Jīngxué huìjiě 經穴匯解
Collected Explanations of the Channel Acupoints by 原昌克 Hara Masakatsu (撰)
About the work
An eight-juan Edo-period Japanese acupuncture compendium by 原昌克 Hara Masakatsu (hào Nányáng 南陽 / Nan’yō; styled Dànyuán Qíwēng 淡園碕翁 in his uncle’s earlier draft); prefaced in Kyōwa guǐhài 享和癸亥 (1803). Hara’s self-preface explains the genealogy of the text: his maternal uncle the “Dànyuán” elder had originally drafted a two-juan Jīngxué huìjiě because his youngest son had gone blind and was set to the trade of acupuncture; when that son died young, the uncle abandoned the project. Hara, returning east, was repeatedly questioned by his students about yúxué 俞穴 (acupoint location) and confessed his ignorance; this prompted him to reclaim the uncle’s manuscript, find it insufficiently sourced (“only three or five authorities cited”), and rebuild it from his own library into the present eight-juan work — incorporating Horitate Kō’s 堀立考 Yúxué zhézhōng 俞穴折衷, the Yúxué quánchāo compendium, the Tōnggōng 通攻 (= Yúxué tōnggōng), and the Japanese-medical and Chinese-medical acupoint-literature down to the late Míng and Qīng.
Abstract
The Jīngxué huìjiě is one of the most rigorous Edo-period acupuncture critical-apparatus works. Hara Masakatsu’s polemical position, set out in the preface of his cousin 山崎子政 Yamazaki Shisei (Yamazaki Zen 善, court physician with the title 醫學教諭), is that the Língshū and Sùwèn are foundational but require the Míngtáng tradition for clinical specificity — and that since the original Míngtáng texts of 徐叔向 Xú Shūxiàng, 秦承祖 Qín Chéngzǔ, and 甄權 Zhēn Quán are lost, the surviving Sòng Tóngrén tújīng of 王惟一 Wáng Wéiyī (KR3ee056) and the Yuán Shísì jīng fāhuī of 滑壽 Huá Shòu (KR3ee026) are the principal sources. Hara’s contribution is a systematic comparison of all available East-Asian acupoint catalogs — Chinese (Sòng Tóngrén, Míng Dàchéng, Qīng Yīzōng jīnjiàn) and Japanese (the various Edo-period acupuncture handbooks) — with a critical apparatus identifying the points of disagreement, especially in the difficult region of cùn-measurement and bone-landmark localization. The work is a major Edo-Japanese contribution to East-Asian acupuncture philology and circulated back into China in the late Qīng.
Translations and research
- Mathias Vigouroux, “Acupuncture in Edo-period Japan”, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (2010s).
- Margaret Lock, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience, University of California Press, 1980 — for the Edo Japanese acupuncture tradition Hara represents.