The Ling Shu Jing

The Ling Shu Jing is the other half of the Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic) and, together with the Su Wen, forms the earliest extant canonical text of Chinese medicine. It was compiled roughly between the Warring States period and the Western Han, is not the work of a single hand, and a few chapters date as late as the two Han dynasties. The book comprises twelve volumes and eighty-one chapters and has also been known as the Jiu Juan, Zhen Jing, Jiu Ling, and Jiu Xu; in the Song dynasty Lin Yi, Gao Baoheng, and others collated and fixed its text. Guided by a holistic outlook and grounded in yin-yang and the five phases, the Ling Shu Jing systematically discusses the functions of the zang-fu organs, spirit, qi, blood, fluids, and humors, human temperamental types, the causes and mechanisms of disease, and diagnostic methods, and it sets forth in particular detail the courses of the channels, the locations of acupoints, the forms of the nine needles, needling techniques, and treatment principles. Chapters such as "Nine Needles and Twelve Yuan," "Root of the Basic," "Channels," "Sinew Channels," "Bone Measurement," and "Fifty Circulations" are the texts on which acupuncture scholarship is founded, while "Heavenly Years," "Root of the Spirit," and "Comprehending Heaven" are sources for Chinese medicine's health cultivation and constitutional theory. Because the book was compiled long ago and copied and reprinted over many dynasties, it contains many errors, omissions, duplications, and inversions. Tian Daihua and Liu Gengsheng have newly organized it on the basis of the 1963 collated letterpress edition from the People's Medical Publishing House, dividing it into paragraphs, punctuating it, collating and correcting errors, and adding an introduction and an index of important terms at the end. It is one of the currently standard, readily available, and practical critical editions.