Page 547 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

HUANGDI NEIJING 507

bodily processes in terms of the Five Phases (*wuxing). The Lingshu is thought
to be more clinically oriented, and frequently the text details principles of
acupuncture and moxibustion therapy.
The textual history of these books is complex and remains a matter of
contention. The Suwen has a ,well-known Tang dynasty editor, *Wang Bing
(f1. 762), who divided it into twenty-four juan and submitted it to the throne in
762. In the orthern Song period it was substantially reedited and "corrected"
by Lin Yi ** 1~ (eleventh century) and his team. About one third of the text is
devoted to the doctrine of the "five circulatory phases and six seasonal influ-
ences" (wuyun liuqi lili/\ ~), also known as "phase energetics." This doctrine
is recorded in chapters 66-7I, 74, and parts of chapters 5 and 9. Chapters 72 and
73 were lost by Wang Bing's time, and he gives only their titles; it is uncertain
whether they dealt with this doctrine. Generally, Wang Bing is considered to
have included the above chapters into the Suwen, but there is no certainty that
their inclusion predated the Song edition of the Suwen.
The Lingshu originally may have had the title Zhenjing ~~~ (Scripture of
Acupuncture). Thus, Huangfu Mi ~ ffi~ (2I5- 82) considered the Suwen and
the Zhenjing available to him to constitute the Huangdi neijing that had been
recorded in the bibliography of the Hanshu (History of the Former Han;j. 30).
Wang Bing, in his preface to the Suwen, refers to the second book of the Huangdi
neijing as Lingshu and, in his commentary to the Suwen, sometimes quotes from
a text with the same title; but this book was later lost. The present editions of
the Lingshu are generally derived from an edition printed during the Southern
Song in II55, which in turn was based on the re edition of a book called Zhenjing
that the Imperial Court had recovered from Korea in the I090S.
Two further books are known to have had Huangdi neijing as prefix to their
title; they are the Mingtang ~ !it (Hall of Light) and the Taisu j;. * (Great
Plainness). Of these only the latter is extant, and only in one recension that
survived inJapan: an eleventh-century copy of an early eighth-century version.
It is now generally accepted that this text was compiled during the Tang by Yang
Shangshan m-L ff (fl. 666-83), whose commentary indicates that he was deeply
involved in Taoist thought and practice (he advocates, for instance, meditation
on and inner visualization of the deities of the five viscera, *wuzang). The
extant eleventh-century Japanese version is incomplete, but its I80 pian all have
counterparts in the Neijing, in either the Suwen or the Lingshu, or in both.
Elisabeth HSU
m Keegan I988; Lu and Needham I980, 88- I06; MaJixing I990, 68-98; Porkert
I974; Rochat de la Vallee and Larre I993 (part. trans.); Sivin I993; Sivin I998;
Yamada Keiji I979
* yangsheng