On the Reception and Uses of Li Shizhen’s Classified Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu) in 17th-century Japan

Abstract

The Bencao gangmu 本草綱目 (Classified Materia Medica, Jp. Honzō kōmoku), a summa on pharmacology (bencao 本草, Jp. honzō) published in 1596 in Nanjing, has been praised as a truly epoch-making book. The richness of the work alone could justify its fame: it lists, describes, and discusses the medicinal properties of 1,895 different kinds of plants, herbs, minerals, and animals. Nor did its compiler, Li Shizhen 季時珍 (1518–1593), stop at merely collecting the more traditional sort of bencao material: fully endorsing the Neo-Confucian epistemological paradigm of “investigation of things” (gewu zhizhi 格物致知, Jp. kakubutsu chichi),2 he extended the purview of his compilation to the basic components of the surrounding world, as well as to the realm of man. If, as Georges Métailié has meticulously shown, Li cannot really be considered a “precursor” to modern zoology, he nevertheless devised a system that, while retaining most of the subjective categories of “folk taxonomy,” still strove after a renewed form of coherency.3 On the Reception and Uses of Li Shizhen’s Classified Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu) in 17th-century Japan: Text, Categories, Pictures1