The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

This is both incredibly rude and extremely revealing projection.

Well, apologies for that, but that bizarre story about every emperor changing the solar terms on a whim for political expediency looked a lot like a lalamo hallucination.

I assure you, only one of us is contaminating this conversation with "AI" garbage.

I have always made it clear where I was using information from Google AI or ChatGPT.  I must do so a lot because I can't read Chinese.  But the scholarly sources that the lalamos cite seem to agree with their claim: the "bare" SBJ (the text on my website, which I claim is the source of the Starred Parags section) could have been easily obtained from the medical books circulating in the 1300-1400 time frame, because it was clearly marked off by color and/or font size and/or negative print.  

That alleged counter-example you provided, taken from the Zenghe Bencao (ZHB) file at the Chinese Texts Project (CTP), did not work because that digital text was obtained by OCR from black and white scans, as shown on that site itself (directly checked, not an "AI garbage" claim).  Therefore the green/black coloring in the digital file encoded only the font size.  Did that that particular print of that particular 11th century medical book use red color in the big font parts to distinguish the "pure" 3rd century BC SBJ text from the 6th century additions? I don't know -- and neither do you.

Before we get into the weeds here, a quick gut check. Does multiple recensions in a single entry seem like a good sign for your claim that this was still widely agreed upon in wide circulation? Or does it seem to comport with the evidence I already showed that prior to these intense scholarly reconstructions that there was no stable SBJ tradition? ... You seem to have missed it, but I found a text much closer to the assumed age of the VMS that didn't make mention of chickens but claimed to have the entries of the SBJ

The existence of multiple recensions means that the SBJ text was more available than it would be if it was in only one book.  

Sure, there were books that quoted only part of it, and maybe books that quoted the 6th century expanded quotes without marking out the pure text, and some books that claimed to quote the SBJ but had hallucinations instead.  But there were widely available texts, like the ZHB, that included the pure SBJ whole and mostly correctly.  

The only question that remains is whether those books marked the "pure" SBJ clearly enough for the hypothetical Dictator to read it out without any of the later insertions.

Of course there were differences in the quoted versions.  I don't know what was the main source for the SBJ file I got from the CTP and the Chinese Wikisource, but it does differs from the one embedded in that ZHB file that is also available at the CTP.  The latter uses only 主 where my file had 主治, and has one extra 主 where my file was missing one.  I cannot thank you enough for leading me to this version, that matches the VMS text much better than my file did.  

There were also a couple other differences, each a substitution of one Chinese character by another with either a similar meaning or that was probably confused by the OCR software.  I spent more than an hour on each, trying to find which version was correct.  Fortunately, these errors do not affect the matching criteria I am using at this point.

You choose to say "intense", but the reconstruction of the "pure" original SBJ does not seem to have been harder than any other similar effort, like reconstructing the original text of Dioscorides's herbal or of Euclid's Elements.  Sure, after extracting the parts marked "pure SBJ" from all the sources that claimed to quote it, resolving the many little discrepancies between those texts (like those above) was an extremely laborious task, which is still not finished.  

But the SPS=SBJ claim does not need that the correct text of the "pure SBJ" was available in 1400.  It is enough that someone could have obtained some version of the SBJ with a level of "purity" that can match the Starred Parags section (SPS).  

The latter apparently omits all the the "flavor", "other name", and "provenance" fields that were present even in the "purest" versions of the SBJ.  It may omit also some non-original comments that apparently were marked as "pure SBJ" in the ZHB, like that bizarre statement that the demons from above the east gate are particularly excellent.  So the source of the SPS was not simply the red bold text from the ZHB.  Either it was some other source that omitted those fields (a Korean or Vietnamese version, perhaps?) or those items were skipped during the creation of the VMS -- by the Dictator or by the Author. 

Your objection is starting to look rather bizarre.  To me it sound like this

>> Me: "Hey, you know the UMS, that encrypted manuscript from 1605? 
>> I discovered that it is a copy of a part of Shakespeare's Hamlet, 
>> encoded with some Vigenère-like cipher. The lengths and order
>> of the words match remarkably well. See:"
>>  UMS: xj kp wz bap sc pe fwqs zt ylh dmtsrfwl bwtzdhr gxw nsotzq
>>  HAM: to be or not to be that is the question whether tis nobler
>>
>> You: "Nonsense! By 1605 the text of the play was essentially lost. There
>> were only a few manuscript versions and they differed considerably.  I found
>> one that said 'it is" rather than 'tis', and another that omitted that monologue
>> entirely.  They show that it was impossible for the UMS author to have
>> obtained that text."

But sure, we can take a look at the other SBJ recension:

Please clarify what is the red text.  Did you add that color to show the parts that match my rooster entry? Or is that the part that was marked off as "SBJ" in whatever book you got that text from?

Just find the extremely common source that you said was being circulated in multiple languages throughout Asia in the 1400s.

The ZHB is one.  It contains the whole text of the "Red rooster" entry that I claim is the source of  parag f105v.32, in the correct order.  AFAIK, it was the most widely available materia medica in the 1300-1400 time frame.  It must have been printed by many printers all over China and beyond, with varying degrees of quality, over the 3-4 centuries before that.  The only question, again, is whether the hypothetical Dictator could have a copy where the "pure" SBJ was clearly marked off, distinct from the 6th century additons that are conflated with it in that CTP digital file.

Why are you using a reconstruction from 1799?

I am not.  I was using a digital file from the CTP and Wikisource, with unknown history.  Now I am using a version of the Red Rooster recipe extracted from an OCR transcriptin of some printed edition of the ZHE, whose print date must be somewhere in that site.

All the best, --stolfi