The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It's not a small detail that this was a lost text in 1420, right? Your little story about a scribe asking "what's your most important materia medica" and getting directed to the Shennong Bencao Jing runs into the not insignificant problem that there were no copies of it at the time. [...] The actual work, in the sense of a materia medica attributed to Shennong, vanishes sometime in the Tang dynasty, [...] Descriptions lead me to think that chunks of the SBJ were pretty recognizable[...] it seems completely out of the question to claim this was the go-to materia medica in the Sinosphere in the 1400s, something I had been taking at face value.

No, the text of the Shennong Bencaojing was never "lost".  By ~1400 CE it was no longer available as a book by itself.  But it has always been revered as the foundation of traditional Chinese medicine, and it was included in its entirety in popular medical texts of the time.  Much like the Pentateuch has long ceased to exist as a separate book, but has always been available as part of Jewish and Christian bibles.  

For example, in the Zhenglei Bencao (1108 CE) the text from the original 365-recipe Shennong Bencao was clearly distinguished by color (white on black instead of black on white) from the much more voluminous commentaries and additions.  The modern "reconstruction" consisted basically in extracting the parts of those texts that are marked off as "Shennong Bencao" and fixing the errors, omissions, and interpolations that had creeped into them.

For all I know, if the hypothetical Marco Polo 3.0 had asked a doctor in China for the most important text of Chinese medicine that he could copy, the guy would have taken out the Zhenglei Bencao or some similar alfarrábio(*) and pointed to the reverse-colored parts.

Moreover, the Shennong Bencao had spread to other countries in the Chinese area of cultural influence, like Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Tibet (not just within the Chinese "empire") at least 1000 years before the VMS was created.  In Korea, the Shennong Bencao was mandatory textbook for all medical students.  In those countries the text was still printed in Chinese characters, but read either in some pseudo-Chinese, or in words of the local language, or somewhere in between the two methods.

All the best, --stolfi

(*) Portuguese has a couple hundred or so words of Arabic origin, many of them distinguished by the initial al-, ar-, or az-.  "Alfarrábio" is my favorite. It is a somewhat disparaging term for a ponderous old book that only scholars would read. The word comes from Al Farabi, a famous philosopher who lived in Baghdad around 900 CE, under the Abbasid Caliphate.  He seems to have been a quite decent guy (called by some "the second Aristotle"), who did not deserve that "honor"...