Sùwèn shào shí 素問紹識
Continued Notes on the Plain Questions by 丹波元堅 (撰)
About the work
The Sùwèn shào shí 素問紹識 (“Continued / Inherited Notes on the Plain Questions”), 4 juàn, completed in Kōka 3 / Dàoguāng 26 = 1846, is the philological supplement to 丹波元簡 Tamba no Mototane’s Sùwèn shí 素問識 (KR3ea010, 1806) by Mototane’s youngest son 丹波元堅 Tamba no Motokata. The character shào 紹 (“to inherit / continue”) in the title explicitly names the work as a continuation. The work belongs to the philological-medical scholarship of the Tamba (Taki) family — across three generations of bakufu oku-ishi 奥醫師 and heads of the Igaku-kan 醫學館 — that effectively defined the modern textus receptus of the Sùwèn, Língshū, and Shānghán corpus.
Abstract
Motokata’s distinctive editorial method, visible in this work, is the systematic incorporation of evidence from the Tài sù 太素 recension — the long-lost ancient form of the Nèijīng that had been recovered from the Ninnaji 仁和寺 archive in Kyōto in the 1820s, and which transformed Edo-period Nèijīng philology. Where Mototane’s 1806 Sùwèn shí worked from the standard Wáng Bīng 王冰 recension with select Sòng Xiàozhèng yīshū jú 校正醫書局 collation evidence, Motokata’s Sùwèn shào shí systematically adds variant-readings from the Tài sù and from further manuscript sources available to the Igaku-kan after the 1830s. The work is one of the most important 19th-century philological supplements to Mototane’s foundational collation programme.
The work circulated back to Qīng China through the importation of Yáng Shǒujìng 楊守敬 from Tokyo in the 1880s (along with the other Tamba philological works), and is one of the principal references for modern critical editions of the Sùwèn. Composition is securely 1846 (preface and colophon dated).
For the parent work see KR3ea010 Sùwèn shí; for the philological tradition see 丹波元簡 and 丹波元堅.
Translations and research
- Unschuld, Paul U. 2003. Huang Di nei jing su wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text. Berkeley: University of California Press — extensive use of the Tamba philological tradition.
- Unschuld, Paul U., and Hermann Tessenow. 2011. Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: An Annotated Translation. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press — definitive English translation with full philological apparatus, drawing on the Tamba commentaries.
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠. Numerous articles on Tamba family philology — see http://square.umin.ac.jp/mayanagi/index_e.html.