Lèijù fāng 類聚方
Classified Formulary (of Zhāng Zhòngjǐng) by 吉益爲則 (撰)
About the work
The Lèijù fāng 類聚方 (Japanese Ruijuhō), 1 juàn, is the foundational programmatic monograph of the Edo Kohōha 古方派 (Ancient-Formula School), composed by the school’s founder 吉益爲則 Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益爲則 (sobriquet Tōdō 東洞, 1702–1773). Together with his pharmacological treatise Yào zhēng 藥徵 (KR3ec077, 1771; also catalogued as KR3eu072 in the present hxwd set) and the doctrinal manifesto Yī duàn 醫斷 (KR3eu069, 1759; composed by his disciple Tsurushū Genitsu 鶴沖元逸 from Tōdō’s lectures), it constitutes the doctrinal triad of the Kohōha. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3ed096 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The compositional date is fixed by the author’s own preface (zì xù), dated Hōreki 12 / 6 (summer 1762) (寶曆壬午夏六月); the senior preface by his patron and pupil Mino Take Kin’yō 美濃武欽繇 is dated Hōreki 13 / spring = early 1763 (寶曆癸未之春), so publication is 1762–1763. The work follows by three years the doctrinal manifesto Yī duàn (1759) and precedes by nine years the pharmacological Yào zhēng (1771).
The author’s preface lays out the programmatic position. The medicine of the Yellow Emperor (炎黃氏) is beyond recovery; the Zhōu state had a medical bureau, but its records were lost; the only authoritative ancient practitioners are Biǎn Què 扁鵲 扁鵲 (Qín Yuèrén 秦越人) and Zhāng Zhòngjǐng 張機 張仲景, but the Biǎn Què tradition survives only in the Shǐ jì biography. Therefore the entire medical tradition must be reconstructed from Zhāng’s Shānghán lùn and Jīnguì yàolüè. But these two works have a methodological defect: the formulae and the symptom-patterns are scattered across the chapters in the order of the disease-categories (太陽病, 陽明病, 少陽病, 太陰病, 少陰病, 厥陰病, 霍亂, 陰陽易差後勞復), so the practitioner who wants to find all uses of guìzhī tāng 桂枝湯 must search the entire corpus.
The Lèijù fāng solves this by systematically extracting every formula from the Shānghán lùn and Jīnguì yàolüè and listing each one with its full set of indications gathered from across the corpus, plus Tōdō’s terse commentary identifying the symptom-pattern (zhèng 證) most distinctive for that formula. The arrangement is by formula-family — guìzhī tāng and its derivatives, then máhuáng tāng and its derivatives, etc. — producing a clinically actionable handbook that allowed any practitioner to recover Zhāng’s full prescribing logic by formula-pivot rather than by disease-pivot. This formula-pivot organisation became the defining methodological move of the Kohōha and is the direct ancestor of the modern Japanese kanpō clinical reference style.
The pugnacious tone of Mino Take Kin’yō’s senior preface gives the polemical context. The contemporary Japanese medical scene is dominated by the Manase / Goseihō school — descended from the late-Míng Língshū / Sùwèn / JīnYuán four-master synthesis transmitted to Japan in the 16th century — which Mino characterises as a fortuneteller’s racket of “empty words and false reasonings” (空言虛語), unable to cure but able to charm wealthy patrons. The Lèijù fāng is presented as a polemical broadside in the Kohōha’s campaign against this establishment.
Tōdō’s editorial method, set out in the fánlì 凡例 (editorial principles) by his disciple Tsurushū 鶴 (writing in Tōdō’s voice): the received Shānghán lùn and Jīnguì texts have been corrupted by the post-Hàn editor Wáng Shūhé 王叔和 with later interpolations, and the Lèijù fāng therefore silently deletes what Tōdō judges to be Wáng Shūhé’s intrusive “empty theorising” (空言虛語) — restoring (in Tōdō’s polemical framing) the “Kūnlún 崑崙 jade-gems and xuánpǔ 玄圃 jewels” of the original Zhāng Zhòngjǐng. This radical editorial intervention is, of course, a method of textual reconstruction by doctrinal judgment, and was already in Tōdō’s lifetime the most controversial feature of the Kohōha programme.
Composition is securely 1762. The work was reprinted continuously through the late Edo period and was the direct progenitor of the 尾臺榕堂 Lèijù fāng guǎngyì 類聚方廣義 (1856), the major Edo-late commentary that became the school’s standard recension. The text was transmitted to China and entered 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. The 19th-century Chinese Shānghán revivalists (徐大椿 徐大椿’s school, the Jiāngnán jīngfāng tradition) drew heavily on the Edo Kohōha methodology of which this is the founding statement.
Translations and research
- Otsuka Yasuo 大塚敬節. 1968. Ruijūhō kōgi 類聚方講義. Tokyo: Sōgensha — the classical 20th-century Japanese commentary on the work.
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39 (2): 299–324 — for the polemical context of the Kohōha.
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2014. “Ancient Texts and New Medical Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Japan.” Asian Medicine 9 (1–2): 78–104 — for the philological-doctrinal method.
- Marushima Eisuke 丸島英祐. Multiple Japanese studies of Yoshimasu Tōdō and the kohō school.
- Liu Ping 劉平. 2009. Riběn hàn-fāng yī-xué 日本漢方醫學. Beijing: Zhōngguó Zhōngyīyào Chūbǎnshè — for the Chinese-language reception.
Other points of interest
The Lèijù fāng is one of the most consequential works in the history of East Asian medicine: through it Yoshimasu Tōdō created a Japanese reading of Zhāng Zhòngjǐng that was substantially independent of the SòngYuánMíng Chinese commentarial tradition, established the formula-pivot method as the centre of Japanese kanpō clinical practice, and (via late-Qīng and Republican reception) reshaped Mainland Chinese practice of the classical Shānghán corpus. It is the principal source-text of every subsequent Japanese-Chinese jīngfāng / classical-formula tradition.
Links
- Author: 吉益爲則 / 吉益東洞.
- Senior-preface author: Mino Take Kin’yō 美濃武欽繇 (Tōdō’s patron and pupil, no separate person note).
- Late-Edo commentary: 尾臺榕堂’s Lèijù fāng guǎngyì 類聚方廣義 (1856).
- Companion works: KR3eu069 Yī duàn (1759), KR3eu072 Yào zhēng (1771).
- Parallel listing: KR3ed096.
- Series: HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), ed. 陳存仁.