Huangfu Mi assembles the scattered acupuncture material of earlier centuries into a single classified work.
Zhen Jiu Jia Yi Jing (针灸甲乙经)Origins and Lineages
ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The English is translated from the Chinese vernacular. The original text and its pinyin sit beneath each sentence in smaller type; hide them whenever you prefer to read the translation alone.
The rise of the medical art is of long standing. In high antiquity Shennong first tasted plants and trees and came to know the hundred medicines.
The Yellow Emperor consulted Qibo, Bogao, Shaoyu and others: within, he examined the five viscera and six bowels; without, he brought together the channels, the blood and qi, and the signs of complexion and pulse; he checked them against heaven and earth, verified them in man and in things, traced them to life and nature, and exhausted the spirit and its transformations — and thus the way of the needle arose.
Huangfu Mi wrote in the third century, at a time when the acupuncture material of the classics lay scattered across separate texts and was difficult to use in practice. His preface explains the labour of collecting, comparing and classifying it into twelve volumes.
The Jia Yi Jing is the first work to treat acupuncture as an organised discipline with its own points, pathways, techniques and indications. Nearly every later text, including the Ming dynasty Zhen Jiu Da Cheng, works within the arrangement he established. The preface is a short statement of why systematisation itself is a form of scholarship.
ANNOTATION
Three works (三部): the Suwen, the Zhen Jing and the Mingtang on points and needling essentials.
Jia and yi (甲乙): the first two heavenly stems, used to divide the text into sections for easy reference, as we might say A, B, C.
Huangfu Mi (皇甫谧): courtesy name Shi’an, style Master Xuanyan, a physician and man of letters of the Wei-Jin period.
COMMENTARY
Huangfu Mi was not famous as an acupuncturist; he was closer to a recluse and a scholar. Precisely because his learning was broad, he could see how scattered the acupuncture material in the three books was, and perform the work of classification. In the history of scholarship, arrangement is often more important than invention — the Jia Yi Jing is the proof.