起死回生 kishi kaisei Miraculous Comeback
This is a philological study of the Japanese phrase 起死回生 (kishi kaisei), to raise the dying and return the dead to life. It spans the record from a Chinese physician's recipe of the seventh century and a coroner's forensic preface dated 1247, through 中江藤樹's 1650 praise of the four great physicians and a Meiji patent medicine that wore the phrase as a brand, to the postwar home run the modern dictionaries reach for, and it examines why the verb 起 means to raise the dying rather than to wake the dead.
Abstract
起死回生, kishi kaisei, to raise the dying and return the dead to life, is a Chinese physician's phrase at least a thousand years old, first known in a Tang-era recipe as the Song editors of 1066 print it and firmly dated in a coroner's forensic preface of 1247. It praised great doctors and, from Wang Yangming's letters on a sick state, was applied figuratively to institutions and nations centuries before Japan's first witness, 中江藤樹's 1650 praise of the four legendary physicians. In Meiji Japan a patent medicine wore the phrase as a brand in 1877 and Ozaki Yukio used it of the nation in 1886, the same decade the word's two modern senses set. The dictionaries have since kept only the figure and added a postwar sense, a game-winning home run, but the verb 起 has always meant to raise the one who was going to live, not to wake the dead.
Overview
The sense. The praise of a great doctor: he raises the dying and returns the dead to life. Together the four characters say the same thing twice, for strength, and the dictionaries record two senses: to bring a dying patient back, and, from that, to bring back what was about to be lost [1].
The words. Kishi kaisei. 起死 is to raise the dying. The 史記 tells how the world said the physician 扁鵲 could bring the dead to life, and how he answered: I cannot bring the dead to life; this one was going to live, and I made him rise [2]. That verb, rise, is the compound's 起; the sense wake up is wrong for it. 回生 is to return to life, a word Dōgen used of the endless cycle of dying and being born again [3].
The text in English. The English met the word late and as a figure.
The historical record
China, 7th to 13th century: the doctor's praise. The oldest known text with the four characters is a recipe. In the 千金要方 of 孫思邈, as the Song editors of 1066 print it, a remedy blown into the nose of a dying man ends this drug raises the dying and returns the dead to life; whether the sentence is the Tang author's or the Song editor's is not settled here [4]. A tenth-century collection of marvels says it of a woman immortal who worked thirty-six arts, raised the dead, and saved people beyond counting [5]. The first firmly dated use is a magistrate's: 宋慈, prefacing his handbook for coroners in 1247, hopes that its washing away of wrongs may have the same use as raising the dead to life [6].
China, 15th to 18th century: ministers, monks and novelists. A Ming minister closes his 1468 preface to the great Song materia medica with the wish that the art of raising the dead may have something to rely on [7]. A Yuan Zen master answers the koan this mind is Buddha with a verse: the numinous wolf-poison raises the dead, and not a dose is used up [8]. Wang Yangming turns it on the state: the realm is like a body wasted with long illness; those who are to raise it from death are you gentlemen, and if you cannot cure your own ailments, how will you cure the realm's? [9]. In the 西遊記, Sun Wukong crosses the eastern sea seeking a way to raise the dead for a withered ginseng-fruit tree, and Guanyin draws the four characters as a charm in his palm with willow and sweet dew [10]. A Ming storyteller praises a healer as the 扁鵲 of old reborn: raising the dead is a lift of his hand [11]. The sceptics use the phrase too; a physician of 1757 asks whether the famous doctor really has the art of raising the dead [12].
Japan, 1650: the four physicians. The word's first Japanese book is 中江藤樹's 翁問答, and none earlier is known. Arguing that a general who has read every book of war but cannot adapt is like a doctor who has read every book of medicine but cannot cure, he names the models: the famous physicians 扁鵲, 倉公, 東垣 and 丹溪, who mastered medicine, trained the four diagnoses, cured every illness and won the merit of raising the dead [13]. The word stays with the doctors through the Edo period: the court physicians at Hideyoshi's deathbed in 1598 offered the art of raising the dead in a 1659 chronicle; the biographies of the court doctors 山脇玄心 and 頴川入徳, a naturalized Chinese pediatrician, use it as their formula for two hundred years; a smallpox prescription is named for it [14].
Meiji: the quack, the brand, the nation. In the 1880s the word belongs to medicine and its shadow: a cholera treatise, a translated exposé of American patent-medicine puffery (revive and prolong life, raise the dead, one drug for every disease), a treatise on schools in which the physician who works the art of raising the dead makes his name at once, an illustrated 西遊記, and a Merchant of Venice in which Antonio's rescue is the debt of a life raised from death [15]. Two uses in the same decade set the word's two modern senses. A patent medicine took it for a name: 守田治兵衛's 寶丹, a restorative sold at Ueno since 1862, was exhibited as 起死回生寶丹 in 1877 and advertised in 1880 with a full page of workmen hoisting its characters on scaffolding under the heading 起死回生 [16]. And Ozaki Yukio's political novel of 1886 says of Japan: the chance to raise the dead is today only; once it is gone it will not come again [17]. The library's curve rises from a dozen books in the 1870s to 737 in the 1930s, a tenth of them in medicine, a third in the social sciences, and the rest across history, religion and fiction [18].
