The Heavenly Sword & the Dragon Sabre Chapter 12 Part 1

Needling the vitals, dosing beyond cure¹

The moment Hu Qingniu² took hold of Zhang Wuji’s³ wrist, he felt the boy’s pulse beating in a most peculiar way, and could not help a start of surprise. He steadied his mind and searched the pulse again, thinking, The cold poison this child has taken is exceedingly strange. Could it be the Xuanming Divine Palm?⁴ But that palm technique has long been lost. There can scarcely be a soul in the world who still knows how to use it. And again he thought, If it is not the Xuanming Divine Palm, then what is it? So yin-cold, so venomous. There is no other palm-force that comes near it. He has carried this cold poison a long while now, yet has not died: that too is a wonder. Ah, yes, it must be that the old Daoist Zhang Sanfeng⁵ used his deep, profound skill to prolong the child’s life. Now the yin-poison has scattered into his five viscera and six bowels, congealed and knotted fast. Short of an immortal, none could save him alive. He set the boy back into the chair.

After a good while, Zhang Wuji came slowly to himself. He saw Hu Qingniu seated in the chair opposite, gazing into the firelight of the medicine furnace, lost in thought. Chang Yuchun⁶ lay out on the grassy path beyond the door. Each of the three pursued his own thoughts, and none of them spoke.

All his life Hu Qingniu had given himself to the art of medicine. There was no illness, however intractable or hopeless, that he could not cure at a touch, and this had won him the byname “Healing Sage”. To be called a “Sage” in medicine shows how near the divine his craft had come. But the cold poison of the Xuanming Divine Palm he had never once met in all his years, and that a man poisoned so grievously should live several years without dying, the poison twined into his viscera and bowels, was more inconceivable still. He had already resolved not to treat Zhang Wuji, yet, faced with so rare a marvel of affliction, one such as he might not meet again in a lifetime, he was like a drunkard set before fine wine, a glutton catching the scent of meat: how could he let it pass? He turned it over half the day, and at last hit upon a fine scheme. First I shall cure him, then I shall put him to death.

But to drive out the yin-poison scattered through the boy’s viscera and bowels was, in truth, far easier said than done. Hu Qingniu laboured over the problem for more than two shichen,⁷ then took out twelve small bronze slips and, gathering his neili,⁸ drove them into twelve acupoints, the Zhongji below the dantian,⁹ the Tiantu below the throat, the Jianjing at the shoulders, and the rest… The Zhongji is the meeting of the Three Yin of the Foot and the Ren meridian. The Tiantu, the meeting of the Yinwei and the Ren. The Jianjing, the meeting of the Hand and Foot Shaoyang, the Foot Yangming, and the Yangwei. Once the twelve bronze slips were set, the twelve regular meridians and eight extraordinary meridians of his body were severed from one another. The heart, lung, spleen, liver, and kidney of a man are called the five viscera. With the pericardium added, these six belong to yin. The stomach, large intestine, small intestine, gallbladder, bladder, and sanjiao are called the six bowels, and these six belong to yang. Five viscera, six bowels, and the pericardium together make the twelve regular meridians. The Ren, Du, Chong, Dai, Yinwei, Yangwei, Yinqiao, and Yangqiao, these eight belong to no regular yin or yang, have no exterior-interior pairing, and run their own separate courses: they are the eight extraordinary meridians.

With Zhang Wuji’s regular and extraordinary meridians thus cut apart, the yin-poison in his viscera and bowels could no longer draw upon one another. Hu Qingniu then took aged mugwort and moxaed the Yunmen and Zhongfu acupoints at his shoulder, and next the Tianfu, Xiabai, Chize, Kongzui, Lieque, Jingqu, Taiyuan, Yuji, and Shaoshang, from arm to thumb. These eleven acupoints belong to the Hand Taiyin Lung Meridian, and moxaing them could a little reduce the yin-poison lodged deep in his lung. This time it was heat set against cold, and the suffering Zhang Wuji endured had a different flavour again from the anguish when the yin-poison flared. When the Hand Taiyin Lung Meridian was done, Hu Qingniu went on to the Foot Yangming Stomach Meridian, and the Hand Jueyin Pericardium Meridian, and so on.

As he worked, Hu Qingniu paid no heed to whether Zhang Wuji felt pain. With the aged mugwort he scorched the boy’s whole body black in patches. Zhang Wuji would not betray the least weakness. You want me to cry out and moan, he thought, so I will not so much as grunt. He even chatted and laughed at his ease, debating with Hu Qingniu the placement of acupoints and meridians. He understood nothing of medical principle, but his sworn father Xie Xun¹⁰ had once taught him the arts of dianxue,¹¹ of releasing acupoints, and of shifting them, so the various points he knew well enough. Beside this divine physician of the age, Zhang Wuji’s grasp of acupoints and meridians was of course shallow in the extreme, but since his talk touched upon medical matters, it fell in exactly with what Hu Qingniu loved. And so, moxaing and drawing the yin-poison from his body, Hu Qingniu discoursed on and on without end.

