Yī shèng 醫賸
Medical Surplus — A Philological Miscellany on Chinese Medical Texts by 丹波元簡 (撰)
About the work
The Yī shèng 醫賸 (Japanese Izō), 3 juàn, is the philological miscellany of 丹波元簡 Tamba no Genkan 丹波元簡 (= Taki no Mototane 多紀元簡, hào Rekusō 櫟窗 / Rekuin Setsusha 櫟蔭拙者 (“the clumsy man of the oak-shade”), 1755–1810), Edo Igakukan director and the founder of late-Edo Japanese medical kǎojù 考據-philology. The catalog meta gives the author as 櫟蔭拙者 — Genkan’s most modest of his three hào. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3eq052 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The Yī shèng (the title literally meaning “Medical Surplus / Leftovers”) is the collected reading-notes of Genkan on the Chinese medical canon — short essays on isolated philological, lexical, historical, and material-cultural problems that did not fit into the larger systematic commentaries (Sùwèn shí 素問識, Língshū shí 靈樞識, Shānghán lùn jíyì 傷寒論輯義, etc.) he was producing in the same period. The format is essay-after-essay, each headed by the term, name, or problem treated, ranging from a few lines to several pages, with a wide range of subject-matter:
- Anatomical and physiological terminology: an opening essay on the term mùyuán 募原 (the membrane-source) traces the philological history through Wáng Bīng 王冰, Quán Yuánqǐ 全元起, the Tàisù 太素 recension, Mǎ Xuántái 馬玄臺, Zhāng Jièbīn 張介賓, Zhāng Zhìcōng 張志聰, Gāo Shìshì 高世栻, Wú Yǒuxìng’s 吳有性 Wēnyì lùn (which makes móyuán 膜原 = “half-exterior, half-interior” central to its pathology), Gāo Gǔfēng 高鼓峰, Wáng Zǐjiē 王子接, Jiǎng Shìjí 蔣示吉, Liú Kuí 劉奎, and the Sōngyái zūnshēng shū 嵩厓尊生書, demonstrating that mù 募 in the canonical text is a transmission-error for mù 幕 / mó 膜 (membrane) and identifying the membrane-source as the layer of fascia connecting the viscera.
- Historical-bibliographical: a substantial essay on the Tóngrén zhēnjiǔ tújīng 銅人針灸圖經 (“Bronze-Man Acupuncture-and-Moxa Illustrated Canon”) of Wáng Wéiyī 王惟一, examining a rubbing (拓本) of the stone-engraved original in the Bakufu collection, deducing from the format (16 characters per line, 160 lines per band, 5 bands per juàn) the original two-stele dimensions (width 2+ zhàng, height 6+ chǐ).
- Material-cultural and lexical notes on drug names, instrument names, and procedure terms.
The work belongs to the same late-Kansei / early-Bunka period as Genkan’s Màixué jíyào KR3eu061 (1795) and Jiùjí xuǎnfāng KR3eu064 (1801–1810), and represents the philological off-cuts of those systematic projects — the notes that did not fit into a single-classic commentary but were too valuable to discard. Composition is bracketed approximately 1803 (the period of Genkan’s mature philological output) to 1809 (the year before his death in Bunka 7 = 1810).
The work 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. Its impact on late-Qīng Chinese medical philology was considerable: the Yī shèng’s philological method was a model for the late-Qīng kǎojù school of medical-textual studies (代代 杨守敬 brought back from Tokyo in the 1880s, 徐大椿’s descendants in the jīngfāngpài).
Translations and research
No book-length Western-language monograph located.
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠. Iseki kō 醫籍考 kenkyū — Japanese-language scholarship on the Taki / Tamba bibliographical project.
- 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.
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39 (2): 299–324.
Other points of interest
The Yī shèng’s opening essay on mùyuán / móyuán — the “membrane-source” — is one of the principal philological landmarks of the term’s reception history. Wú Yǒuxìng’s 1642 Wēnyì lùn had made the móyuán the anatomical localisation of pestilential pathogens (the “half-exterior, half-interior” pathology), which the late-Edo Japanese kanpō tradition (cf. 源元凱 Wēnbìng zhī yánjiū KR3eu051) had taken as foundational. Genkan’s essay shows that the term is in origin not a Wú Yǒuxìng coinage but a Nèijīng technical term — though one corrupted by transmission errors — and historicises the late-Míng / early-Qīng wēnyì-school anatomy as a creative misreading of the canonical layer-of-fascia anatomy.
Links
- Author: 丹波元簡 (hào 櫟蔭拙者 Rekuin Setsusha).
- Companion works in same author’s hand: KR3eu061 Màixué jíyào (1795), KR3eu064 Jiùjí xuǎnfāng (1801–1810).
- Engaged tradition: Wú Yǒuxìng’s móyuán theory; the Nèijīng membrane-anatomy.
- Parallel listing: KR3eq052.
- Series: HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), ed. 陳存仁.