Huangdi Neijing Lingshu - Collected Commentaries 黄帝内经灵枢集注

Collated and annotated by Shi Song of the Southern Song Dynasty.

It was roughly compiled in the 25th year of Shaoxing in the Southern Song Dynasty (1155).

The original book consists of twenty-four volumes, or alternatively twelve volumes, with editions including the Song-dynasty block-printed version, Song-style reprint, and the version included in Complete Library of Four Treasuries.

The version in The Daozang has twenty-three volumes, which is mistakenly titled Collected Annotations on Suwen and Lingshu of Huangdi Neijing, and is included in the Tai Xuan Section. As a classic of ancient Chinese medicine, Huangdi Neijing was roughly compiled during the Qin and Han dynasties. According to the record in Book of Han·Treatise on Arts and Literature, the original work had eighteen volumes, nine of which are Suwen (Plain Questions), and the other nine are Lingshu (also named Classic of Acupuncture). Divided into eighty-one chapters, the book adopts the style of dialogues between the Yellow Emperor and Qi Bo, which is the same as that of Suwen. The medical techniques expounded in the book focus particularly on the study of acupuncture and meridians, which are based on the theories of Yin and Yang and the movement of Qi. Hence, the first chapter Nine Needles and Twelve Sources clearly states the purpose at the very beginning and expounds the principles of acupuncture first. The other chapters respectively discuss the human body’s five zang-organs and six fu-organs, the twelve meridians, as well as medical techniques such as treating diseases with acupuncture and protecting the zang-organs and fu-organs. Lingshu was not widely circulated during the Sui, Tang and Northern Song dynasties. In the early Southern Song Dynasty, Shi Song collated the nine-volume old family copy of Lingshu by referring to various books, added phonetic annotations, and rearranged it into twenty-four volumes. Later generations mostly based their block-printing of Lingshu on this version.