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prefatory remarks This book is a study of the Huang Di nei jing su wen ¿“∫g¿› (Su wen), an ancient text that, together with its sister text, the Huang Di nei jing ling shu ¿“∫gFœ (Ling shu), plays a role in Chinese medical history comparable to that of the Hippocratic writings in ancient Europe. Progress and significant paradigm changes have reduced Hippocrates to the honored originator of a tradition that has become obsolete. In contrast, many practitioners of Chinese medicine still consider the Su wen a valuable source of theoretical inspiration and practical knowledge in modern clinical settings. Available evidence suggests that at the basis of the Su wen is a layer of texts written beginning in the second or first century b.c., with some of its conceptual contents possibly dating from the third century b.c. Presumably in the first or second century a.d., several compilers or teams of authors, all unknown to us today, set out to bring together disparate texts of previous decades, thereby generating a second textual layer, to which were added further layers in subsequent centuries. The outcomes of these more or less contemporary efforts to combine a selection of statements and texts from an identical pool of writings by numerous previous authors in one authoritative compilation have come down to us in four major works: in addition to the Su wen and the Ling shu, the Nan jing and the Huang Di nei jing tai su (Tai su). Although the Su wen corpus has so far escaped all attempts at reconstruction , scholars agree that it was subjected to significant rearrangements, emendations, and additions in post-Han centuries, culminating in the contributions by Wang Bing in the eighth century. The Imperial Editorial Of- fice of the eleventh century decided to introduce only minor editorial changes, so that the corpus available today essentially reflects the text that existed twelve hundred years ago. ix Hence the importance of the Su wen as a source of ancient Chinese intellectual history lies in its formative period of about one thousand years; it offers invaluable data on cognitive dynamics in ancient Chinese medicine and knowledge of nature. Reading the Su wen not only increases our understanding of the roots of Chinese medicine as an integral aspect of Chinese civilization. It also provides a much needed starting point for serious and well-informed discussions on differences and parallels between European and Chinese approaches to existential threats such as illness and the risk of early death. Such discussions are essential to an appreciation of the cultural construct of illness and health in Chinese intellectual traditions; they appear necessary in view of current political attempts to structure the coexistence of Chinese and Western medicine either as competing or as complementary paths in the unending quest for human health. Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text is the first in a multivolume publication of the results of the Su wen project, which was carried out with international cooperation at the Institute for the History of Medicine of Munich University. The scope of the project was broad. It aimed at preparing the first complete, philologically sound English translation of the Su wen together with a research apparatus that will be of help for future work on this text. I prepared a preliminary version of the translation to serve as a starting point for an extensive collaboration with Hermann Tessenow. His philological expertise contributed decisively to the result achieved, which will be published separately in three volumes. In addition, Tessenow has conducted a detailed analysis of the approximately three hundred fifty separate segments constituting the historical and structural layers of the Su wen. The outcome of this study also will be published in several volumes. Because we have spent so much time with the Su wen, we have come to realize the enormous complexity of its contents. There is no doubt that just as we have adjusted our interpretation of many passages to an everprogressing understanding of the text, knowledgable readers will take issue with the result and discover errors that we overlooked. Nevertheless, we believe that this translation represents a level of understanding that may be considered a substantial contribution to a well-informed discussion of the Su wen as one of the seminal documents of ancient Chinese culture. In my attempts to penetrate the Chinese text and its historical context, I have greatly benefited from Chinese and Japanese scholarship of previous decades and centuries. The publication...

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