Ling Shu or the Spiritual Pivot (review)

Reviews 285 Soviet troops, and between the CCP and American marines in the Northeast and North China. Drawing upon a variety of new materials, the author is also able to shed light on the policy debates and evolution within the GMD and CCP. Understandably , although the author promises to give "equal importance to the four parties," his analysis of Soviet perceptions and actions is the least solid one due to the scarcity of primary sources. The problem is that the author often makes his strong arguments about the Soviet role in the civil war out of relatively weak historical evidence. The book is well organized and quite readable. Given the difficulty in employing a multifocused approach, the author demonstrates remarkable analytical skills in presenting the data in an orderly and coherent fashion. On the other hand, such an approach often gets the reader lost in detail and leads to some repetition . Overall the text is carefully edited, and factual and linguistic errors are not pervasive. Still, pinyin sometimes causes trouble for the author. For instance, Song Ziwen" is spelled as "Song Xiwen" (p. 232), and "Zhang Qun" appears as "Zhang Zhun" (pp. 144, 260). The author also confuses "Zhang Qun" with "Zhang Zhizhong." It was Zhang Qun who signed the cease-fire agreement with Zhou Enlai on January 10, 1946. Zhang Qun was later replaced by Zhang Zhizhong as the GMD member of the "Committee of Three," which was established as a result of the agreement. Jianwei Wang East-West Center, Honolulu F Wu Jing-nuan, translator. Ling Shu or the Spiritual Pivot. Asian Spirituality, Taoist Studies Series. Washington, D.C.: The Taoist Center, 1993. xv, 283 pp. $30.00. Ling Shu or the Spiritual Pivotis a translation of the second and final section of the Huangdi neijing, one of the oldest and most revered medical canons in China. This classic covers a broad spectrum of traditional medical lore, which modern science would classify as anatomy, physiology, etiology, symptomatology, psychology , pharmacology, and the like, as well as philosophical subjects such as ontol-© 1994 by University 0gV) cosmology, and metaphysics. The latter supplies the conceptual foundation ofHawai ?PressQT rationaie for me former. The text is, however, chiefly concerned with acupuncture and takes the form of a dialectic between the Yellow Emperor, who poses a query or states a principle, and Qi Bo or some other expert who provides an an- 286 China Review International: Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1994 swer or expounds on a topic through reasoned discourse. At the same time it is a vade mecum, a rough guide to primary skills in acupuncture as a therapeutic treatment that a physician could resort to in ministering to the ailments of his patients . The format and the mixture of the pragmatic and the abstract are entirely consistent with the character of many ancient Chinese texts devoted to skills, science , and technology. The translator is a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and has undertaken this task to provide a "fresh understanding" for the text (p. xi). What audience he had in mind for this work is not at all clear. The generalist—historian of science, the dabbler in chinoiserie, or the just plain curious will find it tough going. In the first place, Mr. Wu has not supplied anatomical diagrams illustrating the location of acupuncture tracts and points—that most standard and indispensable aid for texts on this subject. True, he has provided a table of acupuncture points that describes their location verbally, but this is not an adequate substitute for figures upon which such features are more or less precisely marked. Second, the author's explanations of traditional medical nomenclature are unsatisfactory. The list of terms that appears at the beginning of the book (p. xiv) is short and the definitions conventional and unhelpful. There is no index that a reader could use to make sense of a word by tracking down other occurrences of it in the text. The annotations appended to some sections of the text are often given cursory glosses and fail to illuminate by describing their place in the larger context of traditional medical lore or their significance philosophically. Furthermore, these notes are rare, and this...