Zhang Wuji took it in, understanding nine parts in ten not at all, but to make it seem “we of the Wudang Order¹² know these things too,” he would often spout some fallacy and wrangle with him a while. Hu Qingniu would set out the truth in detail, and by the time he had grasped that “this lad in fact knows not the first thing and is merely talking through his hat,” he had already spent a deal of breath. Yet in that deep and secluded valley, with no company but the few page-boys who cooked the rice and brewed the medicine, Hu Qingniu had none to keep him, and today, with this child come to ramble on with him about acupoints, he found his heart rather eased.

By the time the several hundred acupoints of the twelve regular meridians had all been moxaed, the sky was wholly dark. The page-boys brought out the meal and set it on the table, and carried a large dish of rice and greens besides out to the grass beyond the door for Chang Yuchun.

That night Chang Yuchun slept out of doors. Zhang Wuji made no plea to Hu Qingniu. When it was time to sleep he simply went and lay down at Chang Yuchun’s side, and passed the night with him on the grass, to show that he would share whatever hardship came. Hu Qingniu made as though he saw nothing and let it be, but he marvelled in secret. This lad is indeed rather unlike my Chang’er.

Early the next morning Hu Qingniu spent another half-day moxaing the acupoints of the eight extraordinary meridians. The twelve regular meridians are like rivers, flowing on without cease. The eight extraordinary meridians are like lakes and seas, that store and gather, and so to clear the yin-poison from among the eight extraordinary meridians was harder by far. Hu Qingniu applied his whole mind and drew up a prescription to dispel the noxious and shore up the sound, to tonify the depleted and drain the excessive, using the contrary method of “treating cold with cold.” When Zhang Wuji had taken it he shivered fiercely and purged at length, and half a day later his spirits were in fact much heartier.

That afternoon Hu Qingniu gave Zhang Wuji acupuncture again. Zhang Wuji goaded him with words, hoping to make him lose his composure and treat Chang Yuchun after all, but Hu Qingniu would not so much as answer, only saying coldly, “That byname of mine, ‘Butterfly Valley Healing Sage’, it is somewhat beyond my deserving. The word ‘Sage’, how should I dare lay claim to it? When people call me ‘Sees Death, Saves None,’ that is the name I like.”

He was at that moment needling the Wushu acupoint between Zhang Wuji’s waist and thigh, the meeting of the Foot Shaoyang and the Dai meridian, a cun¹³ and a half to the side of the Shuidao. Zhang Wuji said, “This Dai meridian of the human body must be the strangest of all. Mister Hu, did you know that some people have no Dai meridian at all?” Hu Qingniu was taken aback. “Nonsense! How could a man have no Dai meridian?” Zhang Wuji had been talking wildly, and said, “The world is wide, and there is no marvel it does not hold. Besides, I see no great use in this Dai meridian either.”

Hu Qingniu said, “The Dai meridian is a subtle thing, that much is true, but how can you call it useless? The world’s quacks do not fathom its finer workings, and so misapply their needles and drugs again and again. I have written a treatise, On the Dai Meridian. Take it and read, and you will see.” So saying, he went into the inner room and brought out a thin, hand-copied volume on yellow paper, and gave it to him.

Zhang Wuji opened it to the first page and read: “The twelve meridians and seven of the extraordinary meridians all course up and down throughout the body. Only the Dai meridian arises between the lower abdomen, below the floating ribs, girdling the body once about and passing round the waist like a belt. The Chong, Ren, and Du meridians rise together yet run apart, one source and three branches, and all bind to the Dai meridian…” There followed a critique of the errors in the old medical books: the Elucidation of the Fourteen Meridians held that the Dai meridian had but four acupoints, and the Great Compendium of Acupuncture and Moxibustion that it had six, whereas in fact there were ten, two of which flickered in and out, now there and now gone, and were the hardest to make out. Zhang Wuji read on. And though he did not grasp its deeper meaning, he could tell the book was of no common insight, and so he raised its strictures against the ancients’ mistakes and asked to be taught.

Hu Qingniu was greatly pleased, and explained as he plied his needle, and when he had run the gold needles through all ten acupoints on the boy’s Dai meridian, he let him rest a moment and said, “I have another work, the Ziwu Canon of Acupuncture and Moxibustion: in it, above all, is the labour of my heart’s blood.” From the room he fetched out a hand-written medical canon, a full twelve scrolls thick.

Hu Qingniu knew well enough that the child had no true grasp of medical principle, but he had passed long years hidden in the wild valley, and was lonely for all that. The seekers of cures came in an unbroken stream, yet every one of them praised only his divine skill, and such flattery he had wearied of a full twenty years before. The great learning he was truly proud of, in fact, was not the fineness of his “medical skill,” but that in “medical science” he had made great discoveries and struck out original ideas, saying what no former worthy had said. He knew these were no trifling achievements, yet he could only prize them in solitude, and there was a loneliness in that. Now, seeing this youth take pleasure in reading his writings, he felt faintly the touch of a kindred spirit, and so brought out the works he was proudest of to show him.

