Huang Di in prehistoric times have been heard in China for centuries, and to this day there is a discrepancy between views held by historians of Chinese medicine in and outside China, on the one hand, and by authors writing for the general public, on the other. Zu Xi ∂Q (1130–1200) and Cheng Hao {V (1032–1085), the two eminent philosophers of the Song era, identified the Su wen as a product of the Warring States period, the fifth through third centuries b.c.2 The latter’s contemporary, Sima Guang q®˙ (1019–1086), author of the important historical work Zi zhi tong jian Ívq≥, stated: “If someone were to say that the Su wen were indeed a work written by Huang Di, this, I presume, would be inaccurate. . . . His name was adopted by medical people during the Zhou and Han eras to lend [his] weight [to their field].”3 Lü Fu f_, the fourteenth-century Yuan-era literary critic, noted, first, that the Su wen was compiled by several authors over a long period, and, second , that its contents were brought together, like those of the Li ji ßO, the “Book of Rites,” by Han-era Confucian scholars who then transmitted the text together with the teachings of Confucius.4 During the Ming dynasty, the famous literatus Hu Yinglin J≥Ô (1551– 1602) concluded: “The Su wen is also called Nei jing today. However, the [bibliographic ] section in the [history of the] Sui [dynasty] (i.e., 581–618) only mentions a Su wen. The fact is, the fifty-five juan of Huang Di’s Nei [jing] and Wai jing [recorded in the bibliographic section of the dynastic history of the 1 Han]5 had been lost by the time of the Six Dynasties (i.e., between the third and sixth centuries a.d.). Hence later persons compiled it [anew] and changed its name.”6 Cui Da ZF voiced a view critical of Huang Di’s authorship during the Qing era: “The Su wen, a text transmitted from the past, contains a dialogue between Huang Di and Qi Bo. Some people say that the Ling shu and the Yin fu jing ±≈g were written by Huang Di himself. By the time of the Warring States, many philosophers included Huang Di in their writings. For example , the Zhuang zi is said to be [the result of] Huang Di’s inquiring from Guang Chengzi about the Way. My opinion is, at the time of Huang Di no historical books existed yet. How could a text have been transmitted to posterity ? Also, the sayings [in the Su wen, etc.] are fairly recent. Obviously, they were compiled by persons living at some time in the Warring States, the Qin, and the Han eras.”7 Beginning with the twentieth century, Chinese scholars have begun to scrutinize the available historical data systematically, their research findings making it increasingly clear that the textual history of the Huang Di nei jing began no earlier than the second century b.c. For example, as early as 1950, quoting an article published in 1928 and concluding that the Su wen was written during the Qin-Han era, with the dialogue structure superimposed by even later authors, Song Xiangyuan ∫V∏ wrote: “From the Shi ji vO, [section] Wu di ben ji ≠“ªO, it is obvious that in early times Sima Qian, the author of the Shi ji, did not believe that Huang Di was the source of medical and pharmaceutical teachings. And we, people living in the twentieth century, if we were to accept [the saying that] Qi [Bo and] Huang [Di] are the ‘Sages of Medicine,’ would this not be superstitious?”8 Zhao Hongjun, repeating arguments voiced by Liu Changlin in 1982,9 pointed out in 1985; “The preconditions for the writing of the Nei jing were not given before the Western Han (i.e., 206 b.c. to a.d. 9). The major contents of the Ling shu and the Su wen cannot have formed before the Western Han. Some...

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