脈學輯要

Màixué jíyào 脈學輯要

A Compendium of the Essentials of Pulse-Lore by 丹波元簡 (撰)

About the work

The Màixué jíyào 脈學輯要 (Japanese Myakugaku shūyō), 3 juàn, is the philological-cum-clinical synthesis of the Chinese sphygmological tradition by the most influential Edo-period Japanese scholar of the Chinese medical canon, 丹波元簡 Tamba no Genkan 丹波元簡 (= Taki no Mototane 多紀元簡, zì Liánfū 廉夫, 1755–1810), then director of the bakufu Igakukan 醫學館 medical academy and oku-ishi 奥醫師 (Tokugawa court physician). The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3ec045 in the present knowledgebase.

Abstract

The author’s preface, dated Kansei 7 / 1 / 27 = 27th day of the 1st month of 1795 (寬政七年乙卯歲春正月二十有七日), gives the work’s controlling intellectual project. Genkan opens with a polemical critique of the state of contemporary pulse-diagnosis: “Every physician today diagnoses a hundred conditions and prescribes a thousand formulae monthly, but when asked the pulse-image beyond fú 浮 floating, chén 沉 sunken, shuò 數 rapid, chí 遲 slow, dà 大 large, xiǎo 小 small — almost none can answer, and as to the differences among hóng 洪 surging, dà 大 large, ruǎn 軟 soft, ruò 弱 weak, láo 牢 firm, gé 革 leather-skinned, he is utterly at a loss.” The cause is the disordered transmission of pulse doctrine since 王叔和 Wáng Shūhé’s 王叔和 Mài jīng 脈經 (c. AD 280): “from Wáng Shūhé downward, scattered and disorderly, almost without principle; the Yuán and Míng compendia merely string together received phrases, without examining the underlying errors.”

Genkan identifies two doctrinal errors as systematically corruptive:

1. The cùnguānchǐ 寸關尺 / five-organ correspondence. The standard HòuHàn doctrine — left wrist correspondences to 心小腸肝膽腎 (heart / small-intestine / liver / gall-bladder / kidney), right wrist to 肺大腸脾胃命門 (lung / large-intestine / spleen / stomach / 命門 mìngmén) — is, Genkan documents, an innovation of Wáng Shūhé that is not in the Nèijīng 內經 nor in 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Shānghán tradition. The closest Nèijīng analogue is the Sānbù jiǔhòu 三部九候 (three regions, nine indicators) of Nánjīng problem 18, but the wrist-only / five-organ scheme is a Wáng Shūhé development that the Nèijīng-stream commentators 王冰 (王太僕) and 楊玄操 subsequently canonised. The wrist-organ correspondence is therefore a secondary doctrine — useful as a clinical mnemonic, but not to be defended as scripture.

2. The pulse-to-symptom one-way correspondence. Genkan rejects as logically incoherent the standard Mài jīng-derived practice of listing fixed symptom-correspondences for each pulse-type (chí = abdominal pain / vomiting; wēi 微 = leucorrhoea / urinary leakage; etc.): a given pulse can attend many syndromes and a given syndrome can produce many pulses. The clinician must first observe the syndrome and then take the pulse to discriminate the yīnyáng / biǎolǐ / xūshí / hánrè polarities — not the other way around.

The body of the work is structured accordingly: opening with a general theory section (總說), proceeding through the individual pulse-types and their form-image (各脈形象), and concluding with separate sections on female and paediatric pulse (婦人小兒) and on anomalous pulses (怪脈). Throughout, Genkan’s method is philological-comparative — he cites the Sùwèn 素問, Língshū 靈樞, Nánjīng 難經, Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Shānghán and Jīnguì corpus, 皇甫謐’s Jiǎyǐ jīng 甲乙經, Wáng Shūhé’s Mài jīng 脈經, 滑壽’s Zhěnjiā shūyào 診家樞要, 李時珍’s Bīnhú màixué 瀕湖脈學, and the late-Míng compendia, examining each pulse-name’s transmissional history before settling on a clinically usable definition. This is the Igakukan-style philological method characteristic of the Taki / Tamba house at its peak, applied to the sphygmological canon.

Composition is securely 1795 by the preface; the work was widely reprinted and exerted a major influence on subsequent Edo kanpō clinical practice, and was reimported into China in the late Qīng / Republican period, entering the Shanghai HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), ed. Chén Cúnrén 陳存仁 — the immediate vector for the hxwd-series text.

Translations and research

No book-length Western-language monograph located.

• Hsu, Elisabeth. 2010. Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press — for the early Chinese sphygmological tradition Tamba reconstructs.
• Kuriyama, Shigehisa. 1999. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books — for the broader history of qiè-mài pulse-taking and its theoretical underpinnings.
• Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠. Iseki kō 醫籍考 kenkyū — Japanese-language scholarship on the Taki / Tamba bibliographical project of which the present work is part.
• Hattori Toshirō 服部敏良. Edo jidai igakushi no kenkyū 江戸時代醫學史の研究. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1978.

Other points of interest

The Màixué jíyào is a model of late-Edo Tamba-house textual-criticism applied to clinical doctrine: rather than write a new pulse-treatise from scratch, Tamba uses comparative philology to clear away accreted error and recover a usable inheritance — exactly the same method his sons Tamba Motoin and Tamba Motokata applied to the Shānghán lùn, Sùwèn, and Língshū corpora. The work was one of the principal Edo-Japanese medical works imported into Qīng China through Yáng Shǒujìng 楊守敬’s 1880s Tokyo collecting expedition and contributed substantively to the late-Qīng Chinese revival of classical-formula medicine.

Links

• Author: 丹波元簡.
• Doctrinal target: 王叔和’s Mài jīng 脈經 wrist-organ correspondence.
• Method-context: the Taki / Tamba house’s other major collations — see Tamba’s Sùwèn shí and Língshū shí in the same period.
• Parallel listing: KR3ec045.
• Series: HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), ed. 陳存仁.