Cóngguì ǒujì 叢桂偶記
Casual Notes from the Clustered Cassia [Studio] by 原昌克 (撰)
About the work
The Cóngguì ǒujì 叢桂偶記 (Japanese Sōkei gūki), 2 juàn, is a clinical-philological miscellany by the late-Edo Japanese physician 原昌克 Hara Masakatsu 原昌克 (hào Nányáng 南陽 / Nan’yō, 1753–1820), best known for the major acupoint-philology work Jīngxué huìjiě 經穴匯解 (KR3ee022, 1803). The title cóngguì 叢桂 (“clustered cassia”) is the name of Hara’s Edo study; ǒujì (“casual / occasional notes”) signals the work’s miscellany form. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3eq056 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The compositional setting is given in the two postscripts preserved in the source-file frontmatter. The principal postscript, by Hara’s pupil Ōtani Kyō 大谷恭, is dated Kansei 12 / autumn = late 1800 (寬政十二年庚申秋), and gives the editorial history. Hara had over many years accumulated occasional notes (ǒujì) on his reading and clinical observations — “broadly gathering all books, if anything would help medical practice, even later-dynasty works, taking them as references; winnowing chaff and refining ore; with long effort coming to clarity.” The notes were originally many juàn; two of Hara’s brothers (二三兄弟) edited and selected from them to produce the present 2-juàn recension for printing. Ōtani’s appraisal: the work demonstrates the deep commitment underlying Hara’s clinical practice (用心之篤) and will, when “savoured and digested” by practitioners, be a “great help in the art of benevolence.”
The second postscript is a short note by Hara’s eleven-year-old son Masafumi 昌文, who reports that his elder brothers had been reading from the manuscript at family gatherings and “laughing as if at common conversation”; on enquiring he learned that this was their father’s writing, and his brothers had decided to put it into print. The young Masafumi adds his own brief preface “at the urging of Master Mokushi-ko 木子虛.”
The body of the work consists of brief, polemically-edged essays on a wide range of medical topics — drug substitution and identification, the recovery of obscure classical formulae through philological analysis, anecdotal clinical observations from Hara’s practice, and notes on the standard kanpō commentarial controversies. Hara’s signature methodological commitment is to non-sectarian eclecticism: while broadly sympathetic to the Kohōha programme of returning to Zhāng Zhòngjǐng, he does not exclude later-dynasty Chinese sources or Japanese-school developments where these have clinical value, and his philological method (most fully developed in the 1803 Jīngxué huìjiě) treats the entire received Chinese medical canon as material for critical reconstruction.
Composition is securely 1800 by the dated Ōtani postscript. The work was reprinted in subsequent Edo / Meiji editions, 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.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language scholarship of the work specifically located.
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠. Studies of Edo-period Japanese acupoint-literature (in Nihon ishigaku zasshi 日本醫史學雜誌) — the standard scholarship on Hara Nan’yō’s broader output.
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39 (2): 299–324 — for the late-Edo kanpō context.
- 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 work is the early-career miscellany that prefigures Hara Nan’yō’s mature Jīngxué huìjiě (1803), the major acupoint-philology work of the late Edo period. The 1800 publication date places the Cóngguì ǒujì as one of the principal late-Kansei kanpō writings, contemporaneous with 丹波元簡’s Jiùjí xuǎnfāng (1801, KR3eu064) and 片倉元周’s Qīngnáng suǒtàn (1801–1802, KR3eu068).