The Suwen and the Lingshu form part of the Yellow Emperor's Classic of
Internal Medicine with the Nanjing as a separate work complementing this
classic. These texts are the first known texts on Chinese acupuncture
with an age of over 2000 years. Regarded as ancient authoritative texts,
they are still held in high esteem by today's Chinese and Western
acupuncturists and are mandatory texts of study in the training of
Western and Chinese acupuncture physicians. Western readers naturally
face tremendous difficulties in accessing these original texts because
of the language and cultural gap between their contemporary Western
cultural background and ancient Chinese culture. This edition of the
Chinese texts therefore includes simplified and traditional Chinese
character versions of the texts that will enable the reader to study
text versions in simplified characters published on the Chinese Mainland
as well as those in traditional character versions published outside the
Chinese Mainland in Taiwan or Hongkong. Complete Latin transcription in
Hanyu Pinyin has been added to the Chinese character versions for all
the texts so that the reader does not need to spend much time in looking
up unknown Chinese characters in the texts. A comprehensive
Chinese-English character and word glossary, generated and compiled from
the Chinese text corpus in this book, is appended at the end of the book
for easy reference by Western readers.
