Yījiā qiānzì wén 醫家千字文
The Physician’s Thousand-Character Classic (Japanese: Ika senjimon) by 惟宗時俊 (Korēmune no Tokitoshi, fl. late 13th c., 鎌倉) — author
About the work
The Ika senjimon is a short medical anthology in the form of a thousand-character primer in twenty-one rhyme-categories, composed by the Kamakura-period Japanese court physician Korēmune no Tokitoshi 惟宗時俊 (catalog meta gives 唯宗時俊, with 唯 an OCR variant of 惟). It draws on the Sùwèn, Língshū, Nánjīng, Shānghán lùn, Jīnguì, the Qiānjīn fāng, and other foundational classics, condensing core medical doctrine into rhymed mnemonic verses on the model of 周興嗣 Zhōu Xīngsì’s Qiānzì wén (the canonical LiúCháo primer in a thousand non-repeating characters). The work is dated by Japanese reference works to Kōan 弘安 10 / 1287 at the earliest, and a complete fair copy is conventionally placed around Kagen 1 / 1303–1304.
Prefaces
The author’s preface (KR3ea033_000.txt) opens with a self-deprecating remark on the difficulty of medical learning: “the way of medicine is a forest, and the student has not yet found a sprout … the way of X (illegible in the jicheng.tw transcription) is an ocean, and the student has not yet found a single drop.” The preface then cites the proverb dú fāng sān nián, biàn wèi tiānxià wú bìng kě zhì; zhì bìng sān nián, nǎi zhī tiānxià wú fāng kě yòng 讀方三年，便謂天下無病可治；治病三年，乃知天下無方可用 (a Chinese saying widely repeated in late-medieval medical literature). Tokitoshi presents himself as “cǎozé zhī gūlòu” 草澤之孤陋 (“a rustic of pitifully limited learning”) who has compiled in one juan a Qiānzì wén with 21 sections — beginning with the qián xiàng kūn yí 乾象坤儀 部 — drawing on more than 200 sources. He explicitly contrasts his own slow compilation with Zhōu Xīngsì’s legendary one-day composition of the original Qiānzì wén.
Abstract
The Korēmune 惟宗 clan were hereditary court physicians (tenyaku-ryō 典藥寮) of the Heian–Kamakura imperial court, descended from the Chinese-immigrant Hata 秦 clan. Tokitoshi belongs to the late branch of the family contemporary with the late-Hōjō shogunate and was a high official-physician (tenyaku-no-suke 典藥助 — vice-director of the bureau). His Ika senjimon is the earliest substantial original Japanese medical work in classical Chinese, and an important witness for the state of Chinese medical knowledge in Kamakura Japan: it cites the Sòng校正 recension of the Nèijīng, the Sòng-era Tàipíng huìmín héjì jú fāng 太平惠民和劑局方, and a wide range of pre-Sòng pharmacopoeia, suggesting that the imperial bureau had effectively current access to the latest Chinese medical literature within decades of its printing.
The catalog meta dynasty 清 reflects the work’s circulation in China — chiefly via late-Edo Japanese imports — rather than the original Kamakura date. The jicheng.tw source likely descends from the Ǐkō kanshō kōka 醫經暠彰廣鈔 or another Tokugawa-era reprint.
Translations and research
- Hattori Toshirō 服部敏良, Heian / Kamakura no ishi to igaku 平安鎌倉の醫師と醫學 (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1964) — biographical reconstruction.
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠, “Ika senjimon の文献学的位置づけ”, in Nihon ishi-gaku zasshi 日本醫史學雜誌.
- Hugh de Ferranti, “Healers in Medieval Japan: a Bibliographic Survey”, in Medieval Japan Studies.