Complete Compendium of Acupuncture and Moxibustion

Among Ming dynasty compilations of acupuncture literature, the Complete Compendium of Acupuncture and Moxibustion is the most widely circulated, and its real value lies in gathering into one volume the acupuncture verses, channel and point theory, time-based point selection, and moxibustion materials scattered among various schools, so that a single book reveals the broad outlines of acupuncture scholarship from the Song and Yuan onward. The Biao You Fu and Jinzhen Fu included here are documents no history of acupuncture can bypass, and the Eight Methods flow-infusion in juan 4 and the midnight-noon ebb-flow in juan 5 are essential primary sources for studying time-based point selection. Xu Feng wrote in verse, in four- and seven-character rhymed lines; the ancients used it to memorize points and methods, and it still reads far more briskly today than long prose passages. The 1987 People's Medical Publishing House edition was punctuated and collated by Zheng Kuishan, known as the "Needle King of the Northwest," using the Ming Zhengtong jimou Sanduo Studio edition of the Tongren Xu Family Acupuncture Combined Engraving as its base text and consulting the Wanli edition; it is in traditional characters and vertical layout, rigorously collated, and has long been regarded by researchers in Chinese medical literature and acupuncture history as a reliable working edition. For anyone seeking a desk book to consult acupuncture verses at any time and to understand the origins of flow-infusion needling, this edition is modest in bulk yet solid in content.