The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I'm not sure if a digital transcription exists, but you can find the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Thanks, but its entries are way too big:

   

That "recipe" for pasta with mortadella and salami seems to be shorter than average, yet it has over 200 words.  A candidate text shoulld have ~35 words per "recipe".  Unless you claim that the languages/encoding of the VMS is not 1:1 token:token...

It was just an example though, there are countless medieval books with short entries about recipes, the zodiac, astrology, etc...

Indeed there must be thousands of old manuscripts out there that match the Starred Parags section as well as my SBJ file.  

Namely, other copies of the Shennong Bencaojing. 

The SBJ was a very popular book throughout East Asia, and was translated and transcribed all over the region.  Even into languages that were not monosyllabic or tonal, like Japanese and Korea.  Think of Disoscorides or Hippocrates in Europe.  While India had its own ancient medical tradition, I bet that the SBJ was not unknown there.  So probably any library East of Tibet has some old version of the SBJ in their "rare books" shelf.

And of course there are millions of modern editions of it, anywhere there are fans of Chinese medicine.

All the best, --stolfi