The Original Meaning of the Medical Classics

The Original Meaning of the Medical Classics (Yijing Yuanzhi), in six volumes, was compiled and annotated by the Qing dynasty physician Xue Xue (courtesy name Shengbo, sobriquet Yipiao, later style Saoye Shanren). It was completed and first printed in the nineteenth year of the Qianlong reign (1754) and comprises about fourteen chapters. Xue Xue was a native of Wu County (present-day Suzhou, Jiangsu) and, alongside Ye Tianshi, a representative figure of the warm-disease school; he also wrote A Treatise on Damp-Heat and On Damp-Heat. The book is the fruit of his rereading of the Huangdi Neijing: dissatisfied with Zhang Jingyue's Leijing, which he found "half doubt and half belief, unable to discard the ornate and preserve the substantial," he rearranged the original text of the Suwen and Lingshu, cut the redundant and highlighted the essential, and reorganized it into nine categories—nurturing life, yin and yang, visceral manifestations, pulse and complexion, channels and network vessels, root and branch, qi and flavor, treatment, and disease—to seek the original intent of the medical classics, hence the title "Original Meaning." Volume One covers nurturing life, yin and yang and visceral manifestations; Volume Two covers pulse and complexion and channels and network vessels (part one); Volume Three covers channels and network vessels (part two), root and branch, qi and flavor, and treatment; Volumes Four through Six cover diseases, moving from pathogenesis, pathogenic qi, deficiency and excess, and seasonal factors to the five qi, emotions, wind, reversal, cold damage, cold and heat, malaria, cough, panting, sweating, drum distension, fluids, water jaundice, impediment, flaccidity, mania, abscesses and ulcers, the five reversals, and times of death. The disease section accounts for about half the book and is the most fully developed. The annotations draw widely on the views of past masters, especially Zhang Jingyue and Zhang Zhicong, with the author's own views added where the principles remained incomplete; because acupuncture has its own specialized texts, that material is treated briefly. The annotations are concise and the discussions terse and sharp, making the book an important reference commentary for studying the Neijing; its shortcoming is that cited passages are not individually marked by chapter. This entry refers to the 1987 China Bookstore photo-offset reprint of the Qing edition (two thread-bound volumes).