The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic

The foundational classic of Chinese medicine, reorganised so a modern reader can actually read it.

The Huangdi Neijing is the root text of Chinese medicine: over two thousand years old, and still the basis of TCM theory today. But at hundreds of thousands of characters spread across 162 scattered treatises, almost no one reads it start to finish, not even practitioners.

The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic: A Thematic Edition solves this. All one hundred and sixty-two treatises are represented through their essential passages, freshly translated from the classical Chinese, and arranged not by ancient chapter order but by eleven themes a reader can actually follow:

• Nurturing Life, and what the classic teaches about long life
• Yin and Yang, the two forces underlying everything
• The Organs and their inner network
• Pulse and Diagnosis: reading what the body does not say
• The Channels and Collaterals that carry qi
• Acupuncture and the needle
• How illness begins
• The physician's art of treatment
• The Movements and Qi of the turning year
• Spirit, Essence, and Cultivation
• One Tradition, Five Gates: medicine among the Five Arts

Every passage appears with the original Chinese, a fresh English translation, and commentary written from the standpoint of a practitioner who has lived inside this tradition, not studied it from outside.

This is a thematic edition, not a word for word translation of the entire text: built for the reader who wants the classic's living teaching rather than a museum piece. For students of Chinese medicine, acupuncturists, qigong and cultivation practitioners, and anyone drawn to yin and yang, the five phases, and the art of living well.