Withered Peach Pill

This is Jibo-dan 至寶丹 rebuilt for the possession chapter. Set the two side by side and the borrowing is plain: rhinoceros horn, cinnabar, realgar, amber and hawksbill shell, with cattle gallstone, borneol and musk behind them, and benzoin boiled to a paste as the binder — the same eight materials in the same order, at roughly half the weights, with the gold and silver leaf dropped. What is added is peach, twice over: seven withered peaches ground separately at the head of the formula, and fourteen bran-fried peach kernels at the foot of it. The ginseng decoction is the same vehicle Jibo-dan uses. The peach is the chapter's own reasoning showing in the drug choice. 桃奴 is the fruit that hangs shrivelled on the tree all winter without falling, and peach wood in every form — twigs, kernels, the withered fruit — is the standard material of this tradition against what it calls 鬼. A formula that wanted only the aromatics and the minerals would have copied Jibo-dan and stopped; this one puts the peach first. The storage instruction is worth reading too. Shade-dried, sealed in a tight vessel, kept in a quiet room: the pill is handled as something that can lose its power, which is not how a decoction is handled. The indications — oppressive dreams, speech thrown into disorder, bewilderment with the ordinary self lost — can be read as a description of acute confusion and night terror, and the aromatic orifice-opening elixirs of this family were in fact given for clouded consciousness. The leaf's own frame is possession, and it is worth leaving it there rather than translating it into a diagnosis. **Contains cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide, and realgar, which is an arsenic sulfide, together with rhinoceros horn, hawksbill shell and musk, all from protected species. This must not be prepared.** — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.