It's a pretty amazing story, and shows that if you do something (like publish a book) but can't get it in front of the right people then you might as well not have done it.
> The first person to teach traditional Chinese medicine in Japan was an 8th-century Buddhist monk named Jianzhen (Ganjin in Japanese), who collected some 1,200 prescriptions in a book: Jianshangren (Holy Priest Jianzhen)'s Secret Prescription. The text was believed lost for centuries, but the authors of a recent paper published in the journal Compounds stumbled across a book published in 2009 that includes most of Jianzhen's original prescriptions.
> That's how they stumbled upon a 2009 book entitled Three Treasures Be Published. It turns out that before he left for Japan, Jianzhen gave a copy of his many prescriptions to one of his disciples, a monk named Lingyou. The text passed through 52 subsequent generations, until Lingyou's descendent, Lei Yutian, decided to organize all the prescriptions into his 2009 book.
52 generations passed down through one family is quite incredible. I'm not aware of anything else like that that has ended up published, although I could be uninformed.
52 generations of teachers passing it to their disciples, not 52 generations of the same family. Much easier to do since someone's son might be a little shit with no recourse but you probably aren't going to train a disciple for years and then have them turn out to be untrustworthy. This is more like a copy of some important christian manuscript getting passed down from St Peter to Pope Francis 260 times over the past 2000 years.
> This is more like a copy of some important christian manuscript getting passed down from St Peter to Pope Francis 260 times over the past 2000 years.
That's actually still pretty incredible. There's a reason that large document caches are our main source for the translations of the Bible, today. Preserving even religious documents through all the upheavals of time and politics, is not a small matter, even if they have a large team dedicated to it. (Which early on, was not the case).
> The first person to teach traditional Chinese medicine in Japan was an 8th-century Buddhist monk named Jianzhen (Ganjin in Japanese), who collected some 1,200 prescriptions in a book: Jianshangren (Holy Priest Jianzhen)'s Secret Prescription. The text was believed lost for centuries, but the authors of a recent paper published in the journal Compounds stumbled across a book published in 2009 that includes most of Jianzhen's original prescriptions.
> That's how they stumbled upon a 2009 book entitled Three Treasures Be Published. It turns out that before he left for Japan, Jianzhen gave a copy of his many prescriptions to one of his disciples, a monk named Lingyou. The text passed through 52 subsequent generations, until Lingyou's descendent, Lei Yutian, decided to organize all the prescriptions into his 2009 book.
52 generations passed down through one family is quite incredible. I'm not aware of anything else like that that has ended up published, although I could be uninformed.