The dictionaries, and the home run. The Meiji dictionaries carry it as an example (under to revive, 1897; under 回生, 1906) and bracket it as a phrase in 1908: to bring the dead back to life [19]. The 日国 keeps the doctor first and the figure second; 大辞泉 today has only the figure, to set on its feet what was about to be lost [1]. The baseball use, a game-winning home run, has no hit in the public-domain corpus and is postwar.
What is not a source. Not a Buddhist term: the Zen verse borrows the doctor's phrase, and 回生 alone is Dōgen's. Not the 史記 verbatim: the 史記 gives the idea and the verb, not the four characters. Not a Japanese coinage: every part of it is Chinese and the phrase is in Chinese medical books centuries before 1650. Not a baseball word by origin: the home run is the newest sense, not the oldest.
The word in English
1928. 斎藤和英大辞典. 斎藤和英 (1928): resuscitation; revival, with a medicine to revive the dead; a magical medicine [20]. 研究社 keeps the medicine (a wonderful medicine capable of reviving the dead; a miracle drug) and adds the two modern examples: hit a homer to pull the game out of the fire and devise a means of pulling back from the brink of disaster [21]. EDR and JST give revival and resuscitation [22]. JMdict: revival from the brink of death; recovering from a hopeless situation; resuscitation; revitalization [23].
Today. None of the dictionaries carries miraculous comeback; that is the house's English, and its home run is 研究社's example. The word has two lives, and the dictionaries have chosen between them. The first is the physician's, from the Tang recipe and the 1247 preface through 藤樹's four doctors to the biographical dictionaries of 1921: what a great doctor does, and what a drug is praised or mocked for doing. The second is the figure: Wang Yangming's sick realm, Ozaki's Japan, the modern 策 and 秘策, the home run. The figure is old, Ming at the latest, and in Japan it arrives in the same decade as the patent-medicine slogan. What both lives keep is 扁鵲's correction: he did not raise the dead; he raised the one who was going to live. That is why the word is a comeback and not a resurrection.
A reading
The word is the physician's, and the comeback follows from it. Miraculous Comeback is right, and the miracle has a source: 扁鵲's I made him rise, which is why the word fits a recovery and not a funeral, and 藤樹's four physicians, the word's first Japanese company. The literal gloss is raise the dying, return the dead to life, not wake from death. For a story there is the Ming minister's preface and the Zen verse, or the 1880 advertisement with the workmen on the scaffolding; both are true.
References
- 「起死回生」・「起死」・「回生」, 大辞泉・日本国語大辞典・四字熟語を知る辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/起死回生
- 史記, 卷105, 扁鵲倉公列傳, at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/史記/卷105
- 道元, 正法眼蔵, 行持 (1231–53), at kotobank (日国 citation). https://kotobank.jp/word/回生
- 孫思邈, 備急千金要方, 卷39, 7th c. (Song 1066 ed., 四庫全書 text), at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/備急千金要方/卷39
- 太平廣記, 卷59, 978, at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/太平廣記/卷059
- 宋慈, 洗冤集錄, 序, 1247, at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/洗冤集錄
- 商輅, preface to 重修政和經史證類備用本草, 1468, in 1542 print, scan 4. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2557898/1/4
- 惟一, 環溪和尚語録, manuscript, scan 81. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2537831/1/81
- 王守仁, 陽明先生文録, 卷三, scan 45. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2576595/1/45
- 西遊記, 第26回, at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第026回
- 警世通言, 卷40, at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/警世通言/第40卷
- 徐大椿, 醫學源流論, 1757.
- 中江藤樹, 翁問答, 下巻, 1910 typeset, scan 58. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/756192/1/58
- 朝鮮征伐記, 1659, scan 31; 楓軒史料; 見宜翁伝; 医道日用綱目, 1873 print. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/11223234/1/31
- 学校通論 (箕作麟祥訳), 1882, scan 284; 絵本西遊記全伝, 1883, scan 22; 人肉質入裁判 (井上勤訳, Merchant of Venice), 1886, scan 33. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/808285/1/284 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/877885/1/22 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/896972/1/33
- 東京商人録, 1880, scan 219. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/779945/1/219
- 尾崎行雄, 新日本, 1886, scan 25. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992908/1/25
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on 起死回生, by decade and by subject class. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- 実用新辞典：発音数引, 森本樵作, 1908, scan 466. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/862944/1/466
- 斎藤秀三郎, 斎藤和英大辞典, 1928, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/起死回生
- 研究社, 新和英中辞典, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/起死回生
- EDR日英対訳辞書・JST科学技術用語日英対訳辞書, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/起死回生
- JMdict (EDRDG), 「起死回生」, at jisho.org. https://jisho.org/word/起死回生