Modern Chinese Translation of the Classic of Difficult Issues

The Classic of Difficult Issues (Nanjing), formally the Huangdi Bashiyi Nan Jing (The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Eighty-One Difficult Issues), is one of the important classics of traditional Chinese medicine. It was traditionally attributed to Qin Yueren (Bian Que) of the Warring States period, and is generally believed to have been completed no later than the Han dynasty. The book is structured as eighty-one questions and answers, focusing on elucidating the essential teachings of ancient medical classics such as the Inner Canon; its content covers physiology, pathology, diagnosis, and treatment, among other aspects. Its discussion of pulse studies is especially refined, and it proposes new theories of the Triple Burner and the Life Gate, systematically discussing 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. This book is a modern-language translation prepared by Ling Yaoxing on the basis of her chief-edited Collation and Annotation of the Classic of Difficult Issues, and the two are companion volumes. In its compilation it remains faithful to the original content and wording, using direct translation into modern Chinese; difficult, obscure, or variably pronounced characters are given phonetic notation and homophones; difficult or ambiguous words and phrases are supplemented with annotations, without tedious philological exegesis or textual research; each difficult issue is preceded by a summary and followed by appropriate commentary notes indicating key points and lines of understanding. This edition is one of the People's Medical Publishing House's 'Reprint of the Series on the Collation of Ancient Chinese Medical Texts,' published in 2013, with about 83,000 characters of main text in a large 32mo format. The annotations throughout are concise and the translation accessible, suitable for beginning students of Chinese medicine, students at Chinese medical colleges, clinical doctors, and practitioners of integrated Chinese-Western medicine, and it can also serve as an introductory reader for studying the original text of the Classic of Difficult Issues.