Texts
To preface this section, please know that I still have quite a lot to learn about Classical Chinese language and translation (and will for the rest of my life). However, I will be sharing translations here with students and other practitioners. Please know that every translation I share is a working draft – and will forever be a working draft, as each reading prompts new ideas. Feel free to offer thoughts and suggestions on how any of this can be improved.
Eventually, I will put a donation link on this site for anyone who wishes to support me in continuing this work. Feel free to use my translations, but please cite them and otherwise use them in an honest manner.
I have been blessed to cross paths with many fantastic scholars in my life. I want to mention James McAllister here, as he helped me to start an investigation into monastic scholarship and the ideas around that for a Chinese medicine practitioner. Joseph Campbell modeled the idea well by splitting his day into four four-hour periods, reading for three of them and using the last for free time. Benedict (of the Benedictine monks) created guidelines which gave canonical texts (in his case, the bible) a huge place in the daily life and their meaning was expected to be integrated seamlessly with prayer and work. He considered this type of scholarship to encompass the divine inspiration, or spirit, of the work as well as the way in which it was interpreted by the reader.
By reading these Chinese medical texts in their original language, we interact with them in a dynamic way. As a Westerner, whose first language was a phonetic variety, it was quite an awakening to work with a symbolic language such as this. Each person brings their own mind, spirit, experience and knowledge to the reading and as such, the symbols are interpreted differently. While the translations I’ve included here may be helpful to you in some way, or be a good way to start a discussion about their meaning – a true translation that represents YOUR reading, honoring your experience and knowledge, can never come from me (or anyone else but you).
For more about learning how to translate for yourself, see this page.
