Yīdé jí 一得集
Collection of a Single Insight by 心禪僧 Xīn-chán-sēng (the bhikṣu Xīn-chán; a late-Qīng Háng-zhōu / Hú-lín Buddhist scholar-physician).
About the work
A three-juǎn clinical-doctrinal essay-and-case collection by the late-Qīng Buddhist monk-physician Xīnchán 心禪 (“Heart-Chán”). The title Yīdé jí (“collection of a single insight”) is self-deprecating in the Confucian-Buddhist mode familiar from the Lùnyǔ (“yú yú yān dé yī” — “I have obtained even one”). The text opens with zhūlùn biànzhèng 諸論辨正 (corrective discriminations of received doctrines), the first essay of which is the polemical “Xú Huíxī xiānshēng ‘Yīzhě wùrén wúzuì’ lùn” 徐洄溪先生醫者誤人無罪論 — Xīnchán’s response to Xú Dàchūn’s (徐大椿) celebrated formula in KR3eq085 Shènjí chúyán that “the incompetent physician kills without crime” (yōngyī shārén wúguò). Xīnchán argues that even the named physicians of the present age have only fault, no merit — the yōngyī (incompetent physicians) come in distinct social-medical species (zhà fraudulent, wàng presumptuous, yū pedantic, lòu shallow, guàipì eccentric) which he typologises in turn. Subsequent juǎn present case-records and prescription discussions in the same critical register, written from the monk-physician’s perspective of detachment from the lay clinical economy.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source _000 preserves the closing bá 跋 (colophon-style inscription), signed “光緒庚寅春仲下浣三日平易金舟鄉發牙經樵徐濟之題於虎林客次” = “Inscribed by Xú Jǐzhī 徐濟之, the wood-gatherer of Fāyájīng of Píngyì Jīnzhōu xiāng, at a Húlín (Hángzhōu) traveller’s lodge, on the third day of the late xún of mid-spring of Guǎngxù gēngyín = 1890”. Xú’s inscription is in elaborate parallel prose: it praises Xīnchán as one who has “shaved his head and let all things follow karma” but kept his xīnchán huìzhū (heart-Chán wisdom-pearl) intact, who consults gǔ dì shū (ancient imperial books) and aspires to be a liángxiàng (good minister) — the late-Qīng physician-as-secular-Bodhisattva trope; describes him reading classical Buddhist medical authorities and the Jīnguì yùhán 金匱玉函; and frames his medical practice as a huórén (saving-life) Bodhisattva-vow.
Abstract
Xīnchánsēng 心禪僧 was a late-Qīng Buddhist scholar-physician, active in the Hángzhōu / Húlín 虎林 region in the 1880s (the colophon dates to 1890). The catalog meta gives him as 清; composition window 1880–1890 reflects the colophon dating. He combined formal monastic training with extensive Chinese-medical kǎojù (evidential research) and clinical practice, addressing patients of both Buddhist and lay backgrounds. The work has no other surviving biographical attestation: Xīnchán is otherwise an unrecovered figure of late-Qīng Hángzhōu Buddhist medicine.
Substantively the work is a useful primary source for two interlocking topics: (i) the late-Qīng Buddhist medical critique of professional medicine — Xīnchán’s typology of yōngyī species develops the polemical apparatus of Xú Dàchūn into a sharper-edged Buddhist ethics in which the physician’s zuì (fault) cannot be evaded by appeal to professional incompetence; (ii) the late-Qīng Hángzhōu / Húlín Buddhist medical milieu — a less-studied counterpart to the Sūzhōu / Wúmén lay medical scene. The Yīdé jí’s combination of doctrinal essays, Buddhist ethical framing, and detailed case-records is unusual in the late-Qīng. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Yī-dé jí located. For Buddhist physicians in late-Imperial China and the yī-sēng 醫僧 tradition see Salguero, C. Pierce, Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China (Penn, 2014), introduction (the topic is medieval but the conceptual framework applies); for the late-Qīng critical-medical polemic tradition see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014).