Quote:
George S. Ledyard wrote:
Thanks Josh,
I ordered it today. I don't know if they have even finished cataloging all the documents they found at the Dun Huang caves. There was so much stuff there it will keep a couple generations of scholars busy. Did this volume come out of that find or did it come to light elsewhere?
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It's been around since it was written, but it got put into a larger collection of works (the Guanzi) during the Han dynasty. For most of the last several millenia, the Guanzi was considered a Legalist collection of texts on politics and economics, so the Neiye chapter, and a few others buried in there, were ignored. Kind of "Hidden in Plain Sight". What the more recent discoveries (like the "Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor" from Mawangdui) *have* done is give a different context for classifying early texts like the Guanzi.
One interesting thing about the text is that it describes the physiological center for the body's energies as being in the center of the chest, not the lower abdomen as in later Daoist works. Very interesting for those with an interest in Akuzawa's excercises . . .
But now back to our chewy center. Apologies to Chris for the thread drift.
Josh