(Shennong)
"Huxiang Library" is a large-scale series of books that collate and publish Huxiang literature and classics and study Huxiang culture, with a full set of more than 700 volumes, and a large volume, which can be called the treasure house of Huxiang culture. Among the predecessors' writings included in this series of books, the "Shennong Materia Medica" written by Teng Hong, a Shaoyang person in the Ming Dynasty, and the "Shennong Materia Medica", one of the four classic works of traditional Chinese medicine, are combined into one volume and published by Hunan Science and Technology Publishing House.
The Shennong Materia Medica is the earliest surviving work of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is said to have originated from the ancient Chinese figure Shennong. Shennong is revered by the world as "Medicine Ancestor", "Wugu Xiandi", "Shennong Emperor", "Emperor of the Earth", and is the inventor of legendary agriculture and medicine. The myth and legend of "Shennong tasting hundreds of herbs" was compiled into primary school Chinese textbooks in the early years and is well-known in China. Shennong's taste of hundreds of herbs, found a chinese medicine with the effect of attacking poisons and dispelling diseases, health care, passed on from generation to generation, in the Qin and Han Dynasties by many medical scientists collected, summarized, sorted out, and collected into a book. Many of the theoretical and empirical achievements of Chinese medicine in the book have played a huge role in thousands of years of medical practice and are the source of the development of Chinese medicine theory. Before the publication of Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica in the Ming Dynasty, the book had been the most authoritative medical work.
The Shennong Materia Medica is a Chinese medicine work based on the Shennong Materia Medica, reclassifying and annotating drugs, and improving and upgrading them. The book refers to ancient and modern insights, clarifies the essence of drugs, examines the taste of drugs, corrects the mistakes of predecessors, respects the ancients but does not respect the ancients, and abides by the law without mud law. The book contains 958 flavors of drugs, divided into grass, wood, fruit, grain, vegetables, jade, people, beasts, poultry, insects and fish, describing the sexual taste, effect, efficacy and collection of each drug, and the content is informative. The book also summarizes and sorts out 78 kinds of books related to the Shennong Materia Medica, 53 medical characters, and 25 prescriptions. Compared with the Shennong Materia Medica, the Shennong Materia Medica contains more drugs, more reasonable classification, more detailed, comprehensive and in-depth discussion, and has high practical value.
However, what is unexpected is that the author of such a classic drug collection is not a medical practitioner who is a serious child, but a local official.
Teng Hong, the author of the Shennong Materia Medica, also known as Ke Zhai, was a native of Shaoyang, Hunan, who lived in the middle of the Ming Dynasty. Born into a family of medicine, Teng Hong was gifted and intelligent since childhood, never forgot to read, and when he grew up, he was not only proficient in Confucianism, but also keen to study Buddhist classics. Teng Hong's interest in pharmacy may have come from the philosophical idea that "the benevolent person makes heaven and earth and all things one". Since man and heaven and earth are one, then people eat, wear, live, and eat medicine when they are sick are inseparable from the plants that grow on the earth. Teng Hong believes that Chinese medicine is a very meaningful discipline.
Probably influenced by the traditional idea of "learning and excellence", Teng Hong later entered the career and served as the Ling of Shaoyang County. However, Teng Hong does not seem to be interested in being an official. When the ancients discussed the value of life, they usually regarded morality, meritorious service, and speech as the criteria for immortality. Virtue is to establish a noble morality, to make meritorious contributions is to establish merit for the country and the people, and to make a speech is to put forward a speech with insight. However, Teng Hong believes that people have no inexhaustible body for a hundred years, and Lide can only benefit the society in his lifetime; meritorious service has contingency, benefiting one party or benefiting the world, relying on opportunities; only the words can best benefit future generations and flow through the ages. And the writing of books and sayings is the most valuable work such as the Shennong Bencao Jing. Therefore, although Teng Hong took being an official as a profession, his lifelong pursuit was to write medicine books.
In addition to his official duties, Teng Hong read a wide range of books and collected the gist of the commentaries of successive generations of medical practitioners on the Shennong Materia Medica, accumulating a large amount of information. After retiring in his later years, he focused on the writing of medicinal books, which lasted twelve years and changed his manuscript seven times, and finally wrote the book "Shennong Materia Medica Huitong".
The Shennong Materia Medica was written during the reign of Emperor Mingxianzong (1465-1487) and printed in the 45th year of the Wanli calendar of Emperor Mingshenzong (1617). According to Teng Hong's sixth grandson, Teng Wanli, who wrote for the book, after the book came out, it had a wide range of influences and was praised. People treated and cared for health according to the prescriptions in the book, and they all achieved excellent results. Generations of Teng Hong's descendants attach great importance to the dissemination of the book, and everywhere they go, they always forget to promote the writings of their ancestors. When it reached the hands of his sixth grandson Teng Wanli, the book was engraved and printed, fulfilling Teng Hong's good wish to write a book and make a statement for hundreds of years. A photocopy of this copy exists in the Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The "Huxiang Library" contains the book, which is based on this photocopy as the base for collation and typesetting.
A local official who has no experience in curing diseases and saving people has written a medicine book that has been circulated for thousands of years, which cannot be said to be a miracle. Teng Hong's life experience shows that the value and achievement of some people are actually outside the profession. (Text/Xie Zhidong)
(Huxiang Bunko: "Shennong Materia Medica Sutra")