(10 hours ago)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are all of these sections later additions or would they have been present in the SBJ when this dictation took place?
Those that I quoted were all part of the text marked as "original SBJ" in the Zhenghe Bencao (by large white-on-black characters). So were also two other comments 神物 "[amber] is a divine substance" and 鸡白蠹能肥脂.
The meaning of this last comment has Chinese scholars themselves baffled. Literally it translates as "chicken white grub can fatten fat". According to The Net, one interpretation is that the first three hanzi refer to white beetle larva that grow in the manure and wood boards of chicken coops. Another is that they refer to lumps of fat in the chcken's belly that resemble white grubs. Either way, the other three hanzi may be saying that eating that stuff makes one put on weight.
Either way, this presumed sub-entry of the recipe is anomalous because it lacks the 主 present in the other eight sub-entries. And, if the first interpretation holds, it would not be a part or product of the "red rooster", like the other eight.
These "non-medical" comments appear to have been later additions, but so old (say, before 200 CE) that by the time the ZHB was compiled (around 1080 CE) they were considered "original" too. There may be other "pseudo-original" bits like these, but if so they seem to have been transcribed by the Author like the rest.
So I had to remove all those parts myself, before looking for the match. In the rooster case these exclusions are easily justified because, even after deleting them, the "red rooster" is still the longest recipe in the SBJ, and it matches the longest single-star parag in the SPS (f105v.32) quite accurately. And it does not come even close to matching any other.
As I noted noted before, the biggest discrepancies between the two are in the name of the entry, before the first 主, which is 3 hanzi in the SBJ, but only 8 letters in the SPS (instead of the expected ~15); and in the gap between the 4th and 5th 主, which is 7 hanzi in the SBJ but 46 EVA letters in the SPS (instead of the expected ~35).
The removal of that comment about roosters hung on the gate did not affect either of the two counts, since it is between the 2nd and 3rd 主. The other two comments are at the end of the entry (after the last 主).
There is another bit of the entry that may or may not have been omitted by the Author: a note （女人） after the first 主, saying that the next few conditions that follow are specific to women. Leaving those two hanzi out improves slightly the match, since the gap between the first two daiin (110 EVA letters) changes from being ~6 letters shorter than expected to being ~3 letters longer than expected. However, this small improvement in such a long gap is not significant. Anyway, that tag seems to be essential because the following conditions 崩中漏下赤白沃 would have very different meanings if they were assumed to refer to both men and women. So it is uncertain whether the hanzi 女人 were transcribed or not.
All the best, --stolfi