Constant Words on Caring for the Aged老老恒言

Also known as

Random Notes on Nourishing Life

Author / transmission

Cao Tingdong (1700–1785)

Period

Qing · Written by Cao Tingdong of the Qing, completed around the thirty-eighth year of the Qianlong reign (1773); in five scrolls. A specialized treatise on elderly regimen, appended here among Daoist regimen literature.

Canon division

Outside the Canon (Qing-dynasty life-nourishing text)

Collected in

Outside the Canon

Category

Medicine and Nourishing Life

Fascicles

5 juan

Synopsis

The five-scroll Laolao Hengyan (老老恒言, Constant Words on Caring for the Aged) was written by Cao Tingdong, a native of Jiashan in the Qing dynasty, and is the most systematic treatise on elderly regimen in premodern China. The first four scrolls are arranged under headings such as sleep, morning rising, washing, diet, foodstuffs, clothing, hats, sashes, socks, shoes, walking sticks, the study, the bedroom, the bed, the bed-curtain, the pillow, the mat, the quilt, the mattress, and the chamber pot, discussing in detail the particulars of an elderly person's daily life; the fifth scroll is a “Gruel Catalogue,” listing one hundred gruel recipes ranked into upper, middle, and lower grades, recording their ingredients and effects in detail. The whole work holds that regimen values the ordinary above all, and opposes the ingestion of alchemical elixirs and exotic techniques: “nourish natural life by the natural Way,” emphasizing accommodation to one's physical strength, constant adjustment to circumstance, and a calm and settled state of mind. Cao himself lived to the age of eighty-six, and much of his teaching derives from personal experience, expressed in plain language. Although the work comes from the hand of a Confucian scholar, its thought is highly consonant with the Daoist regimen tradition of “modeling oneself on the natural” and “treating illness before it arises,” and it draws extensively on the Huangdi Neijing (黄帝内经, Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon), the Qianjin Fang (千金方, Formulas Worth a Thousand Gold), and the Eight Discourses on Nurturing Life, among other sources. It is a representative work in the shift of Chinese regimen literature from religious technique toward practical rationality, and remains frequently cited in traditional Chinese geriatric medicine today.

Key Ideas

• The most systematic premodern treatise on elderly regimen
• Nourishing natural life by the natural Way
• Item-by-item discussion of daily-life particulars
• One hundred gruel recipes
• Regimen's shift from religious technique to practical rationality

Structure

Five scrolls: the first four discuss the particulars of daily life, the fifth is a catalogue of one hundred gruel recipes.

Editions

• Qianlong-era Qing block-printed edition
• Edition under the title Yangsheng Suibi (养生随笔, Random Notes on Nourishing Life)
• Collated editions from the People's Medical Publishing House and Zhonghua Book Company

Full Text & Online Resources

• CTEXT search
• Wikipedia: Laolao Hengyan

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