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選針三要集

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Text ID
KR3ee052
Date
1670–1694
Dynasty
江戶

Xuǎnzhēn sānyào jí 選針三要集

Collected Three Essentials for Selecting the Needle by 杉山和一 Sugiyama Wa’ichi (撰)

About the work

A 17th-century Japanese Edo-period kanbun acupuncture treatise by Sugiyama Waichi 杉山和一 (Jp. Sugiyama Wa’ichi; 1610–1694) — the most famous blind acupuncturist of premodern Japan and inventor of the kanshin / guǎnzhēn 管鍼法 pipe-needle technique that allowed precise insertion through a guide-tube. The text survives in two juan (juànshàng 卷上 and juànxià 卷下) preserved among the Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書 repatriation series. Sugiyama’s bá 跋 (postface, KR3ee052_000.txt) opens with the Yìjīng tag-line tiān xíng jiàn, jūnzǐ yǐ zìqiáng bùxí 天行健，君子以自強不息 (“Heaven moves with strength; the noble person uses this to strengthen himself without rest”), then gives a brief autobiographical statement: “In my youth I had illness and treated it with needles; in my middle years I had illness, [studied with] Master Iruka 入江先生, received the needle-teaching for three years, and treated myself. Thereafter I have needled many people in treatment.” This identifies Sugiyama’s teacher as 入江豐明 Irie Toemon (Iruka), of the Edo Irie-ryū 入江流 acupuncture lineage.

The work’s title — Three Essentials — alludes to (1) bǔxiè yíngsuí 補瀉迎隨 (tonification, draining, going-against, following-with); (2) jǐngyíngshùjīnghé 井榮俞經合 (the five shù-categories of canonical acupoints); and (3) xūshí 虛實 (deficiency-and-excess). Juan 上 (KR3ee052_001.txt) treats these three essentials in turn, with a fourth chapter miùzhēn 謬針 (“erroneous needling”) critiquing contemporary Japanese practitioners who needle without studying the channel system. Juan 下 (KR3ee052_003.txt) provides a systematic shísì jīngxué fēncùn 十四經穴並分寸 enumeration of all 365 channel-points with their precise location-measurements in cùn, the nine-needles diagram 九針圖, the fifteen luò network-vessels, and a zhēnjiǔ yàoxué lùn 針灸要穴論 (“Essential Points for Acupuncture and Moxibustion”) with disease-by-disease point prescriptions, closing with the jìnzhēn xué gē 禁針穴歌 (“Forbidden-Acupuncture Points Song”) of 31 points and the jìnjiǔ xué gē 禁灸穴歌 (“Forbidden-Moxibustion Points Song”) of 47 points.

Abstract

Xuǎnzhēn sānyào jí is the principal kanbun acupuncture monograph attributed to Sugiyama Waichi, the kengyō 検校 (highest-rank blind scholar-official) and acupuncturist patronized by the fifth Tokugawa Shogun, 德川綱吉 Tokugawa Tsunayoshi 綱吉, who in 1693 endowed him with a residence in Edo and founded the Sugiyama-ryū hari-jutsu kōshūjo 杉山流鍼術講習所 — the school of acupuncture for the blind. Sugiyama’s place in Japanese medical history is summarized in Hinrichs & Barnes, Chinese Medicine and Healing (2013): he “lost his sight while young; among other innovations, Sugiyama introduced the use of a guide tube to govern the depth to which the needle can be inserted; he went on to establish forty-five acupuncture schools to train blind practitioners” (304). The text is dated by internal evidence — the autobiographical preface presupposes a mature practice — and conventionally placed between Sugiyama’s elevation to kengyō (1670) and his death (1694); the catalog’s “Edo” 江戶 assignment is followed here.

Doctrinally, the work transmits the Sòng-Yuán-Míng Chinese acupuncture canon (Língshū 靈樞, Nànjīng 難經, the Tóngrén tradition KR3ee056 / KR3e0017, and the Míng Yáng / Yú commentators) into Edo Japan through Sugiyama’s Irie-ryū lineage filter. The polemical miùzhēn chapter is notable for its sustained attack on contemporary Japanese acupuncturists who “abandon the channels-and-network-vessels and search only for the disease” (舍經絡而尋病而已), who needle only superficially, who needle only the abdomen, or who refuse to combine needling with herbal therapy — Sugiyama insists that the canonical doctrine Língshū is the only authoritative basis and that the Three Essentials (補瀉, 取穴, 虛實) must be mastered together. The work also makes the interesting theoretical claim that yíngsuí 迎隨 (going-against / following-with the channel direction) is itself the bǔxiè operation, harmonizing the Sùwèn and Nànjīng on a question that had divided the Chinese commentators.

The text was not transmitted in China during the late Qīng and only entered the modern Chinese canon via the Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū repatriation series.

Translations and research

  • Hinrichs, T.J. and Barnes, Linda L. (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, esp. 304–305 (Sugiyama and the blind-acupuncture lineage).
  • Lock, Margaret, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 — frames the Sugiyama-ryū’s long survival.
  • Kosoto Hiroshi 小曽戸洋, Nihon kanpō tenseki jiten 日本漢方典籍辞典 (Tokyo: Taishūkan, 1999) — entry on Senshin san’yōshū.
  • Machi Senjurō 町泉壽郎, “Sugiyama Wa’ichi-ryū no keisei to sono shūhen” 杉山和一流の形成とその周辺, Nihon ishigaku zasshi 日本醫史學雜誌 (various issues).

Other points of interest

The text’s status as a kanbun (Sino-Japanese literary Chinese) work means its prose register diverges from continental Chinese usage in characteristic ways — e.g. jí … yě 即…也 sentence-final, the use of yǔ 與 as a connective in unexpected positions, and the heavy reliance on kun-readings calqued into Chinese characters. These features have made the work easier to date as Japanese-origin even where its content is purely classical Chinese.

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