In the previous legend, it was said that Hua Tuoshan invented Mafeisan, because he was good at surgery and could treat diseases by craniotomy. In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Hua Tuo treated Guan Yu with an arrow wound by scraping the bone to cure poison. These two things are completely nonsense after people's textual research on historical materials. Coincidentally, Professor Chen Yinque of Tsinghua University, after several studies and argumentation, thinks that Hua Tuo is actually not from China, but a foreigner. What's going on here? Today we will find the same thing.
Tsinghua's Vivid Dictionary of Literature and History and Chen Yinque, a master of Chinese studies.
Professor Chen Yinque has two well-deserved titles: "the son of a son" and "the professor of a professor".
Chen Yinque, 1890, was born in the late Qing dynasty. His grandfather was Chen Baozhen, the former governor of Hunan, his father was Chen, one of the "four sons of the late Qing Dynasty", and his wife was the granddaughter of Tang, the governor of Taiwan Province. Since childhood, Chen Yinque has always had the best educational resources because of her excellent family.
When Chen Yinque was enlightened, he learned four books and five classics, geography, mathematics and other categories of knowledge. 10 years old, started a school at home and hired Zhou Dalie, Wang Boyi, Liu Yimou and other masters of Chinese studies to teach historical classics, English, mathematics, Chinese painting and other courses. I have accumulated profound historical and literary skills since I was a child.
/kloc-When he was 0/2 years old, he traveled to Japan with his brother and studied at Chaoyahong College of Literature in Japan. At the age of 20, he went to Germany, Switzerland, France and other places to study. At the age of 28, he went to Harvard University to study Sanskrit and Pali. 3 1 year-old went to Berlin university in Germany to specialize in oriental ancient philology. He not only learned Mongolian, but also owned Persia, Turkic, Xixia and Xixia with his own research spirit. Chen Yinque, born in a famous family, is knowledgeable and known as the "son of a son".
Chen Yinque's profound and extensive linguistic foundation and familiarity with different languages enable him to conduct historical research freely. 1925, Chen Yinque returned to China and became the tutor of Tsinghua University Research Institute, teaching Chinese, history, Buddhism and other courses. In Tsinghua campus, no matter who has questions about literature and history, they are willing to ask Chen Yinque for advice. Chen Yinque is a vivid expression of literature and history in Tsinghua campus.
His teaching feature is that he likes to infer historical stories from poems and explore historical materials with the spirit of emphasizing evidence and facts. At the same time, he used the method of combining Chinese and Western research and comparison to get the original truth of history, which effectively promoted the development of historical research in China. After decades of teaching, Chen Yinque has cultivated many masters of Chinese studies, such as Ji Xianlin and Jiang Tianshu, so he was called a "professor" by his deceased.
The record of Hua Tuo in history is slightly exaggerated.
In the Book of the Later Han Dynasty, it was recorded that Hua Tuo was "a hundred years old and still magnificent, and people thought he would never die". According to historical research, Hua tuo was born in 145 and died in 208, at the age of 63, which made our descendants feel very confused about Hua tuo's life. You know, in ancient times, everyone was confused.
In addition, it is said that Hua Tuo is proficient in surgery and can cut open the human body to eradicate diseases. However, people in some places will know that in ancient times, it was impossible to successfully carry out craniotomy and laparotomy without the assistance of sophisticated medical equipment, sterile operating environment and blood transfusion technology, and to ensure that patients were not infected after operation.
Hua tuo is just a Chinese medicine practitioner. If he wants to be proficient in surgery, he must be very familiar with the internal structure of the human body. In other words, he must dissect a considerable number of human bodies or corpses to be "proficient in surgery" as historical rumors say.
Inferring the origin of Huatuo by comparing Chinese and foreign literatures
When Chen Yinke was 40 years old, he suddenly found an interesting "point" in the study of historical materials in the Han Dynasty. This "point" is Hua Tuo, a famous doctor in the Central Plains at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Although there are many stories about Huatuo's magical medical skills in history, Chen Yinque, who prefers to trace the historical truth, still has to unveil Huatuo's historical veil layer by layer. Later, he researched many Chinese and foreign historical materials, and finally demonstrated in detail whether Hua Tuo really existed in history and where Hua Tuo came from with the academic paper "Biography of Hua Tuo in Cao Chong".
There is an article in the book "The History of the Three Kingdoms": Hua Tuo, qualitative, admiring the country. At that time, Pei Guoqiao was from Bozhou, Anhui Province today. It can be seen that the history books say that Hua Tuo was from the Central Plains. But Chen Yinque raised an objection. He thinks that if Hua Tuo is really a historical figure, he is not from China, but from India. Chen Yinque threw out three arguments to support his assertion.
First of all, Hua Tuo is known as the founder of Ma Feisan. It is recorded in the Biography of Hua Tuo in the later Han Dynasty that what acupuncture and medicine can't do is to take Ma Feisan with wine first, so that you are drunk and sleepless. It means: If the disease comes from the inside of the human body and the power of acupuncture can't reach, let the patient take a kind of hemp powder with wine first, that is, hemp boiling powder, and people will lose consciousness after taking it.
But even in today's highly developed medicine, there is no anesthetic that can make people unconscious only by oral administration. Therefore, Chen is very skeptical about the efficacy of this medicine. He searched Indian literature and found that drugs with the same efficacy as leprosy powder appeared in ancient Indian literature in an earlier period. Therefore, Chen believes that leprosy powder is probably a kind of powder "imported" from India.
Then Chen Yinque inferred from the text composition of the name that Hua Tuo was not a real name, but a title translated from Indian pronunciation. The word "Tuo" is rare in China's ancient historical materials, both in terms of words and homophones. However, this word is very common in Indian scriptures. In Indian Buddhism, monks with thirteen branches of Buddhism are called "Buddha" and Sakyamuni is called "Buddha". Anyone who knows Sanskrit knows that "Veda" means "knowledge" and "consciousness" in Indian religion.
Huatuo is actually a simplified language after the Indian character "Ahuatuo" was introduced into the Central Plains, which comes from the pronunciation of the Indian character "Agada", so "Huatuo" is probably the name of "medicine" introduced from India to China, not the name of the Central Plains people.
In addition to the above two aspects, Chen Yinque looked for traces from a passage in the History of the Three Kingdoms, and thought that Hua Tuo recorded in the book was the story that Chen, the satrap of Guangling at that time, could not eat, which led Chen to spit out red worms. Its real source remains to be discussed. This story is exactly the same as one in Indian history books, and the historical period of the story is basically the same. So Chen Yinque concluded that Hua Tuo should be an Indian who came to China not far from Wan Li, and he knew medical skills.
We don't doubt Chen Yinque's ability and thinking to restore the historical truth by using the comparative analysis method of textual research and Chinese and western historical materials. Academic views contend and a hundred flowers blossom. I'm afraid only people in the Eastern Han Dynasty can know exactly whether Hua Tuo came from China, not only Hua Tuo, but also Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, which caused many historians to argue about whether there was a real person in history. What is the truth? We hope that more people of insight will make further progress.