The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

I never claimed there was some "lunar month" stuff in the VMS.  On the contrary, that concept is notable for its absence.  Instead, what I see is that the Zodiac section divides the year into 12 sections of exactly 30 "things" (or 24 sections of exactly 15 "things").  That is neither the Western Zodiac nor a solar or lunar calendar.   

I found one system that divides the Ecliptic into 24 sections of exactly 15 "things".  The problem is, it is a Chinese system called the "solar terms" ...

At one point we went around on this for awhile and the reason you are saying "things" is because you acknowledged that the interpretation of them as degrees was untenable in 1400. I again ask: If not degrees, what are they? A solar term divided the year, not the ecliptic, and did so based on time, not space. The division you are describing is based on work done with the Jesuits, and required a translation of Kepler's work. So, where is this pre-1645 example of dividing the ecliptic into 24 sections of exactly 15 "things"? 

What else could he have done?

Nothing is very much an option here, and one that has an immense amount of explanatory power for why you cannot get a consistent correspondence between the two texts!

The Zhenghe Bencao editors who copied the SBJ into their encylopedia already could not understand many parts of it. (Like those comments in the Rooster recipe about heads hung on the East gate, turning eggs into amber, and what were those "chicken white grubs".  And already could not identify several of the plants.)  

I would like to see your sources on this reception, not because I think this is impossible, but because I want to be clear what exactly is being claimed. There is a distinction to be had here between the linguistic difficulties you've been leaning on, that the hypothetical Author could not distinguish between words in spoken Chinese, and the kind of cultural reception these examples seem to reference, such as not knowing the exact context of hanging a rooster head on a gate. Your exposition might be providing clarity that is not in the text, but it seems like the text is understood from the way you are talking about it. At any rate, I would like to read for myself the underlying scholarship here for all three of these claims---the head, the egg, and the grubs---because my sense from your presentation is that it is a very different issue than would lead to someone writing the same word a dozen different ways.

With that in mind, you keep framing this in terms of his goal being to bring Chinese knowledge to Europe, but in order to achieve that goal, there needed to be someone who could read it and understand it at the end. If you think this could not be understood in China, then it was a hopeless task for him in Europe. If he could not take the dictation with reasonable accuracy, if there is no clear system for recovering the text, then that knowledge was never even lost because he never even had it. He would have known this as he was taking the dictation and he would have known this as he was reading back over it. What else could he have done at that point? I doubt he existed, so who is to say?