The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I'm not sure if we are talking about the same piece, but I don't think there are any obvious problems (e.g., pasting several times) with the transcription I posted. YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ is 藥一百二十, which I can read, it is medicine+one+hundred+two+ten and it visually appears at the very beginning of lines 1, 2 and 3 of the text (the introduction, as you called it). 藥 is the Traditional Chinese version of 药, which is one of the characters in the word "pharmacy", so it's used all over the place in many Asian countries.

Ah, yes, sorry.  That part is in the introduction, and is saying that the original SBJ listed 120 ("one hundred two ten") harmless tonics, 120 remedies, and 125 ("one hundred two ten five") poisons.  I did not search in the intro, and found only one "xiǎo'ér bǎi èrshí" way further down, in the phrase "used to treat 120 kinds of epilepsy ..."

But that webpage is the "expanded" version of the SBJ, written around 1400 CE.  If the VMs Author copied the SBJ, it must have been the original version.  Which apparently is now lost, and probably did not have that introduction...

Which, by the way, if true would make the VMs suddenly quite valuable to Chinese scholars.  It would be like the re-discovery of the Book of Enoch in the Ge'ez Bible, or of the Zend Avesta among a small Zoroastrian community in India...