Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic)

The Huangdi Neijing is a primary Chinese medical text compiled in stages across several centuries, from the Warring States period through the Han dynasty, with no single author and no single date of composition, a layered origin this record states rather than assigning one false date to it. As a primary text it is authoritative for what the Lingshu states about acupuncture and meridian theory or what the Suwen states about the theoretical foundations of Chinese medicine, checkable directly against the text, not for a settled account of which passages belong to which historical layer, which remains a matter of ongoing textual scholarship. Use it to establish what a named passage of the Lingshu or Suwen itself states; a claim resting on the text's precise compositional history or on modern clinical practice needs a dedicated scholarly source such as Unschuld and Tessenow's critical translation of the Suwen.