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Seventeen Rules of Enjuin

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 17, 2025
Entity authorityQ7457639 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Seventeen Rules of Enjuin (延寿院医則十七ヶ条) are a code of conduct developed for students of the Japanese Ri-shu school of medicine in the 16th century CE. They contain the same number of precepts as the Seventeen-article constitution of Prince Shōtoku.

The rules are similar to the Vejjavatapada, the Buddhist medical doctor's oath, the Oath of Asaph and the Hippocratic Oath, in that they stress the rights of the physicians' teachers, require the physician to respect the patient's privacy rights, and prohibit both euthanasia and abortion. They also emphasize that physicians should love their patients and that they should work together as a brotherhood.

The Seventeen Rules

Source:

1) Each person should follow the path designated by Heaven (Buddha, the Gods).

2) You should always be kind to people. You should always be devoted to loving people.

3) The teaching of Medicine should be restricted to selected persons.

4) You should not tell others what you are taught, regarding treatments without permission.

5) You should not establish association with doctors who do not belong to this school.

6) All the successors and descendants of the disciples of this school shall follow the teachers' ways.

Editorial summary

“Seventeen Rules of Enjuin” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Seventeen, Rules and Enjuin can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 193-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Seventeen, Rules and Enjuin.
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“Seventeen Rules of Enjuin” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Seventeen, Rules and Enjuin provides the most credible route into that argument.

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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7457639. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

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The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Seventeen Rules of Enjuin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.