Jiāshú Fāng yǔ Fāngjí 家塾方與方極
Family-School Formulas, with The Apex of Formulas (Japanese Kajuku-hō with Hōkyoku) by 吉益為則 (Yoshimasu Tameru = Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞, 1702–1773; Kyōto, Edo Japan)
About the work
A combined publication of two short doctrinal-clinical formularies of the Yoshimasu Tōdō school:
- Hōkyoku 方極 (“Apex of Formulas”) — Tōdō’s compact statement of his single-formula / single-symptom-syndrome doctrine, organising the canonical Shānghán and Jīnguì formulas in a tight inventory under the doctrinal principle that each formula corresponds to a specific zhèng (symptom-syndrome) configuration. Composition: 1755 (preface dated Bǎolì 5 yǐhài 寶曆五年乙亥 mid-autumn).
- Kajuku-hō 家塾方 (“Family-School Formulas”) — a slightly later supplement, presenting the formulas as actually used in the Tōdō household-school clinical instruction.
The combined volume is the doctrinal counterpart to Ruijuhō (KR3ed096, the re-categorisation of Zhòngjǐng) and Hōki (KR3ed097, the teaching transcripts).
Prefaces
The source opens with the Hōkyoku Preface (Fāngjí xù), Bǎolì 5 yǐhài mid-autumn = autumn 1755, signed by Tōdō himself: Yìyáng Yoshimasu Wéizé Gōngyán fǔ zhuàn 藝陽吉益為則公言甫撰 (“composed by Yoshimasu Tameru, zì Gōngyán, of Aki 藝陽 [= Aki province]”).
The preface develops a sustained Confucian-classical argument:
“The Shū (Book of Documents) says: the august will establish his jí (apex / pivot) (皇建其有極); without an established jí, what should the people follow? Medicine is also so. In the Hàn, Zhāng Zhòngjǐng wrote the Shānghán lùn — and with this the jí of medicine was established. But over two thousand years his book has been transmitted with characters defaced and slips out of order — it is no longer Zhòngjǐng’s antiquity. I have shuffled the various chapters; I have weighed them by night and tested them by day; and where I have found something, I have set it down. My friend Mr. Yúnmén Zēng said to me: physicians, who attend to disease, treat it with formulas, and now in the prescription-making of the various houses, master and disciple necessarily disagree among themselves — what is the reason? I answered: there is no settled jí. Zhòngjǐng’s formula-making has a method: it is the matching of formula to evidence (fāngzhèng xiāngduì), without regard to causation. He establishes — and what is established correctly amid the toxic concentration — this is what is called the jí.""
After-preface (hòuxù) — develops the same argument: “the medical art is the formulas, that is all; and its meaning is to take Zhòngjǐng as the standard.” Notes that the work was compiled by Tōdō’s son Pǐn Xuánzuǒ (品玄左 = Yoshimasu Nangai 吉益南涯, 1750–1813) as a clinical record of his father’s tested formulas.
Abstract
Hōkyoku is the founding doctrinal manifesto of the Ko-iho school’s clinical method. Its title is consciously borrowed from the Shàng shū (Hóng fàn 洪範 / “Great Plan”) chapter on the huángjí — the “August Apex,” the pivot around which the Confucian polity organises itself — and Tōdō’s claim is that the Shānghán lùn of Zhāng Zhòngjǐng functions as the jí of medicine, the immovable centre against which all later prescribing-practice should orient itself. The composition is firmly dated autumn 1755, four years before Idanron (1759) and seven years before the Ruijuhō (early 1760s). It is the work in which Tōdō first publicly stated the fāngzhèng xiāngduì (方證相對, “match formula to symptom-syndrome”) doctrine that became the defining methodological signature of his school.
The combined volume’s Jiāshú fāng (Kajuku-hō) is a slightly later document, the practical-instructional companion: the formulas as used in the Tōdō household-school clinical training. The two pieces together constitute the Tōdō school’s pedagogical canon, set alongside the larger Ruijuhō (KR3ed096) and Hōki (KR3ed097).
The publication-history is complex. Hōkyoku was first printed in 1764 or shortly thereafter; Kajuku-hō in slightly different recensions also circulated in the 1760s-70s and was preserved by Tōdō’s son Nangai. The combined-volume printing under the title Jiāshú fāng yǔ Fāngjí is an Edo recension; the digital text is from this combined recension.
Translations and research
- Hōkyoku in modern annotated edition: Kampō kohōha sōsho 漢方古方派叢書 (Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1971; 1979 reprint), with parallel Kajuku-hō.
- Daniel Trambaiolo, “Antiquarianism, Medicine and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Japan: The Kohōha and the Reception of Zhang Zhongjing,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine.
- Yamada Keiji 山田慶兒, Iyaku no genryū (The Sources of Medicine) — sections on Tōdō.
Other points of interest
The classical-Confucian rhetorical strategy of borrowing the Shàng shū concept of huángjí for the title — making the Shānghán lùn the architectonic jí of medical practice — is itself a doctrinal claim of the highest order. It places Zhāng Zhòngjǐng on the same level of authority within medicine as Yáo / Shùn / Yǔ in the Confucian political tradition, and is one of the principal reasons why Tōdō’s school was so polemically forceful in pre-Meiji medical debates.
Links
- See 吉益為則 for biography.
- For Tōdō’s other works in the corpus see KR3ed096 Ruijuhō and KR3ed097 Hōki.
- 家塾方與方極 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB