Bunnies Bumping Stumps
… in the seventh month of pregnancy…???
In this last week of the rabbit month, I offer you a fun rabbit conundrum to get lost in: What does the seventh month of pregnancy have to do with waiting for rabbits to bump into stumps? If you can answer this question, you must be a genius with a brilliant imagination, as well as being highly educated in classical Chinese literature. Or maybe you have paid really close attention in the third class of the “Diamond Core” level of my Triple Crown training program in classical Chinese…???
For me personally, after having taught the story behind the Chinese saying “guarding the stump to wait for the rabbit” (守株待兔) for many years at this point, I responded with glee when I came across a citation of this expression by the renowned physician Zhāng Lù 張璐. Below I offer you the full quote in context, from a text from 1698 titled Qiānjīnfāng yǎnyì 《千金方衍義》 (Expanded Meaning of the Thousand Gold Formulary), which constitutes the only surviving historical commentary on Sūn Sīmiǎo’s Bèijí qiānjīn yàofāng. For the past few months of translating and preparing material for my upcoming course on “Nurturing the Fetus” with Andrew Loosely, I have been greatly appreciating Zhāng Lù’s witty insights into each of the two formulas found in Sūn Sīmiǎo’s writings on the ten months of pregnancy.
The reference to stump-bumping bunnies is found in Zhāng Lù’s commentary on a formula for Xìngrén Tāng 杏仁湯 (Apricot Kernel Decoction), which is indicated for “cases of any damage to the fetus during the seventh month of pregnancy,” as the second medicinal formula given by Sūn Sīmiǎo for that month. As you can probably guess from the commentary below, the formula is a decoction made up of the nine ingredients xìngrén, gāncǎo, màiméndōng, wúzhūyú, zhōngrǔ, gānjiāng, wǔwèizǐ, zǐwǎn, and jīngmǐ. Here is my literal translation of the quote in the context of the full commentary to this formula:
The seventh month is the time when Lung Qì nurtures the fetus. The situation addressed in this formula, of the fetus being damaged in the seventh month, must be due to countercurrent movement with coughing in the lung. Because of this, the formula is set up specifically to focus on warming the lung as its indication. In the formula, zhōngrǔ, gānjiāng, and wúzhūyú are specific herbs for warming the lung.
In cases of lung vacuity with the presence of heat, additionally utilize màiméndōng, zǐwǎn, and jīngmǐ to address the urgent need to clear the lung! Xìngrén and wǔwèizǐ work together by the first scattering outward and the second gathering inward, and gāncǎo harmonizes all the ingredients and prevents any possibility of their clashing.
Even though they are all here combined into a single formula, neatly subdivided into Host Qì and Intrusive Qì, and into movement against the current and movement in alignment with the current, you must not restrict your usage of the formula to these exact proportions and measurements. This would be a case of “guarding the stump and waiting for the rabbit”!
I would love to stop right here and run this by my Triple Crown students to see who among them can make sense of this last sentence. For those readers who are not familiar with the background of this saying, can you figure this out? My guess is that you would have a hard time even knowing where to start (unless of course you just google it in Chinese). And that is precisely why I do think that any translator of even late imperial Chinese medical literature must be trained in traditional Chinese culture, to be able to appreciate these sorts of condensed references that any educated Chinese person living in the last two thousand years would recognize and understand. It is not only Confucius’ Analects or Sūn Sīmiǎo’s Bèijí qiānjīn yàofāng that are chock full of references to early classics like the Yìjīng (Classic of Changes) or Shījīng (Classic of Poetry). Chinese writers have been quoting and referencing their predecessors, teachers, and cultural ancestors for literally thousands of years, and the later you get with the literature you study, the more complex this task of recognizing cultural references becomes.
So, what’s the story with the poor rabbit? For the answer to that question, we must put the History Train into reverse and go back all the way to the Warring States period: In the third century BCE, the Legalist reformer Hán Fēi 韓非 wrote down the original story in order to demonstrate the need to update governmental policies in accordance with the realities of the times rather than blindly following the models from the ancient past:
There once was a man among the people in Sòng who was tilling a field. This field happened to have a stump in the middle of it. A rabbit ran into the stump, broke its neck, and died. The farmer dropped his plow and guarded the stump, hoping to catch another rabbit in this way. Of course no other rabbit could be caught, and this farmer became the laughingstock in the state of Sòng.
Today, to want to apply the policies of the former kings to govern the people of the present age, this falls in all cases into the category of “guarding the stump.”
Can you now see the message that Zhāng Lù is trying to impress on his readers here when he uses this saying to criticize what I like to call a “paint-by-numbers” approach, of blindly applying the formula exactly as written to any “case of damage to the fetus in the seventh month of pregnancy”? And isn’t this a warning that is as relevant today (if not even more so) as it was in 1698?
First, we are confronted with the highly complex situation of administering a powerful medicinal formula in an emergency situation during pregnancy, which is a state where we are dealing with the physiology and pathology of not just one entity but actually two, namely the mother and the fetus. Second, we are now doing so in a society and medical context where Chinese medicinal formulas are considered anything but mainstream, and where most patients and their family members, friends, and any additional medical providers are likely to be fairly ignorant of, and potentially opposed to, the medical paradigm and tools used by the classically oriented practitioner who might want to prescribe such a formula.
For these reasons, I think it’s probably a good idea to follow Zhāng Lù’s advice and avoid “guarding the stump to wait for the rabbit.” What do you think? I so look forward to discussing this situation in my upcoming course with Andrew Loosely and the participants. Maybe I will see you there on ZOOM (:
