More Chinese stuff: Shennong Bencao

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The fundamental book of Chinese medicine is the Shennong Bencao (aka
Shen Nung Ben Tsao, Chi'en Nung Pen Ts'ao, Classic Herbal of the
Divine Farmer). It was written sometime before 200 CE and was
attributed to Shennong, the Divine Farmer, a mythical emperor who
supposedly lived around 2600 BCE and was the inventor of commerce,
agriculture, and herbal medicine.

(The legend says that it was Shennong who discovered that drinking
water could be made healthier by boiling; and that he invented tea by
accident when the wind blew a camelia blossom into his hot water bowl.
He is also said to have tested all 365 Bencao recipes personally,
watching their effect through his conveniently transparent abdomen. He
reportedly turned green and eventually died as a result of such
experiments.)

The book is said to consist of 365 paragraph-length recipes. 

This book was expanded and revised many times in the following
centuries. An image of one page from a 6-volume derived work written
in 1625, vaguely resembling the "pharma" pages of the VMS, can be seen at

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/chinese/books.html
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/chinese/images/021c.jpg

I haven't found yet a translation of the original Shennong Bencao, but
here are pointers to the Chinese text:

   Big5 encoding:
   http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/IMPORT/texts/chinese/text.big5
   http://helios.unive.it/~pregadio/ikei.html

   shift-JIS encoding:
   http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/IMPORT/texts/chinese/text.jis
   ftp://xuanmiao.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/archives/text/zi/chinaset.lzh

The two versions are supposed to differ only in the encoding,
but the Big5 version has 364 bullets, and the shift-JIS
one has only 125 + 114 + 118 = 357 bullets.  Perhaps 
someone who can read the text can tell me what is going on?

All the best

--stolfi