General Remarks on the Grand Basis of the Inner Canon

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Zhongjie The courtesy name of Ke Fengyi, the Governor mentioned on the previous page. took the manuscript to be sent to the printers fuzi: literally "to be committed to the catalpa wood," meaning to have woodblocks carved for printing. He also gifted me a copy of the Yuan edition Original: "Yuanke"—referring to the edition published by Yuan Chang (1846–1900), a high-ranking official and bibliophile.. In my spare time, I took the Governor’s collated manuscript and compared it against this Yuan edition. I found that wherever the Yuan edition had made revisions or corrections, they were largely identical to the Governor's own collations. This suggests that my previous assertions were not unfounded.

Afterwards, I used the Yuan edition to proofread this current book. Whenever a character in the Yuan edition differed from our text, I noted it clearly under the "Standard Commentary" ping'an: the specific heading Yang Shangshan used to introduce his own medical assessments within the text, stating "the Yuan edition writes this character as X." As for the Governor's specific corrections, since they have already been integrated into the Yuan edition, I no longer distinguish them separately.

While I was living in the capital Beijing, I also had the opportunity to see another copy at the home of my elder townsman, Mr. Zuo Huqing. Its volume sequence was identical to the Governor’s manuscript, and it contained no fragmentary or missing volumes. I borrowed it for collation over several months and calculated that there were only about a dozen characters that differed from our current book. I have likewise noted these under the "Standard Commentary" sections, stating "another edition writes this character as X," preserving them for future reference.

The Author Yang Shangshan: Rank, Hometown, and Era

The official histories provide no evidence regarding the rank, hometown, or specific era of Yang Shangshan The Tang Dynasty physician who compiled and commented on the Taisu.. We must rely on the "Expanded and Supplemented Collation" by Lin Yi A famous Song Dynasty medical scholar (c. 1000–1075) who headed the Bureau for Editing Medical Books. and others...