In the early 1960s, when huazu nunnery (a temple dedicated to the Eastern Han Dynasty physician Hua Tuo) in Bozhou, Anhui Province, was expanded into the Huatuo Memorial Hall, the local government wrote to Mr. Guo Moruo, then president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to write the name of the museum, but Guo Lao wrote the "Tuo" of "Huatuo" as "Tuo" in his reply, and the government enlarged the words "Huatuo Memorial Hall" as it was, which led to a long-standing controversy over whether "Tuo" was a typo. The people who defended Guo Lao have their own reasons: some say that Guo Lao's inscription is probably the anesthetic effect of mandala in mind, some say that according to the evidence, Hua Tuo is from India, so they write "Tuo" as "Tuo" related to Indian Buddhism, and some say that Guo Lao has a deep meaning, and uses "Chinese Buddha" to secretly praise Hua Tuo and so on. In short, most of the reasons have nothing to do with Buddhism.
Thinking about it from another angle, if we can find the actual use case of the predecessors who wrote "Huatuo", can't we directly prove that Guo Lao's writing is derived from it? In fact, there are not only such examples, but they are not few, and most of them actually appear in Buddhist-related texts. For example, Northern Wei Yang Yanzhi's "Luoyang Jialan Ji" volume 5 "Chengbei": "Guan Ren Shanbu, Hua Tuo cured diseases, Zuo Ci Fang Shu". The book is a document passed down from generation to generation, the version is mixed, and it is not easy to know whether "Tuo" is the result of later generations' tampering, but Fan Xiangyong's "Luoyang Jialan Notes" specifically mentions that "Tuo" is the same as "Tuo", which shows that the version seen by Mr. Fan is written as "Tuo".
In addition, the Kangxi Dictionary cites the "Huatuo Critical Illness Formula" contained in the "Biography of Wei Zhi Huatuo", the "Compendium of Materia Medica", the "Complete Collection of His Holiness Zibai", the "Siku Quanshu • Lotus Sutra Zhi Palm Neglect", and other characters, medical books, and Buddhist literature, and the writing of "Huatuo" is extremely common. It can be seen that Guo Lao's writing of "Huatuo" is by no means a whim, and it is not a fiction to the wall, and naturally it is not a typo. Of course, this way of writing may be related to the influence of the large use of the word "Tuo" in translations such as "Buddha", "Mandala" and "Amitabha" after the introduction of Buddhism. As for whether Elder Guo intended it, or whether he subconsciously felt that "Huatuo" was also the correct way to write, we don't know.
Kangxi Dictionary "Dun" character annotation
The inscription on this painting is also written as "Tuo"
* Images from the Internet and books, invaded and deleted.
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