Collected Commentaries on the Classic of Difficult Issues

Collected Commentaries on the Classic of Difficult Issues is the earliest surviving annotated edition of the Classic of Difficult Issues (Nanjing). It runs to five volumes and thirteen sections covering the eighty-one difficult issues, about sixty thousand characters in all. The book was traditionally attributed to Wang Weiyi of the Song dynasty, but modern scholarship generally holds that it was compiled and edited around 1505, the eighteenth year of the Hongzhi reign of the Ming, by Wang Jiusi, Shi Youliang, Wang Dingxiang, and others; the Qing scholar Qian Xizuo collated it against the edition in the Lost Books Collection and included it in the Shoushan Pavilion Collection. Following the scriptural framework of Yang Xuancao's Annotations on the Classic of Difficult Issues, the book selects commentary from five masters—Lü Guang of Wu in the Three Kingdoms period, Yang Xuancao of the Tang, and Ding Deyong, Yu Shu, and Yang Kanghou of the Song—and appends them to the original text of each difficult issue, marking each commentator with phrases such as "Lü says," "Yang says," and "Ding says." The material is then arranged by pulse diagnosis, channels and network vessels, viscera, diseases, acupoints, and needling methods, divided into thirteen sections, with illustrations and a glossary of pronunciations at the end of each volume. Lü Guang's commentary is the earliest known annotation of the Classic of Difficult Issues, strong on pulse diagnosis and also touching on channels, acupoints, and pathogenesis; Yang Xuancao's commentary was the first to divide the text into thirteen categories and is the earliest surviving comprehensive annotation; Ding Deyong and Yu Shu are the most frequently selected, with Ding's commentary drawing extensively on the Inner Canon and containing the earliest illustrated explanations of the Classic of Difficult Issues. The standalone annotated editions of all five masters are now lost, and their content survives only through this book. It is therefore both an introductory reader for studying the original text of the Classic of Difficult Issues and an important document for examining the state of commentary on the work from the late Han through the Tang and Song. The 1955 Commercial Press letterpress edition, typeset from the Shoushan Pavilion edition, is carefully collated and long circulated, making it a relatively common modern critical edition.