Yanjing Yan

Yanjing Yan (Remarks on the Study of the Classics) is a collection of insights gained by the Qing dynasty physician Mo Meishi (1837–1907) from years of studying the canonical texts of Chinese medicine. Mo, whose original name was Wenquan, was a native of Gui'an in Zhejiang (present-day Wuxing, Huzhou). He began his career in classical studies and was well versed in philology and exegesis; later, owing to illness, he took up medicine and studied under the renowned physician Wang Baoshu of Wujiang. Consequently, in interpreting the medical classics he was not content with broad generalizations but often started from the sound and meaning of characters, collating terms and analyzing disease names, advocating the use of the classics to explain the classics and striving to recover the original intent of the ancient medical texts. The book comprises four juan and over one hundred and fifty essays (the number varies slightly among editions), offering commentary on the Huangdi Neijing, Nanjing, Shanghan Lun, Jinkui Yaolue, Maijing, Qianjin Yaofang, Waitai Miyao, and the warm-disease doctrines of the Ming and Qing dynasties. By content the essays fall into categories such as basic theory, diagnostic methods, pattern and disease differentiation, treatment methods, formulas, materia medica, and book reviews; by form there are five types—lun (discourse), shuo (exposition), shi (gloss), jie (explanation), and bian (disputation)—as in "On the Five Wills," "On the Intermingling of Yin and Yang," "On Diagnostic Formulas," "Glossing Asthma," "Glossing Phlegm," "Explaining Suanxiao," "Explaining Xieku," "A Disputation That the Two Kinds of Damp-Warm Should Not Be Conflated," and "A Disputation That Zhongjing's Methods Are Not Northern Learning." The book's distinguishing feature is its textual and semantic analysis; it offers many original views on the meaning of pulse and symptoms, the discrimination of similar patterns and diseases, the correction of errors in earlier commentaries, and the application of treatment methods and formulas, all in concise, incisive prose with thorough reasoning. This edition is published in the Annotated Classics of Medical Essays Series, with annotations by Xing Yurui and Zhang Dan, making it accessible to modern readers. Other editions include Wang Xu'ao's punctuated edition (People's Medical Publishing House, 1990) and the photographic reprint with annotations in the Collected Rare Editions of Ancient Chinese Medical Texts (Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2014).