The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If he didn't know the written or spoken language, he would not have been able to recognise those fields, even in theory. In order to remove them, he had to know what the symbol was and what the section represented.

He would need to just be able to recognize those hanzi.

I myself don't know any Chinese language and I can't read written Chinese.  For the latter,I would have to know the shape and meanings of at least a thousand hanzi, and thousands of compounds thereof.  But I know a few dozen hanzi from the time I studied Japanese.  I can recognize those keywords and easily delete those fields.  In fact, my program does that automatically, with only a couple of python lines.

The classical chinese text would not have provided an understandable flow of intelligible language when spoken character by character. Therefore I would assume such a flow would not have been understood by the VMS author as it was spoken, and that those sections wouldn't have been particularly more or less understandable than any others, so he would likely not have asked for an explanation.

A literal one-word-per-hanzi reading of that Rooster recipe into English would be

red male chicken flavor sweet  slightly warm main woman person burst inside drip down red white pour ... fatten fat grows plain marsh

Even with this mechanical reading the Author could tell that "flavor sweet  slightly warm" and "grows plain marsh" would be those standard non-interesting fields.

But a sensible Dictator would, at the very least, have used intonation to hint at the parsing.  That is, he would insert "oral punctuation", like modern editions of the SJB insert printed punctuation:

red male chicken: flavor: sweet,  slightly warm.  main: (woman person) burst inside, drip down, red white pour; ... fatten fat. grows: plain marsh.

This would be different if the dictator read the characters and translated full sentences/concepts into the understandable local dialect which the VMS author understood. But in that case the structure of the SBJ content would be changed.

Yes. I see some hints of that -- like the title 丹雄鸡 "red male chicken" becoming just two words poar.keeo -- but they seem rare and are not confirmed yet. (The poar.keeo may still be three words with a missing space.)

If the concept was explained to him by the doctor, wouldn't writing it down still hold the knowledge of what it meant within the context of chinese medicine?  Later on, the VMS author would speak out loud "is sweet, warm" and say "ah yes, sweet+warm means this in chinese medicine".

The meaning of those fields is quite complicated.  IIUC, the "warm" tag means that remedies derived from a rooster are supposed to have the general effect of moderately boosting the flow of 气, which is some invisible fluid that transports the nutritional value of food from the digestive center (stomach and spleen) to certain other organs.  It seems unlikely that the Author would have learned enough Chinese medical theory to understand that, and make use of that understanding.  

But, worse, for historical reasons there is usually only one 味 field per entry, even when the entry has sub-entries with very different indications, effects, and preparations.  Thus "officially" that "sweet, slightly warm" field applies not only to the rooster's meat abut also to its quills and to the white part of its poo.  That apparently makes sense within Traditional Chinese Medicine, because (IIUC) it assumes that all products derived from X will somehow inherit some of the healing attributes of X.  But the Author, even if he was just a silk and cloves merchant, may have seen that assumption as a silly ancient superstition...

Anyway, writing down those fields (or copying them to vellum) would have been a waste of time if the Author and/or the intended readers were not knowledgeable in Chinese medical theory (or did not believe in it).  The Author already had opted to omit all the additions and commentares that were appended to each entry in the Zhenge Bencao, including the "semi-sacred" additions made before 400 CE or so, which were printed black-on-white but in double size characters.  Obviously he did not have infinite time and money to spend in this project...

Let me use an analogy close to my experience to perhaps get my point across: ...
kwam - came
de aap - the monkey
uit de - out of the
mouw - sleeve
There wouldn't be sections he understood, and sections he didn't. He wouldn't understand the structure of anything, other than grasping a word here or there outside of its full context.

Yep, that is probably what happened.  

But even Chinese doctors versed in Traditional Chinese Medicine sometimes cannot understand words and expressions in the SBJ.  Like 鸡白蠹 = "chicken white grub".  Or like they (and the Author) superficially undertstand 鸡子可作虎魄 = "eggs can be turned into amber", but have no idea of what alchemical process is supposed to do that.  

So the Author would be confused like them, only over 70% of the text instead of 1%...

On the other hand, he would understand the overall structure of most recipes, because it is quite simple and regular.  Like that Englishman would understand or guess the  structure of most sentences, such as "coffee good is" or "has you today milk buy?".

All the best, --stolfi