By The Side Of The Heritage Context: Origin Of Zhongjing

Zhang Zhongjing is a renowned physician of the eastern Han dynasty. After his main work the Treatise on Cold Damage and Complex Disorders had gotten lost, it was retrieved by Jin dynasty physician Wang Shuhe who reorganized the work into two volumes: the Treatise on Cold Damage and the Concise Essentials of the Golden Cabinet.There are many idiographical transmissions of the Treatise on Cold Damage, of which the most famous ones are the Dunhuang edition, the Tang edition, the Song edition, the Zhao Kaimei edition and the Antique Guilin Edition. And regardless there are some disagreements on the chapters on pulses as well as on the preface, there is general agreement on the structure of the work. The structure of the Treatise on Cold Damage is commonly called 'three-hundred and ninety-seven lines' with a total of 'one hundred and twelve' formulas without repetition. The structure of the Concise Essentials of the Golden Cabinet is twenty-five chapters with two-hundred and sixty-two formulas without repetition. This series of formulas is now called the 'canonical formulas' and are the ancestral formulas for all later herbal prescriptions.The Treatise on Cold Damage and Complex Disorders is a unique clinical handbook, never before seen in the pre-Han history of Chinese medicine. Its clinical and academic value is unrivalled. But when reading all medical classics preceding the eastern-Han dynasty, it is hard not to wonder what the blueprint for the formulas in this work was? Many historical physicians have contemplated this question but only Jin-dynasty masters like Huang Fumi and Tao Hongjing formulated an actual answer. The answer at the time being that Zhongjing's formulas belong to the transmission lineage of the Divine Farmer, and were a continuation of the formulaic science of western-Han dynasty's Decoction Classic.But for modern man it is hard to confirm this opinion. And it is even harder to actually establish the source of Zhongjing's formulas. Until the first part of the twentieth century, when among the medical books found in the Dunhuang caves in Northwest China, a work by Tao Hongjing was found, titled Secret Key to the Essential Methods for the Application of Herbs for Viscera and Bowels. In these Secret Keys, Tao Hongjing records a total of sixty formulas from the Decoction Classic, among which the major and minor tonification and purgation formulas, and the major and minor Dawn and Six Constellation decoctions. Upon inspection, it is not hard to discern...