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.
