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類聚方

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Text ID
KR3ed096
Date
1762–1764
Dynasty
江戶 / 清

Lèijù Fāng 類聚方

Categorically Assembled Formulas (Japanese Ruijuhō) by 吉益為則 (Yoshimasu Tameru 吉益為則, gō Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞, 1702–1773; Kyōto, Edo Japan)

About the work

The single most-cited work of the Japanese Ko-iho 古醫方 (“ancient-formulas”) school. Tōdō takes the entire formulary of the Shānghán lùn and Jīnguì yàolüè — the two surviving works of Zhāng Zhòngjǐng — and re-arranges them by mother-formula category, with each zǔfāng (parent formula) followed by its named jiājiǎn variants. The doctrinal point of the re-arrangement is the foundational Tōdō claim that only Zhòngjǐng’s formulas are reliable; the entire post-Hàn formulary tradition (Táng Wàitái, Sòng Júfāng, JīnYuán sìjiā, Míng compendia) is to be discarded. Ruijuhō presents the canonical material in the analytic order that Tōdō’s clinical method (fang-zheng xiang-dui 方證相對, “match formula to symptom-syndrome”) requires. The book had an extraordinary influence on Edo, Meiji, and modern Japanese Kampo — it is the foundational text behind essentially every later Edo kanpō clinical manual.

Prefaces

The source opens with a substantial preface by Yoshimasu Tōdō’s senior disciple Kin-yō 欽繇 (Saitō Hōzen 齋藤方山? — disciple’s zì). The preface is a fierce polemical defence of Tōdō’s “back-to-Zhòngjǐng” position against the dominant gōseiha 後世派 (later-generations school) of his day, with particular targeting of the followers of Lǐ Dōngyuán and Zhū Dānxī (“Dāntián 丹溪 and Dōngyuán 東垣 schools” — i.e. the JīnYuán sìjiā). Key claims:

  1. Personal testimony. The preface-writer himself had suffered a blood-disorder for “five or six years, bones drying up,” and Tōdō cured him; thereafter their friendship deepened.
  2. The anti-Jīn-Yuán polemic. “From the TángSòng onward there have been no fewer than several dozens of fāngjì schools. Dānxī and Dōngyuán were the celebrated names of their times, but their writings are záokōng zhāngxū (chiselling-empty and inflating-the-void) — though one can see plausibility in their argumentative scaffolding, they do no good in actual clinical practice. It is like feeding the starving on a soup of mud.”
  3. The clinical-realism position. “Some contemporary physicians, for a single morbid agent and the same symptom, give one prescription in the morning and change it by evening — that is mǎng (random shooting). Others, for one morbid agent in different symptoms, hold to a single formula like a man waiting at a tree-stump for the rabbit (shǒu zhū dài tù) — and if they sometimes hit, it is not their own merit, only the patient’s heaven-given luck.”
  4. The Zhòngjǐng-restoration mission. “Tōdō, in the strength of his young manhood, was indignant and stirred to action, and set his will to restore antiquity. He weighed his thought; he wrestled with the deficient strategies of the Tang and Sòng; he carried Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s banner forth and beat the drums of his army’s discipline — and in this he was simply continuing the dead and reviving the lost.”
  5. The reception of Tōdō’s Idanron 醫斷論. “When Idanron came out, those rotten doctrinalists trembled in alarm — some pretended to recant and reform their ways, others lay low and hid behind their rags, others tried to take refuge in fake erudition or claimed they were ‘attacking heresy.’ I have heard from informants that the slyer ones publicly denounce Tōdō and privately copy his manuscripts.”

Abstract

The work is firmly datable to the early 1760s — Tōdō’s Idanron of 1759 (referenced in the preface as already published and as having provoked the Sturm-und-Drang of his opponents) is the terminus post quem, and his death in 1773 the terminus ante quem. The first woodblock printing is conventionally cited as 1764 (Meiwa 元年 / Hōreki 14). The work was reprinted many times in the Edo period and a heavily-revised second-generation edition (Ruijuhō kō 類聚方廣義) was prepared by his son Yoshimasu Nangai 吉益南涯 (1750–1813) and printed in 1796.

The doctrinal structure has three layers: (1) the canonical formula with ingredients-and-doses as preserved in the Sòng recension of the Shānghán lùn and Jīnguì; (2) a list of variant-clauses (jiājiǎn — “adding X”, “subtracting Y”) drawn from within the Shānghán / Jīnguì canon itself, presented in compressed form; (3) Tōdō’s own clinical notes giving the syndromic indications and palpation-findings (fùzhèng 腹證) that justify the formula. Layer (3) is the principal Edo innovation — it places clinical-physical-examination (esp. fukushin 腹診 abdominal palpation) at the heart of formula-selection, in conscious displacement of pulse-diagnosis as the principal heuristic.

The work is the founding text of the Edo / Meiji / modern Kampo clinical doctrine: every standard Japanese kanpō formulary in use today is structurally a descendant of Ruijuhō.

Translations and research

  • Ruijuhō: numerous Edo printings; modern annotated editions in the Kampo igaku zenshū 漢方醫學全集 (Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1979).
  • Yamada Keiji 山田慶兒 and others, Edo no honzōgaku — sections on the Tōdō movement.
  • Daniel Trambaiolo, “Antiquarianism, Medicine and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Japan: The Kohōha and the Reception of Zhang Zhongjing,” in East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine — on Tōdō’s polemical method.
  • Susan Burns, Kingdom of the Sick: A History of Leprosy and Japan — passing treatment of Tōdō.

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