Yàozhēng Xùbiān 藥徵續編 / Zoku Yakuchō
Continuation of the Testimony of Drugs by 村井杶 (Murai Kin 村井杶, hào Chinju 椿壽, 1733–1815, 江戶)
About the work
The Zoku yakuchō is the principal continuation of Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益爲則’s Yakuchō KR3ec077 (1771), written by Yoshimasu’s leading Kohōha 古方派 disciple Murai Kin in the years after Yoshimasu’s death (1773) and printed in the early 19th century. The work covers 46 substances of the ShānghánJīnguì pharmacopoeia that Yoshimasu had not treated in the original Yakuchō (which limited itself to 53 substances). Each entry follows Yoshimasu’s exact six-part method: zhǔ zhì (primary indication), kǎo zhèng (formula evidence), hù kǎo (cross-examination of textual cruxes), biàn wù (refutation of commentarial errors), and pǐn kǎo (substance identification).
The opening entries — on chì shí zhī 赤石脂 (red halloysite), guālǎogēn 栝樓根 (trichosanthes root), shǔqī 蜀漆 (dichroa shoot), and shēngjiāng 生薑 (fresh ginger) — show the method clearly. Murai is willing to propose textual emendations: for the Wūtóu chì shí zhī wán he proposes that wūtóu 烏頭 is a copyist’s error for wūméi 烏梅 on the grounds that wūméi is the standard huí jué (roundworm-induced syncope) drug, and that no Zhòngjǐng formula elsewhere combines wūtóu and fùzǐ in the same prescription. The guālǎogēn entry similarly critiques the philological tradition (Lǐ Shízhēn’s 李時珍 Gāngmù etymology) and proposes that the proper graphic form should follow the Ěryǎ 爾雅. The shǔqī entry includes a sustained polemic against the Jin-Táng pharmacological tradition that had failed to recognise shǔqī / chángshān as Zhòngjǐng’s distinctive drug for “movement” (動) — a critique that Murai claims completes a discovery his teacher Yoshimasu had begun but not fully articulated.
The work in 2 maki (上, 下) extends the Yakuchō’s coverage from 53 to 99 substances, providing a near-complete Kohōha pharmacopoeia of the ShānghánJīnguì drug corpus. Together the Yakuchō and Zoku yakuchō are the canonical Kohōha pharmacological reference for the late Edo and early Meiji periods.
Prefaces
The local repository preserves the substance body in two maki. The frontmatter file is present. Standard editions preserve Murai’s own preface explaining the continuation programme and his relationship to Yoshimasu’s teaching, plus colophons by his Ōgaki and Kyōto students.
Abstract
Murai Kin (村井杶, 1733–1815). See his person note.
The work’s significance is as the principal extension of the Yoshimasu Yakuchō method and as the canonical jīngfāng pharmacopoeia of the late Edo period. The combination of Yoshimasu’s original 53-substance core with Murai’s 46-substance continuation gave the Kohōha school a near-complete pharmacology of the ShānghánJīnguì drug corpus, sufficient for the clinical purposes of the school. Murai’s willingness to propose textual emendations to the ShānghánJīnguì (the wūtóu / wūméi case is the most famous) makes the Zoku somewhat more critically engaged with the textual tradition than the original Yakuchō; this anticipates the more thoroughly philological jīngfāng commentaries of the early Meiji period.
The catalog meta gives the dynasty as 清 (Qīng), again reflecting the Chinese-calendar dating of Murai’s working life rather than the work’s Japanese provenance.
Translations and research
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2014. “Writing, Authority, and Practice in Tokugawa Medicine, 1650–1850”. PhD diss., Princeton.
- Daidōji Keiko 大道寺慶子. 2014. Edo-jidai no kanpōigaku.
- Hattori Toshirō 服部敏良. 1978. Edo-jidai igakushi no kenkyū.
- No complete Western-language translation.
Links
- Wikipedia (ja): 村井杶.
- 藥徵續編 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB