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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, Jīn-Yuán 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 Jīn-Yuán 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 Táng-Sòng 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

Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome

  • 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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