The Three-Finger Zen

The Three-Finger Zen is a treatise on pulse diagnosis by the Qing physician Zhou Xueting (1771–1834, courtesy name Jingwei, sobriquet Daoren of Awakened Dream), completed in the seventh year of the Daoguang reign (1827). The work in three juan comprises eighty-one discourses. Juan One is a general survey: it discusses in turn the origins of pulse studies, the sites for taking the pulse, the allocation of the cun, guan, and chi positions to the six pulse regions, the number of beats, the names of the twenty-seven pulses, and such essentials as "one with stomach qi lives" and "the pulse is valued for its spirit." Zhou singles out the moderate (huan) pulse, taking it as the normal pulse: whoever masters it can infer the pulses of all diseases. He further takes floating, sinking, slow, and rapid as four great guiding categories governing all pulses, and distinguishes pulse images in paired contrasts—minute versus fine, vacuous versus replete, long versus short, stringlike versus weak, slippery versus rough, hollow versus drumskin, tense versus scattered, soft versus firm, surging versus hidden, knotted versus hasty, stirring versus intermittent. Juan Two and Juan Three take diseases and patterns as their framework, discussing separately the pulse characteristics and the principles of establishing treatment and prescribing drugs on the basis of the pulse for consumption, dysphagia and counterflow vomiting, panting, qi distention, blood disorders, cough, diarrhea, edema, headache, cardiac pain, low back pain, leg qi, wasting-thirst, vomiting, flaccidity, wind painful obstruction, epilepsy, warm diseases, summerheat, dysentery, malaria, cold damage, pestilence, as well as menstruation, pregnancy and postpartum, and childhood malnutrition. The work concludes with the Rhapsody on the Three-Finger Zen. The title means that "the pulses and symptoms of the whole body, in an instant, all come beneath three fingers" and that all depends on "sudden awakening." Throughout, discussion of the pulse is tightly joined to etiology and symptoms, with discourses, verses, methods, and formulas; it is close to clinical practice and was esteemed by later physicians. This edition is edited and collated from the original Daoguang seventh-year blockprint.