Great Treasure Paste

Four drugs, no mineral, no animal part, nothing that has to be rendered or fired — which among the chapter's applications makes it unusual and is probably why it travelled. Trichosanthes root at three nyang is the bulk and the cooling part; red peony and curcuma are the two blood-moving drugs that 散血 refers to; dahurian angelica is the aromatic that carries the rest. Tea, not honey or oil, is the vehicle, so it dries to a thin film and has to be renewed. Registering it here closes a cross-reference the corpus has been carrying. The Blood chapter names this formula for a nosebleed that will not stop — mixed with cold water and applied to the back of the crown, 最絶血路, cutting the blood's road most completely — and sends the reader off with only 方見回春, formula in the Hoechun. The recipe is here, in this chapter, and the chapter's own list of encircling applications names it again among the pastes laid round a swelling. The Blood chapter leaf also carries a collation note 膏 : 丹 at the foot of its leaf; 洪寶膏, a paste one mixes with a liquid and spreads, is the reading that holds, and this leaf is the reason. The claim on the Blood chapter's side — that a paste on the back of the head stops a nosebleed — has nothing behind it. The claim here, that a cool astringent film over a hot swelling is worth putting on, is modest and defensible. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.