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

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 behavior and medical treatment. No other text offers such broad insights into the thinking and manifest action of the authors of the time as does the?Ling shu. Following an introduction, this volume contains the full original Chinese text of the?Ling shu, an English translation of all 81 chapters, notes on difficult-to-grasp passages and possible changes in the text during the passage of time on the basis of Chinese primary and secondary literature of the past two thousand years and the 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.

Paul U. Unschuld is Professor and Director of the Horst-Goertz Endowment Institute for the Theory, History, and Ethics of Chinese Life Sciences at Charite-Medical University, Berlin. His previous books include?Medicine in China: A History of Ideas?and?What is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Health Care