Lu, Henry C
- Publisher Academy of Oriental Heritage
- Edition 1st
- First published 1973
- ISBN n/a
- Course relevance Reference Only
- ICOM Ref. 330 – LU(REF)
The Ling Shu, also known as the Ling Shu Jing, is part of a unique and seminal trilogy of ancient Chinese medicine, together with the Su Wen and Nan Jing. It constitutes the foundation of a two-thousand-year healing tradition that remains active to this day. Its therapeutic approach is based on a purely secular science of nature, with natural laws serving as guidelines for human behaviour and medical treatment. No other text offers such broad insights into the thinking and manifest action of the authors of the time. Following an introduction, this volume contains the full original Chinese text of the Ling Shu, an English translation of all eighty-one chapters, and notes on difficult-to-grasp passages and possible changes in the text over time on the basis of Chinese primary and secondary literature of the past two thousand years and translator Paul Unschuld’s own work. The Ling Shu reveals itself as a completely rational work, and, in many of its statements, a surprisingly modern one. It will provide the foundation for comparisons with the nearly contemporaneous Corpus Hippocraticum of ancient Europe and today’s iterations of traditional Chinese Medicine as well.
A foundation of Chinese life sciences and medicine, “The Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen” is now available for the first time in a complete, fully annotated English translation. Also known as “Su Wen,” or “The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic,” this influential work came into being over a long period reaching from the 2nd century bce to the 8th century ce. Combining the views of different schools, it relies exclusively on natural law as conceptualized in “yin/yang” and Five Agents doctrines to define health and disease, and repeatedly emphasizes personal responsibility for the length and quality of one’s life. This two-volume edition includes excerpts from all the major commentaries on “The Su Wen,” and extensive annotation drawn from hundreds of monographs and articles by Chinese and Japanese authors produced over the past 1600 years and into the twentieth century.
The Jia Yi Ying or Systematic Classic of Acupuncture & Moxibustion is the first textbook of this art. Written by Huang-fu Mi in the Jin Dynasty (265-420 CE), it is composed of excerpts from the Su Wen, Ling Shu, Nan Jing and other no longer extant Chinese medical classics, all arranged according to topics in a systematic, step-by-step manner and held together by Huang-fi Mis comments based on his own clinical experience.