The Intellectual-Historical Significance of the Systematization of Abdominal Diagnosis in the Japanese Kōhō School: An Integrated Description of Two Thousand Years of East Asian Medicine through Multi-Layer Meta Network (MLMN) Theory
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Modern Kampo practice lacks a systematic theoretical foundation. This paper proposes that Kampo medicine is fundamentally a system for eliminating doku (pathological concretion) formed within the body, and for rectifying the constitutional substrate that generates it. AI-assisted analysis was applied to 1,654 propositions from Chinese classical texts and from the corpus of Utsuki Kontai (1779–1848), the most prolific theoretical systematizer in Japanese Kampo history. Eight convergence points (A–H) were identified where Chinese classical propositions and Japanese clinical propositions describe identical pathological processes in different descriptive languages. These findings are organized within the Multi-Layer Meta Network (MLMN) Theory, a ten-layer coordinate system formalizing the diagnostic structure of East Asian medicine. The systematization of abdominal diagnosis in the Japanese Kōhō school is interpreted as the two-thousand-year convergence of Chinese classical deduction and Japanese clinical induction. This paper constitutes the first systematic international scholarly analysis of Kontai's theoretical corpus.
DOI: 10.17613/ke2s6-nnb79
Author: Ishihara, Koichi
Language: English
Subfield: Complementary and alternative medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7141350134
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