藥徵

Yào zhēng 藥徵

The Verification of Drugs by 吉益爲則 (撰)

About the work

The Yào zhēng 藥徵 (Japanese Yakuchō), 3 juàn, is the systematic pharmacological treatise of the Edo Kohōha 古方派 (Ancient-Formula School) and the third major work of the school’s doctrinal triad — together with the Yī duàn KR3eu069 (composed 1747, published 1759) and the Fāng jí / Lèijù fāng KR3eu065/KR3eu063 (1755 / 1762) — composed by the school’s founder 吉益爲則 Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益爲則 (sobriquet Tōdō 東洞, 1702–1773). The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3ec077 in the present knowledgebase.

Abstract

The postscript by Tōdō’s son Yoshimasu Yū 男猷 (= Yoshimasu Naomichi 吉益南涯, 1750–1813), dated Tenmei 4 / 11 / 1 = November 1784 (天明甲辰之冬十一月朔), gives the publication history. Tōdō completed the manuscript in his final years (1771 by the conventional dating) but refused to allow its publication: “To publish an unfinalised book and pass it down as immortal, only to be the laughingstock of others — better to let it be worm-eaten in the trunk”; he saw the pharmacological treatise as the lifelong project that would never reach final form. Twelve years after Tōdō’s death in 1773, his son Naomichi judged that the manuscript should be put into print, “and ordered the engraver to spread it through the world.”

The methodological programme is set out in the postscript’s polemic against the received Běncǎo tradition. The classical materia-medica works — Shénnóng běncǎo, the Bīnhú běncǎo, the SòngYuán expansions, and the encyclopedic Běncǎo gāngmù 本草綱目 of 李時珍 — are, in Tōdō’s view, rife with speculation, yīnyángwǔxíng assignments, and invocations of immortality-arts that have no grounding in actual clinical use. “Their reasoning is far from reality, their disquisitions are like Zhào Kuò’s debating tactics” — i.e. theoretical prowess disconnected from the battlefield. The Yào zhēng proposes the alternative method: each drug must be verified (zhēng) by reference to its actual function within Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Shānghán / Jīnguì formulae. The Hàn corpus is the only authoritative clinical record we have; therefore each drug’s therapeutic claim must be extracted from the symptom-patterns of the formulae in which it appears, not from the Běncǎo tradition’s accreted speculation.

The structural format of each Yào zhēng entry — applied to about 50 principal Shānghán substances — is:

1. Zhǔzhì 主治 (primary indication): one short, surgically precise statement of what the drug actually does, derived from the Shānghán / Jīnguì formula record. E.g. for guìzhī 桂枝: “Zhǔ zhì shàngchōng 主治上衝” — “primarily treats up-surging qì.”
2. Pángzhì 旁治 (subsidiary indication): secondary symptom-pattern uses.
3. Kǎo zhēng 考徵 (citations of verification): list of every appearance of the drug in the Shānghán / Jīnguì with the specific symptom-pattern in each formula.
4. Hù kǎo 互考 (cross-references): related formulae and substances.
5. Biàn wù 辨誤 (correction of errors): polemic against the Běncǎo tradition’s mistaken claims for the drug, often with sustained citation of the Běnjīng, Biélù, Mínyī, Lǐ Shízhēn, etc., and item-by-item refutation.
6. Pǐn kǎo 品考 (substance identification): morphological and origin-of-supply notes.

Sample tabulated entries: guìzhī up-surging, máhuáng sweating-and-attacking, cháihú chest-and-flank-fullness, báizhú dampness-and-water-retention, fùzǐ shock-cold-deficiency, xiàng 香 fragrant drugs are systematically downgraded as “wandering ghosts” without verifiable Zhāng Zhòngjǐng function, etc.

The pugnacious tone is characteristic and intentional: Tōdō means to dismantle the entire post-Hàn herbal tradition and replace it with a strict Shānghán-canonical pharmacology. The result is much smaller than the classical Běncǎo — Tōdō covers only the substances actually used by Zhāng Zhòngjǐng — but each entry is anchored in clinical evidence. The work is the pharmacological complement to the Fāng jí’s formula-pivot reorganisation: where the Fāng jí tells the practitioner which formula for a given symptom-pattern, the Yào zhēng tells the practitioner what each component drug actually contributes to the formula’s effect.

Composition is conservatively 1771 (the date traditionally given for the manuscript completion) to 1784 (the posthumous publication); the work was extended posthumously by Tōdō’s pupil 村井杶 Murai Kin in the Yào zhēng xùbiān 藥徵續編 (in the corpus as KR3ec078). 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.

Translations and research

• Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2014. “Ancient Texts and New Medical Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Japan.” Asian Medicine 9 (1–2): 78–104 — the principal English-language treatment of the Yào zhēng’s methodology.
• Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39 (2): 299–324.
• Marushima Eisuke 丸島英祐. Multiple Japanese studies of Yoshimasu Tōdō and the Kohōha.
• Sakai Shizu 酒井シヅ. 1998. Edo no naka no Kanpō 江戸の中の漢方. Tokyo: NHK Books.
• Liu Ping 劉平. 2009. Riběn hàn-fāng yī-xué 日本漢方醫學. Beijing: Zhōngguó Zhōngyīyào Chūbǎnshè.

Other points of interest

The Yào zhēng is the most consequential 18th-century East Asian work of comparative-clinical pharmacology. Its substance-by-substance verification against actual canonical clinical use is a methodological move that, in retrospect, anticipates aspects of modern evidence-based pharmacology — though Tōdō’s “evidence” is canonical textual rather than experimental. The continuation by 村井杶 (the Yào zhēng xùbiān, KR3ec078) extended the same method to drugs not used by Zhāng Zhòngjǐng but in active Edo kohō-practice circulation. The work was the principal vehicle by which the Kohōha’s pharmacological methodology was transmitted to late-Qīng and Republican China, where it informed the jīngfāngpài 經方派 revival and contributed to the modern Mainland Chinese jīngfāng clinical-formula tradition.

Links

• Author: 吉益爲則 / 吉益東洞.
• Posthumous editor: 男猷 = Yoshimasu Naomichi 吉益南涯 (Tōdō’s son, no separate person note here).
• Continuation: 村井杶’s Yào zhēng xùbiān (KR3ec078).
• Companion works in Kohōha canon: KR3eu063 Lèijù fāng (1762), KR3eu065 Jiāshú fāng yǔ Fāng jí (1755–1780), KR3eu069 Yī duàn yǔ Chì yī duàn (1747–1759).
• Parallel listing: KR3ec077.
• Series: HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), ed. 陳存仁.