The Annotated Classic of Difficult Issues

The Classic of Difficult Issues (Nanjing) is one of the foundational works of Chinese medicine. Traditionally attributed to Bian Que (Qin Yueren) of the Warring States period, it is now generally held to have been compiled in the Han dynasty. Cast in question-and-answer form as eighty-one difficulties, it elucidates the essential teachings of ancient medical classics such as the Inner Canon. Its contents span physiology, pathology, diagnosis, and treatment, with particularly refined discussions of pulse studies. It also advances the doctrines of the Triple Burner and the Life Gate, systematically expounding the pathways, functions, and disorders of the Eight Extraordinary Vessels, as well as the roles of acupoints, source points, and front-mu points in acupuncture treatment.

The Annotated Edition of the Nanjing, edited by Ling Yaoxing, is one of the eleven key projects for the collation of ancient Chinese medical texts established in 1982 under the Ministry of Health's Plan for the Collation and Publication of Ancient Chinese Medical Texts, and it is also the fruit of a ministerial-level research project of the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 1980s. The book treats each of the eighty-one difficulties in turn, providing for each a summary, original text, collation notes, and commentary. It draws out the essential meaning, corrects textual errors, and explains terminology, while discussing medical principles and resolving difficult points in light of clinical practice. Where the meaning is complex and hard to convey in words alone, diagrams and tables are supplied. The collation takes as its main base texts the Japanese Bunka 1 (1804) Zhuoyingtang edition of the Nanjing Jizhu, the Bunka 3 (1806) Lin Heng reprint in the Yicun Congshu, and the 1956 Shanghai People's Medical Publishing House photocopy edition, with reference to various Ming and Qing editions. The book concludes with a postscript on the collation, discussing the date and authorship of the Nanjing, its main contents, scholarly thought, and the textual and edition history, together with prefaces from successive dynasties and a bibliography of Nanjing editions, providing documentary evidence for the study of the text's edition history.

The book was first published by the People's Medical Publishing House in February 1991 and reissued in June 2013 in the Reprint Series of the Collation of Ancient Chinese Medical Texts. The reprint preserves the original traditional characters and incorporates necessary corrections.