Wang Bing

Wang Bing a physician and editor of the Tang dynasty, active in the eighth century, who is remembered as the scholar whose annotated edition of the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon preserved and clarified the fundamental text of Chinese medicine and shaped its interpretation for a thousand years.

Life and Career

Wang Bing, whose courtesy name was Qi Xuan, lived in the eighth century during the Tang dynasty and held office as an official, attaining the rank of a provincial administrator. He came from a scholarly background and was educated in the classical tradition, but his enduring passion was the study of medicine and especially of the ancient medical canon. Little of his personal life is recorded, and he is known chiefly through the great work of scholarship that he produced.

He was deeply concerned that the foundational text of medicine, the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, had suffered from the hazards of transmission over the centuries. Manuscripts had been copied and recopied, passages had been lost or corrupted, and the order of the text had become confused. The meaning of many passages was disputed, and physicians of his day often misunderstood the ancient doctrines. Wang Bing set himself the task of restoring and explaining the work.

His edition, completed in 762, was a labour of great care and erudition. He gathered the surviving portions of the text, arranged them in what he judged to be their proper order, supplied missing material where he could, and added a running commentary that explained the difficult language, the technical terms and the underlying ideas. His work made the ancient canon accessible to the physicians of his own age and to all the ages that followed.

The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon

The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, the Huangdi Neijing, is the oldest and most authoritative of the Chinese medical classics. It is a composite work that took shape over several centuries and consists of two principal parts, the Simple Questions and the Spiritual Pivot, which together set out a theory of the body, of health and disease, of diagnosis and of therapy. Its doctrines of yin and yang, of the five phases, and of the channels and organs form the foundation of traditional medicine.

The text is written in the form of a dialogue between the Yellow Emperor and his physician ministers, and it covers an immense range of subjects, from the anatomy and physiology of the body to the causes of disease, the methods of diagnosis, the principles of treatment and the preservation of health. Its language is terse and archaic, and many passages admit of more than one interpretation, which is why the work of commentators such as Wang Bing was so important.

The canon teaches that health consists in the harmonious balance of the vital forces and that disease arises when that balance is disturbed, whether by external influences such as cold and heat or by internal factors such as emotion and excess. Treatment aims to restore the balance by means of drugs, acupuncture, moxibustion, diet and the regulation of the manner of living. These ideas, elaborated and refined by generations of physicians, remained at the centre of medical thought.

Editing and Commentary

Wang Bing's contribution lay in his systematic editing and annotation of this difficult text. He divided the Simple Questions into sections, arranged the chapters in what he took to be their original order, and supplied explanatory notes to each. His commentary clarified obscure terms, resolved apparent contradictions and drew out the implications of the text for the practice of medicine, so that a reader could understand not only what the canon said but what it meant.

He made use of a wide range of earlier commentaries and of his own medical learning, and he was careful to indicate where lines of interpretation diverged or where the text was uncertain. This scrupulous scholarship gave his edition an authority that later physicians accepted, and his work became the basis for the study of the canon in subsequent centuries. He also wrote on other medical subjects, including the diagnosis and treatment of disease and the principles of therapeutics.

A further important aspect of his work was his treatment of the calendrical and cosmological calculations embedded in the medical text. The canon contained passages bearing on the correspondence between the human body and the rhythms of the heavens, and the calculation of the times at which certain therapeutic methods should be applied. Wang Bing, who was learned in astronomy and the calendar, provided the tables and explanations needed to make these passages intelligible.

Medical Doctrine

In his commentary Wang Bing set out a coherent account of the doctrine of the canon. He explained the interaction of yin and yang as the fundamental polarity of the body and the cosmos, the generation and control of the five phases as a scheme for understanding the relations among the organs, and the movement of the vital substances through the channels of the body as the basis of health and disease. These explanations became standard for later readers and gave the ancient text a reasoned structure that could be studied and taught, so that the terse sayings of the canon became a connected body of doctrine.

He emphasised the importance of understanding the underlying cause of a disease and of adjusting treatment to the particular constitution and circumstances of the patient, rather than applying a fixed remedy to all cases. He stressed the value of prevention and of the regulation of the manner of living, holding that the wise physician attended to the patient before illness had developed rather than merely treating it after it had taken hold.

His work also preserved and transmitted many passages of the ancient text that might otherwise have been lost, and it fixed the form in which the canon would be read for centuries. Later editors built upon his edition, but his arrangement and his commentary remained the foundation of the textual tradition, and his name became inseparable from the study of the Inner Canon, which physicians consulted in his version whenever they sought the authority of antiquity for their practice.

Influence and Legacy

Wang Bing's edition of the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon became the standard version of the text and the basis for all subsequent study of it. Later physicians referred to it as authoritative, and the great medical compilations of the Song and later dynasties incorporated his arrangement and his commentary. Without his labours, the survival and interpretation of the ancient canon might have been far less secure, and his work is thus of fundamental importance to the whole tradition.

He also exerted a lasting influence through the doctrines that he clarified. His exposition of yin and yang, of the five phases and of the channels shaped the theoretical framework within which later physicians understood the body and disease. The methods of diagnosis and treatment that he described passed into the mainstream of practice, and his insistence on careful textual and clinical reasoning became a model for medical scholarship.

He died in about 805, having secured for himself a place among the most important figures in the history of Chinese medicine. He is remembered not as a clinician of exceptional fame in his own day but as the scholar whose patient and learned commentary gave the medical classics a form and a meaning that endured, and whose edition preserved the foundation of a tradition that continues to be studied throughout the world.

See also

• Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon
• Traditional Chinese medicine
• Yin and yang
• Tang dynasty