Introduction
"Formulary of Enlightenment"
This page is cultural documentation, not medical advice.
A 15-volume Jin-Yuan formula collection by Liu Wansu (ca. 1120–1200), completed around 1172. The founding text of the "cool-cold" (寒凉派) school and a landmark in the history of Chinese-medicine theory of "fire-heat" patterns.
Liu Wansu, styled Shouzhen and self-styled Hejian Jushi (居士, "Lay Recluse of Hejian"), is conventionally cited as the first of the "four great masters of Jin-Yuan." The Xuanming Lunfang is his clinical-pharmacological treatise, indexing 360+ formulas organized by pattern. Liu's central thesis — "the six qi all transform into fire" (六气皆从火化) — reframed Song-dynasty formulas around a hotter, drier, and more inflammatory disease ontology, and led him to prefer cool-cold herbs (huáng lián, huáng qín, shí gāo, zhī zǐ). The text records Dāng Guī Lóng Huì Wán (当归龙荟丸) and Fáng Fēng Tōng Shèng Wán (防风通圣丸, "Saposhnikovia Connection-Approving Pill"), the latter being a canonical "release the exterior and drain the interior" formula still widely used in modern 中成药. It is, in short, the foundational text of the cool-cold school and a major inflection point in the intellectual history of Chinese medicine.
Historical background
The Xuanming Lunfang was composed by Liu Wansu around 1172, near the peak of his career in the Jin-dynasty north. The work sits within a broader Jin-Yuan intellectual turn in which physicians began to challenge the dominant Song-dynasty formula manuals and to theorize disease in terms of regional climate, dietary habits, and emotional causation. Liu organized his formulas by disease pattern, drawing on classical Suwen (素问) passages on the six qi, and the text became the canonical exposition of the fire-heat (火热) school. The Xuanming Lunfang was transmitted alongside Liu's parallel treatises and was widely cited by later Jin-Yuan masters including Zhang Yuansu, Li Dongyuan, and Wang Haoogu, shaping warm-disease (温病) theory.
Formulas recorded in this text· 2
Formula · Dāng Guī Lóng Huì Wán
Angelica Gentian Dragon
当归龙荟丸
A "qing-xie gan-dan shi-huo" (clear and drain excess fire from liver and gallbladder) formula from Liu Wansu's "Elucidations of Formulas" (1172), one of the most strongly purgative classical "liver-fire" formulas.
Formula · Fáng Fēng Tōng Shèng Wán
Saposhnikovia Unblocking
防风通圣丸
A "release the exterior, drain the interior, and clear heat" formula from the Jin dynasty, unusually comprehensive in that it covers exterior, interior, and heat in a single prescription.