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


Journal of Chinese Medicine • Number 111 • June 2016


represents an explicit counter-model to the prevailing image of the world at the time, which regarded human life as subject to extreme degrees of existential alien influence. Deities, demon-spirits and ancestors – in addition to “the heavens” as a numinous power – held sway over the ups and downs of each individual.5


In general, people


believed that the duration and quality of life on earth were not under their own control. The authors whose thinking has found expression in the texts handed down to the present day in the Su wen, Nan jing and Ling shu were a group of intellectuals whose names and number would very quickly be forced into the darkness of collective forgetting – and with good reason. They questioned what had for many centuries remained self-evident for all segments of society. They confronted their contemporaries with the idea of natural laws that were valid regardless of deities, spirits, demons and ancestors, not to mention of time and space. These intellectuals constituted the kernel of an enlightened, secular perspective on the world, the consequences of which would open up a view of nature and the embedding of humanity in the laws of nature as a foundation for understanding the origins, essence and transience of life.


By this time China was already a highly advanced civilization. A complex state administration with a bureaucracy that ensured continuity as well as social and economic standards was accompanied by a culture of writing that addressed the numerous themes of daily importance in this state construct. Libraries and catalogs took note of works composed either as chronicles or philosophical texts, as dictionaries or military guides. Many of these authors are still known by their names. It might therefore seem puzzling why the authors of exceedingly large books that founded a new form of healing, a “medicine” in the modern sense, should not belong to this group. It might seem puzzling why their texts survived the centuries only as extremely fragile copies, or even – like the Ling shu and the Tai su 太素 – were mostly or completely lost, even in China. One might explain these losses through the many wars that also caused the destruction of countless other manuscript texts, but this argument is not persuasive. Had the Su wen, the Ling shu and the Tai su been esteemed by larger numbers of the educated elite, they would have been copied in sufficient quantities to become the foundation for responses to illness in these strata of the population. Yet, as all the evidence suggests, this was not the case. Thanks solely to the fact that copies of the Tai su were


brought to Japan and survived for centuries there as fragments do we have the possibility today of laying our eyes on this oldest testament to all those ancient texts, one created from an annotated compilation of the content of the Su wen and Ling shu. The author of the Tai su is Yang Shangshan 楊上善. His name is the sole one of the writers of the works that together and in hindsight are identified


as constituting the Huang Di nei jing 黃帝内經, “The Inner Classic of Huang Di” text corpus. However, Yang Shanshan lived later, during the Tang dynasty in the 7th century.6 That time witnessed a completely different atmosphere of never-before-seen diversity in world views. Yet even then, the Tai su was apparently regarded as insufficiently important. The number of copies produced in China was too low to prevent the work from being lost in China itself. In the centuries following the Han period, few authors took up the ideas of the revolutionaries. Best known is the aforementioned Huangfu Mi 皇甫謐, writer of the Jia yi jing 甲乙經 in the third century. The extent to which the Jia yi jing and other texts continually handed down in China reproduced the content of the Su wen and Ling shu in a manner that obscured the “objectionable” character of the source texts is a matter for future research. Only in the 12th and 13th centuries, in the context of a fundamentally transformed view of the world, did the thousand-year shadow existence of the source texts come to an end. On the emperor’s orders, the most important surviving manuscripts were edited and made available to the wider public. Lin Yi 林億, a collaborator in this editing project and publisher of a Su wen edition from the year 1067, cited from a lost Ling shu text and remarked in his foreword: “Today the Ling shu is no longer available in its entirety.”7 Moreover, the passages cited by Lin Yi do not match any surviving Ling shu texts. In 1092 a version of the Ling shu titled Huang Di zhen jing 黄帝針經, “The Needle Classic of Huang Di,” was brought to China from Korea.8


Finally, a


Song-era doctor named Shi Song 史崧, whose exact lifetime is no longer known, became the first to study the Ling shu in depth and, in 1135, publish an annotated manuscript from his personal family holdings. This edition has ever since been considered the Ling shu that extends back to the Han era. From then on, historians began devoting themselves to questions surrounding the authorship and temporal origins of the Huang Di nei jing texts; new, annotated editions were produced to lend meaning to the texts, which in many parts had since become difficult to comprehend.


2. Huang Di – The Yellow Thearch The question of Huang Di’s significance in the compilation of the Su wen and Ling shu was discussed early on. Huang Di 黃帝 does not mean “Yellow Emperor,” as one often reads today in popular literature. Di 帝 is a monarch among gods, a deified ancestor, the Thearch, and huang 黃 means “yellow” and stands for China. The Yellow Thearch, as per the now-standard international translation, was the highest cultural and spiritual authority of ancient China, and there were countless texts in which a supposed dialog between Huang Di and one of his ministers or advisers placed the most valuable contributions to ancient Chinese culture as coming from the lips of this very same Yellow Thearch. This is also how the authors of the Su wen and


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