This translation was written on a rickety lounge chair, over several decades, surrounded by dictionaries, countless texts, and wonderful, truly wonderful friends.

 

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After a number of years spent acquiring the basic skills required to attempt a translation of Neijing, learning the language, collecting the required texts, I began on the work, making a reasonably thorough and slow translation of about the first six chapters of Linghsu and Suwen each. That exercise demonstrated two things. Firstly, that such an approach lacked the sort of perspective on the whole work that was needed to produce a decent result. And secondly, that at that pace I would never come close to finishing the work. In response, I adopted a more directed and accelerated workflow that would allow some chance of completion. That approach, in my view, worked well, and allowed my to complete a full translation of Lingshu, and a large part of Suwen.

 

Unfortunately, it's now become clear that, even at this increased rate, I will not be given the chance to finish this work. I'm reluctant to release what I have done without the revision it clearly needs, but I'm forced to the view that, despite its deficiencies, and all the shortcomings and inadequacies of the translator, the work being available in public is much preferable to having it languish in incompletion – to venture quixotically is far better than to retire sagely.

 

There are two major idiosyncracies of this translation. The first is that I am quite convinced that the two parts, Lingshu and Suwen, are not quite separate works, but are sequential parts of a whole. And furthermore, that Lingshu is the first or earlier of the two parts. The principal indicator of this idea is that both Suwen and Lingshu contain refererences to other parts of Lingshu (notably the "small needle" passage of Lingshu 1), while Lingshu doesn't reciprocally contain similar reference to Suwen. The logical implications of this patterning are complex and debatable, and I don't by any means regard it as proof of this proposition, but I do regard it as a significant and sufficient basis for the default presumption that Lingshu is the earlier of the two books, rather than the opposite, as is implied in the standard positioning of Suwen at the beginning of practically every joint compilation. The translation is very much structured on this basis; it reads sequentially from Lingshu to Suwen, and loses its integrity and continuity if the opposite is attempted.

 

The second salient feature is that the arrangement of Suwen used is not the standard one. In the 8th century, the imperial physician Wang Bing produced an edited version of the text, in which it's well known that he substantially reordered the sequence of the chapters, as well as altering the text in some chapters. He also introduced the series of nine large chapters towards the end of the work (the Qidalun, or "seven great treatises", commonly known in English as "the stems and branches chapters").

 

[Failing health prevented conclusion of the introduction. The Lingshu translation is complete; forty-two chapters of Suwen have been finished. Comprehensive revision to tighten and polish the work was never commenced. There was never any intention of translating the qidalun ("the stems and branches chapters").]

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