Zhang Wuji opened the volume and saw every page packed close with tiny fly-head script: the sites of the acupoints, the measures of the drugs, the timing and the depth of the needle, all set down in full detail. A thought stirred in him. Let me look through this and see whether there is any way to cure Big Brother Chang’s hurts. And so he turned to the ninth scroll, the “Chapter of Martial Learning,” to the section on “Methods for Treating Palm Injuries,” and there he found the Red Sand Palm, the Cotton Palm, the Venom Sand Palm, the Iron Sand Palm, the Mountain-Splitting Palm, the Stele-Shattering Palm… the symptoms, the emergency measures, and the treatments for every manner of palm-force injury, all fully recorded. And after he had read of a hundred and eighty kinds of palm-force and more, there rose up starkly before him the “Heart-Severing Palm.”¹⁴

Zhang Wuji was overjoyed, and read it through with care. The text discoursed at length on the force of the Heart-Severing Palm, but the treatment it gave in the barest terms, saying only: “One must set to work from the four acupoints Zigong, Zhongting, Guanyuan, and Tianchi. Command the changes of yin and yang and the five phases. Observe the five signs of cold, heat, dryness, damp, and wind, and dose according to the five humours of the injured: joy, anger, worry, brooding, and fear.”

The Chinese physician’s art shifts in ten thousand ways, and holds to no fixed rule. For one and the same complaint the physician will often weigh cold and heat, day and night, decline and return, fullness and emptiness, beginning and end, motion and stillness, man and woman, great and small, inner and outer… all their tangled bearings, before settling the manner of the cure. The changes lie for the most part within his own mind, and rules are few, and it is by this that a fine physician and a quack stand as far apart as cloud from mud. The subtlety of it Zhang Wuji naturally did not understand, but he read the treatment over several times and fixed it firmly in his memory. The last item under “Methods for Treating Palm Injuries” was the “Xuanming Divine Palm”, and after the symptoms of the injured had been set down, beneath the two words “The Treatment” was noted a single word: “None.”

Footnotes

1. 针其膏兮药其肓 – Zhēn qí gāo xī yào qí huāng. Chapter title. Lit. “Needle its gao, dose its huang.” From the Zuo Zhuan: a disease lodged between the gao and the huang, below the heart, lies beyond needle and medicine. ↩

2. 胡青牛 – Hú Qīngniú. His name meaning “Green Ox.” The Butterfly Valley Healer, a physician of the Ming Order, nicknamed “Sees Death, Offers No Aid” for refusing to treat any who are not of the order. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 张无忌 – Zhāng Wújì. His name meaning “Without Envy” or “No Misgivings.” Son of Zhang Cuishan and Yin Susu, and the protagonist of the tale. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 玄冥神掌 – Xuánmíng Shén Zhǎng. Xuanming Divine Palm. Xuanming is the ancient deity of winter and the dark waters; the palm inflicts a deadly, penetrating cold. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 张三丰 – Zhāng Sānfēng. His name meaning “Three Peaks.” Legendary founder of the Wudang Order and creator of taijiquan; Zhang Wuji’s grandshifu. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 常遇春 – Cháng Yùchūn. Fighter of the Ming Order who befriended Zhang Wuji; historically a founding general of the Ming dynasty. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 时辰 – shíchén. Traditional Chinese unit of time equal to two hours; the day was divided into twelve shichen. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 内力 – nèilì. Literally internal force. Kinetic manifestation of cultivated qi; generates tangible effects such as deflecting weapons or scaling walls. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 丹田 – dāntián. Literally dantian. Energy centre located three finger-widths below the navel, where qi is cultivated and stored. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 谢逊 – Xiè Xùn. His name meaning “Modest” or “Yielding.” His courtesy name Tuisi (退思) meaning “Retreat and Reflect.” One of the Four Dharma Kings of the Ming Order, bearing the epithet the Golden-Haired Lion King. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 点穴 – diǎnxué. Art of striking or sealing an opponent’s acupoints to disable them. Retained in pinyin. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

12. 武当派 – Wǔdāng Pài. Wudang Order, the Daoist martial order founded by Zhang Sanfeng; 派 renders as “Order” for its religious character. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

13. 同身寸 – tóngshēn cùn. The body-cun of Chinese medicine: a proportional unit scaled to the patient rather than a fixed length, one cun being the width of his own thumb at the knuckle. Acupoint positions are given in it, so it does not convert to inches. A fen is a tenth of a cun. ↩

14. 截心掌 – Jiéxīn Zhǎng. Lit. “Heart-Severing Palm.” A palm technique whose force strikes inward at the heart. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