Yīxīnfāng 醫心方 (Japanese: Ishinpō)
Formulae from the Heart of Medicine by 丹波康賴 Dānbō Kānglài / Tanba no Yasuyori (912 – 995, Japan).
About the work
A thirty-juǎn late-10th-c. Japanese medical encyclopaedia — the largest and most important medieval Japanese medical compilation, completed by Tanba no Yasuyori in Eikan 2 / 984 and presented to Emperor Enyū 圓融天皇. The work is a topical reorganisation of citations from over 200 pre-Táng and Táng Chinese medical sources (and a small number of Japanese sources of the Nara and early Heian periods), almost all of them lost in their original form: it is therefore the principal extant secondary witness for an immense library of vanished early-medieval Chinese medical literature, including substantial fragments of the Liùcháo (Six Dynasties) and Suí–Táng formulary, dietetic, sexological, and ritual-medical traditions that have not been preserved in any Chinese transmission.
The catalog records the author as BěiSòng 北宋, which reflects only the contemporaneity of the work with the early Northern Sòng; in fact the Yīxīnfāng is a Japanese Heian-period composition with no Sòng-Chinese intermediation. The dating is Tengen 5 / 982 (the date of imperial commission) and Eikan 2 / 984 (the date of completion and presentation, confirmed by the colophon of the Nakarai-shi 半井氏 manuscript) — followed here.
The 30 juǎn are organised as follows: juǎn 1 (general principles, materia medica preliminaries); juǎn 2–3 (acupuncture-moxibustion); juǎn 4 (general internal medicine — head and face); juǎn 5–6 (ear, nose, mouth, throat, eye, dental); juǎn 7–8 (consumption, urology); juǎn 9–10 (cough, shānghán, fēng disorders); juǎn 11 (dysentery); juǎn 12 (haemorrhoid, intestinal); juǎn 13 (xiāokě / diabetes, dropsy, jaundice); juǎn 14 (huòluàn, miscellaneous fevers); juǎn 15 (yōngjū abscesses); juǎn 16–17 (poisons, jǐnjí emergencies); juǎn 18 (small surgery, fractures); juǎn 19–20 (fúshí 服食 mineral elixirs); juǎn 21–24 (women’s medicine and childbirth — extensively detailed); juǎn 25 (paediatrics); juǎn 26 (yǎngshēng longevity); juǎn 27 (ànmó 按摩 massage and dǎoyǐn 導引 gymnastics); juǎn 28 (fángzhōng 房中 sexology — the principal extant medieval witness to the lost Chinese fángzhōng tradition); juǎn 29 (shíyǎng 食養 dietetics); juǎn 30 (shíjì 食忌 dietary contraindications and materia medica miscellany).
The work’s editorial method is closely modelled on Sūn Sīmiǎo’s KR3er088 Qiānjīn yàofāng and Wáng Tāo’s KR3er091 Wàitái mìyào, but goes beyond either in explicitly preserving the original source-attributions for every excerpted passage (often three or four distinct attributions, with variant readings, for a single formula). This editorial-philological scrupulousness, combined with the work’s geographical insulation from the Sòng-period editorial standardisation that affected the Chinese textual tradition, makes the Yīxīnfāng uniquely valuable for the textual reconstruction of pre-Sòng Chinese medical literature.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries the Edo-period publication paratexts:
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A bá 跋 (postface) by Fukuyama Genryūshi 福山源立之 dated Ansei dīngsì zhòng wǔ 安政丁巳重五 = Ansei 4 / 1857 Duanwu (fifth day of the fifth month). Fukuyama narrates that the Nakarai-shi 半井氏 (the hereditary imperial physicians of Japan) held two copies of the Yīxīnfāng: a scroll-form (juǎnzǐ běn 卷子本) presentation copy of Eikan 2 / 984, with a postface by Joi Hakushi 女醫博士光成 (a female-physician doctor of the imperial Tenyaku-ryō 典藥寮); and a sewn-binding zhānyè běn 黏葉本 transcription. The scroll-form copy was thought to be the original presentation manuscript. The sewn-binding copy was lost in the yǐmǎo 乙卯 winter (= Ansei 2 / 1855) Edo fire (“the calamity of pond-fish” chíyú zhī zāi 池魚之災), but the scroll-form copy had already been engraved for printing by official command and so escaped destruction.
