Theory

The Jin-Yuan Forefathers

By Gory ⋅ June 30, 2009 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The Jin Dynasty:

In about the year 1115, a community of people called the nvzhen (女真) tribe began conquering the north-eastern part of China we know as Manchuria. They were the ones who founded the Jin (金) dynasty, and began pushing the existing Song dynasty toward the south.

And so the Song dynasty began shrinking southward. After the northern capital Kaifeng (开封) was occupied by the nvzhen people in 1126, the Song dynasty (now called the Southern Song (南宋) dynasty put in place a new capital in Hangzhou (杭州). Hangzhou is close by Shanghai, for those in need of geographical bearing.

Intro to the Duo:

The Jin-Yuan forefathers lived in the north. Liu Wansu (刘完素) was born in 1120, six years before Kaifeng was taken over by the foreign invaders. We don’t know when Zhang Yuansu (张元素) was born, but we know he was a contemporary of Liu. Both of them lived in the northern state of Hebei (河北) and had regular contact. Zhang Yuansu actually made a name for himself curing Liu Wansu of a Shanghan-type externally contracted disease (伤寒病).

It is very important to recognize the headway made by both Liu Wansu (刘完素) and Zhang Yuansu (张元素) in the realm of medicine in China.

• Liu came from Hejian (河间) county in Hebei, and most influenced those after him with his idea that “heat is the original cause of disease.” This idea, we can now relate as being similar to the later (36 years later) attack and drain (攻泻) ideas of Zhang Congzheng (张从正), who came to occupy second place in the Jin-Yuan Four Masters listings.
• Zhang Yuansu is from the Yishui (易水) county in Hebei. He is remembered for his focus on the five Zang and six Fu, refining its use in the area of diagnostics etc. It is from him that later disciples Li Gao (李杲) and Wang Haogu (王好古) further zoomed in on the Spleen-Stomach as the chief cause of disease.

Zhang Yuansu deserves more than just brief mention — he could have easily been be one of the Four Masters. However, his student Li Gao (李杲) – the founder of the Spleen-Stomach school – was better able to distinguish himself, and is more well-known that his master is.

Some of Liu Wansu’s Ideas I like:

• “All six qi evolve from fire (六气皆从火化).” This is akin to saying “all disease is inflammation.”
• The cause of excess emotion is heat.
• With regard to the use of herbs, I like his idea that we don’t need to stick to the old method of using mahuang and guizhi.
• His favorite formulas include liangge san, tianshui san, baihu tang, huanglian jiedu tang, and most importantly, fangfeng tongshen tang.

Zhang Yuansu’s Ideas:

• He probably has influences us more than we like to know. He was well-versed in the classics of his times, and was very opposed to sticking blindly to set formulas the way the people in the South did – adhering to the formulas put together by the state formulary in the book heji jufang (合剂局方). One well-known sentence of his is “old formulas cannot be used on today’s diseases (古方今病不相能).”
• His area of specialty was on the different zang-fu organs, each of which he clarified their relevance to clinical application. His focus on the Spleen-Stomach is not one bit surprising if we know that his progeny were people like Ligao and Wang Haogu, propogators of the Spleen-Stomach school of thought. Indirectly too, he influenced the ideas of Xueji, who by the time his thinking had matured adhered to Ligao’s Spleen-Stomach school of thought. Two Spleen-Stomach phases from Zhang Yuansu: “脾者土也… 消磨五谷，寄在胸中，养于四旁“ and “胃者脾之腑也…人之根本，胃气壮则五脏六腑皆壮也。“ Put simply, he felt that Spleen digested stuff and nurtured the other organs, that the Stomach was a crucial component of our body, a strong Stomach means all the other organs are strong.

Summary:

My own conclusion is to see these two people as the headsprings of two distinct schools of thought. These two distinct schools guided treatment for different constitutional types. Liu Wansu’s patients tended toward inflammation con calor, while Zhang Yuansu’s patient had weak Spleen-Stomach constitutions. Liu’s patients were likely Warrior types, while Zhang’s could be classified constitutionally as either Monarch or Seer. Liu’s patients were on fire, and most certainly were not in want of agni-fire, while Zhang’s patients probably needed to bolster agni-fire.

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