It's a pretty amazing story, and shows that if you do something (like publish a book) but can't get it in front of the right people then you might as well not have done it. > The first person to teach traditional Chinese medicine in Japan was an 8th-century Buddhist monk named Jianzhen (Ganjin in Japanese), who collected some 1,200 prescriptions in a book: Jianshangren (Holy Priest Jianzhen)'s Secret Prescription. Th…
52 generations of teachers passing it to their disciples, not 52 generations of the same family. Much easier to do since someone's son might be a little shit with no recourse but you probably aren't going to train a disciple for years and then have them turn out to be untrustworthy. This is more like a copy of some important christian manuscript getting passed down from St Peter to Pope Francis 260 times over the past 2000 years.