What Is the Tangaek-pyeon? A Guide to the Herbology Volume

Tangaek-pyeon is the volume this entire site is built on. Here's how it's organized, and why that structure still shapes how we present each herb today.

Of the Donguibogam's five major divisions, Tangaek-pyeon (湯液篇) is the one devoted entirely to materia medica — the substances used to prepare medicine, rather than the diagnosis or theory surrounding them. The name itself refers to decoctions, the boiled-water preparations that were the most common form of herbal medicine at the time, but the volume covers far more than liquid remedies alone.

Organized by the natural world, not by ailment

Rather than grouping substances by what they treat, Tangaek-pyeon groups them by what they are and where they come from: water, earth, grain, human-derived substances, birds, animals, fish, insects, fruit, vegetables, herbs, trees, jade, stone, and metal each get their own section. This is a classificatory logic borrowed from the broader East Asian materia medica tradition, and it's why a single volume can hold everything from ginger to deer antler to well water.

A consistent template, entry after entry

Nearly every substance in Tangaek-pyeon follows the same basic pattern: its nature (性, warm/cold/neutral), taste (味), whether it carries toxicity, its main traditional actions, and often notes on harvest season, storage, and processing (法製). If that structure sounds familiar, it's because it's the same skeleton behind every herb page on this site — we didn't invent this format, we inherited it directly from a 400-year-old convention.

A larger corpus than most readers expect

Tangaek-pyeon records roughly 1,400 substances in total. This site currently documents 144 of them, each individually checked against the source text — a project we describe in detail in our column on verification. There is a great deal of the volume still ahead of us.