The Suwen and the Lingshu form part of the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine with the Nanjing as a separate work complementing this classic. These texts are the first known texts on Chinese acupuncture with an age of over 2000 years. Regarded as ancient authoritative texts, they are still held in high esteem by today's Chinese and Western acupuncturists and are mandatory texts of study in the training of Western and Chinese acupuncture physicians. Western readers naturally face tremendous difficulties in accessing these original texts because of the language and cultural gap between their contemporary Western cultural background and ancient Chinese culture. This edition of the Chinese texts therefore includes simplified and traditional Chinese character versions of the texts that will enable the reader to study text versions in simplified characters published on the Chinese Mainland as well as those in traditional character versions published outside the Chinese Mainland in Taiwan or Hongkong. Complete Latin transcription in Hanyu Pinyin has been added to the Chinese character versions for all the texts so that the reader does not need to spend much time in looking up unknown Chinese characters in the texts. A comprehensive Chinese-English character and word glossary, generated and compiled from the Chinese text corpus in this book, is appended at the end of the book for easy reference by Western readers.

Dr. Schmidt is a sinologist, linguist and theologian with extensive experience in foreign language teaching. He has a number of widely sold textbooks on Chinese language and related subjects to his credit.