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Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu: The Ancient Classic on Needle Therapy


Journal of Chinese Medicine • Number 111 • June 2016


they were handed down. The original Chinese has been inserted in lines or sections


into the English translation. Knowledge of Chinese is possibly quite common among readers of this translation and therefore I have aligned it as exactly as possible, not only in terms of content but also syntax, with the Chinese original. This ensures the highest level of transparency. Segments of text inserted into the translation are marked in brackets [ xxx ]. Also, I have rendered the Chinese with consideration for its content units and rhyme structures. Many passages in the Chinese were written in rhyming patterns of three or four or more characters each. The rendering of these rhymes sometimes reveals breaks, insertions or omissions in the original text and makes apparent from what diverse source texts the textus receptus of the Ling shu was compiled. Characters or passages that Chinese commentators or I have suspected were erroneously inserted are identified by a gray background. Insertions that one may regard as latter- day commentaries are identified in the translation within pointed brackets (> xxx <). Longer passages that may have been introduced subsequently as additional information are identified in the translation within slashes (// xxx //). These are all presumptions based primarily on structural comparisons and contexts. The translation follows the same principles that I


adhered to in my past renderings of ancient classics of Chinese medicine into English. My primary effort has been to communicate the authors’ manner of thinking to contemporary readers by translating the terminology and especially the images as literally as possible. Again and again I have been encouraged in my approach not least by expectations that, through philological criteria comparably stringent to those long accepted in translations of the Corpus


Endnotes


1 For a detailed discussion of the early history of the Ling shu and the other classic texts of Chinese medicine see Paul U. Unschuld, Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen. Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text. With an appendix: The Doctrine of the Five Periods and Six Qi in Su wen 66 through 71 and 74, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003, 3ff.


2 See Ma Jixing 马继兴，Zhong yi wen xian xue 中医文献学 Shanghai


kexue jishu chubanshe 上海科学技 术出版社, Shanghai 1990, 80 f. with references to various older texts of the Ling shu, excerpts of which had been cited during the time of the Northern Song dynasty, but which do not correspond in their content to the work translated here. The Daoist environment from which many of these texts originate is clearly recognizable.


3 On the status of pre-medicinal healing arts in China see D. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts. Routledge, London, 1998.


4 For a completely annotated translation, see Paul U. Unschuld with Hermann Tessenow: Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen. Huang Di’s Inner Classic. Basic Questions. Vol. 1: Treatises 1 through 52. Vol. 2: Treatises 53 through 71 and 74 through 81. The Original Chinese Text with Annotated Translation, in collaboration with Zheng Jinsheng. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2011.


5 On existential heteronomy in the world view and religious practice of ancient China, see Bernard Faure, ed.: Michel Strickman, Chinese Magical Medicine. Asian Religions and Cultures. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002.


6 Sivin, Nathan. (1998) “On the Dates of Yang Shang-shan and the Huang ti nei ching t’ai su.” Chinese


Hippocraticum, comparisons of ancient Chinese Medical texts with their European counterparts would be made possible. This approach will offer hardly anything to those who do not take the ancient authors seriously. Reading their texts over the years has instilled the greatest respect in me. The longer one occupies oneself with their patterns of thinking and arguing, the clearer the intelligence becomes that they express. Therefore I have not followed the demands that are often voiced to essentially dispossess these people of their thinking and manner of expression by using modern terms and contemporary physiological and pathological concepts in the translation, as if asserting today that the authors of the time neither knew nor understood what they were seeing in sick or healthy people and how to interpret what they saw. Back then they knew very well what they saw and understood it with great logic and reason – in their time and with the means they had. This is what the present translation may suitably highlight.


Paul U. Unschuld is the director of the Horst-Goertz Endowment Institute for the Theory, History and Ethics of Chinese Life Sciences at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin. His three-volume survey of more than 1000 Chinese manuscripts on healthcare from the past three to five centuries was published in 2012 by Brill, Leiden, as Chinese Traditional Healing, co-authored with Zheng Jinsheng. His publications further include annotated translations of the antique Yellow Thearch trilogy Su wen, Ling shu and Nan jing. A first comparative history ideas of European and Chinese medicine, What is Medicine. Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing, has been translated into five different languages. His analysis of Chinese reform policy of the past two centuries, The Fall and Rise of China, based on his understanding of Chinese medical attitudes towards disease, appeared in the UK in 2013. In June 2016, Paul U. Unschuld was asked to accompany the delegation headed by the German chancellor A. Merkel to Beijing, as personal advisor to the German minister of health.


Science 15: 29-36. Qian Chaochen 钱超尘 (2006). “Taisu zhuanzhu juti


shijian xinzheng” 《太素》撰著具 体时间新证 [New evidence on the concrete date of the writing of the


Taisu]. Zhongyi wenxian zazhi 中医 文献杂志, 2006, No. 4.


7 Ma Jixing 1990, 80. See also p. 81 for a graphical overview of the names of the various possible forerunner texts of the Ling shu as it is available today and when they were lost.


8 Okanishi Tameto 岡席為人, Song yi qian yi ji kao 宋以前醫籍考, Ku T’ing Book House, Taipei 1969, 35.


9 A very detailed attempt to place the contradictory references among the Nei jing texts Su wen and Ling shu and the dialog structure into the context of intellectual history


is offered by Ma Boying 马伯 英, Zhonggu yixueshi 中国医学 文化史, A History of Medicine in


Chinese Culture, Shanghai renmin chubanshe 上海人民出版社, Shanghai 1994, 242 ff.


10 For a definition of “medicine” as a healing art in the strict sense, see Paul U. Unschuld, What is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing. Munich. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2009.


11 Paul U. Unschuld, 2013, 13.


12 Paul U. Unschuld, Der Wind als Ursache des Krankseins. Einige Gedanken zu Yamada Keijis Analyse der Shao-shih Texte des Huang-ti nei-ching, T‘oung Pao 68 (1982), 91-131.


13 On the beginnings of pulse diagnosis in China, see E. Hsu, Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.


14 For a detailed discussion see Unschuld 2003, 385 ff.


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