Zhang Zhicong's Bencao Chongyuan and Extracting Innate Endowment

Zhang Zhicong’s Bencao Chongyuan is the most important demonstration material in the latter half of this course. We value Zhang because he combined clinical practice with authorship, remained rooted in the Inner Canon, and habitually used the method of explaining one classic through another to return to the meaning of the ancient sages.

Zhang Zhicong interprets medicines from the *Inner Canon*; his value lies in reducing scattered effects to the fundamental endowment of each medicine.

Zhang does not merely paraphrase effects in plain language. He extracts each medicine’s innate endowment—its most fundamental directional tendency. This can usually be returned to the Three Yin and Three Yang, Five Phases, zang-fu, inner/outer layers, or clarity/turbidity and ascent/descent. Once the endowment is grasped, apparently scattered effects in the original text can be connected.

We examine atractylodes, licorice, cinnamon twig, scutellaria, aconite, asarum, kudzu, eucommia, and other medicines and present their reasoning as causal graphs: green nodes are effects stated in the Shennong Bencao Jing; white nodes are Inner Canon rules extracted by Zhang Zhicong. This makes the relationship between branch and root immediately visible.