The Life and Work of Sun Simiao 孫思邈Sun Simiao is most famous for being the author of the seventh-century Bei Ji Qian Jin Yao Fang 備急千金要方 ("Essential Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold Pieces for Every Emergency"), an enormous encyclopedia of early medieval Chinese medicine that continues to be used extensively by classically-trained physicians in East Asia to this day. In addition, though, he is also venerated in Chinese popular religion as the "King of Medicine" (yao wang 藥王), a Daoist sage who attained immortality after spending much of his life in the company of a tiger and a dragon as a pinecone-eating hermit and adept of life-prolonging practices known as "cultivating life" (yang sheng 養生). Lastly, we know from the dynastic histories that he also served successfully as loyal advisor to the first Tang emperor, a role in which he was greatly respected for his learning, wisdom, and calligraphic and literary accomplishments. In this course, we discuss this famous physician's life and work on the basis of legends, his own writings, and historical biographies. Thereby, we gain insights into his political involvements, philosophical and religious background, medical training and practice, and personal practices of health-cultivation. We explore the various dimensions of his life inclusively, whether they are historically accurate or not. We certainly briefly address such issues as whether he died at the tender age of 101, at 141 years of age, or merely pretended to die and instead left behind a mortal body to gain immortality. We leave research on whether he did in fact converse with dragons (as suppliers of some of his celebrated formulas) to other authorities and focus instead on the content of his formulas and their significance in early medieval China. Nevertheless, by acknowledging all the facets of his life regardless of their historicity, we get a sense of the medieval Chinese synthesis of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, all in the context of classical Chinese medicine. What we know about Sun Simiao now on the basis of sources that were composed within a few centuries of his death is significant not so much for the historical details about his life, but for the image of the ideal physician -- or perhaps rather "practitioner of medieval Chinese medicine" -- that they construct. Much more than just getting the "facts" about Sun Simiao's life, we contemplate the following questions:
|