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A bá 跋 by Tanba Genshu 多紀元琰 and Tanba Genkichi 多紀元佶 (侍醫醫學教諭法眼, the hereditary Tanba-family imperial-physicians of late-Edo Japan, in continuous descent from Yasuyori), dated Man’en 1 / 1860 七月十五 (mid-month of the seventh month). The postface narrates the multi-generational editorial labour of the Tanba family: the elder Tanba had begun the editio princeps engraving, two senior collaborators (Kojima Naotada 小島尚真 and Shibue Zensan 澀江全善) had died, and the work was completed by Takashima Hisanuki 高島久貫, Mori Tatsuyuki 森立之, Satō Naga 佐藤萇 and the two Tanba scions. The postface gives a detailed account of the philological method used: comparison with the Enryō 4 / 1747 zhānyè běn fragment (by Wake no Shigeo 和氣成庸 covering juǎn 25, 26, 28), and with the Ninna-ji 仁和寺 manuscript fragment of 16 juǎn.
Abstract
The 984 dating is established by the juǎn 30 colophon preserved in the zhānyè běn. The work circulated in manuscript through the Japanese medieval period as the secret medical lore of the Tanba family, hereditary imperial physicians; the principal extant manuscript (Nakarai-shi juǎnzǐběn) is now designated a Japanese National Treasure. The editio princeps in print is the Edo-period Edo bakufu edition completed under Tanba Genshu’s editorial direction in Man’en 1 / 1860, after multi-generational labour. The hxwd recension descends from this edition through a Meiji-era reprint.
Tanba no Yasuyori (912–995) was descended from the Tanba clan, which traced its lineage to Chinese immigrant-physicians of the Nara period; he held the zhēnbóshì 鍼博士 (Doctor of Acupuncture) post at the imperial Tenyaku-ryō. His son Tanba no Masatada 丹波雅忠 founded the Tanba-family hereditary medical line that continued unbroken in service to the Japanese imperial court for nearly nine hundred years.
The cited Chinese sources include: Sùwèn, Língshū, Zhūbìng yuánhòu lùn 諸病源候論, Qiānjīn yàofāng 千金要方, Qiānjīn yìfāng 千金翼方, Xiǎopǐn fāng 小品方 (Chén Yánzhī 陳延之), Cuīshì fāng 崔氏方, Shēnshī fāng 深師方, Zhǒuhòu fāng 肘後方 (Gě Hóng), and many others — the bulk of which are now lost outside the Yīxīnfāng’s citations.
Translations and research
The principal critical edition is the Japanese facsimile reproduction of the Nakarai-shi juǎn-zǐ-běn (Ozora-sha, 1991), and the standard annotated edition Maki Sachiko 槙佐知子’s modern-Japanese translation Ishinpō 醫心方 (Chikuma Shobō, 1993–2012, 33 volumes); for the fáng-zhōng chapter specifically Howard S. Levy and Akira Ishihara, The Tao of Sex (Integral Publishing, 1989). In Chinese the principal study is Gāo Wén-zhù 高文鑄, ed., Yī-xīn-fāng jiào-zhù yán-jiū běn 醫心方校注研究本 (Huá-xià, 1996). For the work’s place in East-Asian medical history see Ma Jixing 馬繼興, “Ishinpō’s value for Chinese medical history” (numerous studies); Vivienne Lo, “The Ishinpō and East-Asian Medical Transmission,” in East Asian Medicine (various); and Hinrichs & Barnes, eds., Chinese Medicine and Healing (Belknap, 2013), entry on East-Asian medical transmission.
Other points of interest
The Nakarai-shi scroll-form manuscript of 984 is one of the oldest surviving Japanese books of any kind and was designated a National Treasure (kokuhō) in 1984 on the millennial anniversary of its presentation. Its preservation is the principal reason the Yīxīnfāng survives.
Links
- Ishinpō (en)
- 醫心方 (zh)
- Person notes 丹波康賴 (author).