Mài Xué Jí Yào 脈學輯要
A Selected Synthesis of Pulse Studies by 丹波元簡 (Tamba no Mototane / Dānbō Yuánjiǎn, zì Liánfū 廉夫, hào Guìshān 桂山, 1755–1810, 江戶 / 寬政期)
About the work
A three-juan late-Edo period Japanese pulse-doctrinal synthesis by the Igaku-kan 醫學館 head Tamba no Mototane, completed in Kansei 7 = 1795. The book is one of the most rigorous Japanese applications of Chinese pulse-doctrinal philology and one of Tamba’s earliest mature kǎojù-style medical works (preceding his more famous Sùwèn shí 素問識 of 1806 and Língshū shí 靈樞識). The Jí yào takes Wáng Shūhé’s KR3eb011 Mài jīng as the textual anchor and assembles around it a critical synthesis of the Sòng-Yuán-Míng-Qing pulse-doctrinal heritage, with characteristic Tamba editorial precision: every cited passage is tagged with its source and dated, every controversy is dispassionately surveyed, and Tamba’s own judgement is reserved for cases where the textual evidence permits a clear adjudication.
Prefaces
KR3eb035_000.txt opens with Tamba’s preface, dated Kansei shichi nen 寬政七年 = 1795, setting out the editorial principle: a Chinese physician — fāngjì zhī qiè yào 方技之切要 (“the most pressing technicality of the medical art”) — must be able to distinguish among the easily confusable pulse types (hóng 洪 vs. dà 大 vs. ruǎn 軟 vs. ruò 弱 vs. láo 牢 vs. gé 革), and the existing literature fails to provide this discriminative clarity. The opening also engages with Chinese disputes (the Wáng Shūhé / Lǐ Zhōngzǐ / Shěn Wēiyuán pulse-position arguments) from a remote and authoritative philological standpoint.
Abstract
Tamba no Mototane (丹波元簡 / 多紀元簡, 1755–1810) was the head of the Tokugawa bakufu’s official medical college from 1790 and oku-ishi (court physician) to the shōgun. The Tamba philological project — his own collations of the Chinese medical canon plus those of his sons 丹波元胤 (Mototane) and 丹波元堅 (Motokata) — re-established the modern East-Asian textus receptus of the medical classics. The Mài xué jí yào is one of the earliest major works of this project and is the gold-standard 18th-century Japanese pulse-doctrinal reference. It circulated back to Qing China in the late 19th century (chiefly via Yáng Shǒujìng’s 楊守敬 importations from Tokyo in the 1880s) and has been continuously cited in Chinese pulse-doctrinal scholarship ever since.
The dating bracket notBefore: 1795 / notAfter: 1795 reflects the Kansei 7 preface. The catalog meta records the work under 江戶 (Edo) period; the present entry follows that placement.
Translations and research
- No full Western-language translation exists.
- The work and its author are surveyed in Susan Burns, Kingdom of the Sick: A History of Leprosy and Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019), and Daniel Trambaiolo, “Antiquity and Authority in the Scientific Imagination of Tokugawa Japan,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 36 (2012). The Tamba family’s philological project as a whole is discussed in Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠, Edo-ki no Igaku-kan to Chūgoku igaku jiten 江戶期の醫學館と中國醫學辭典 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 2007).
Other points of interest
The Mài xué jí yào is one of the principal channels by which Chinese pulse doctrine reached Edo-period Japanese clinical practice and was integrated with the kōhō-ha 古方派 (classical-medicine school) tradition.
Links
- Wikidata: not assigned.
- Author’s later mature works in this catalog: KR3ea010 Sùwèn shí, KR3ea026 Língshū shí.
- 脈學輯要 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB