Introduction

Why I wanted to translate the Chinese acupuncture point names to English.

I started work on translating the Chinese names for the acupuncture points, when I became dissatisfied with the existing lists I had encountered. The translations I had seen seemed undescriptive, in several instances. As I had translated the Ancient Chinese Yijing (or actually its core, the Zhouyi), I felt I had the capabilities to do this.

Limitations of existing English point names

Existing English point names are often translated with one English word per Chinese character. That may yield nice short names, but not very meaningful ones, as more words would sometimes be really needed in English to convey the meaning.

Another problem is that the names may refer to psychological effects that points have, but that are not part of Traditional Chinese Medicin. TCM is, in fact, more concerned with solving bodily problems, rather than psychological ones. Therefore, translators only aware of TCM couldn't really know what some pointnames really are about.

Then, translators may not have had access to suitable dictionaries. While translating the Yijing, I tried various online available dictionaries, and found that many just weren't suitable for translating ancient Chinese. The one that worked best for me turned out to be AC Muller's CJKV-English Dictionary of Confucian, Daoist, and Intellectual Historical Terms.

My own development

I became interested in acupuncture when I noticed that some points for acupressure, that I had found online for my lower backpain, also had a quite noticable psychological effect. I figured that there could be many more points with psychological effects. The acupuncture books that I bought, and the research I did online, however, seemed to bring surprisingly little. Even the hefty 'Manual of Acupuncture' didn't seem to have much more than that points were useful for treating 'mania' or 'calming the Shen'.

Only when I found a text online called 'The Spirit of the Points', by Lonny Jarrett, did I get my intuition confirmed that there must be quite a lot acupuncture points with a psychological effect. I bought his book 'Nourishing Destiny', but, even though there was more there than I had found elsewhere, this wasn't really a point book.

I then took a break from researching and experimenting with acupressure and acupuncture points. For my spiritual development, I joined the Ridhwan School, and stayed with it for over a decade. I knew that I would start working with acupressure again if I would find reason to stop with the school. And I did, but not after learning a lot about the psyche, developing my feeling abilities, and progressing with my self-development in quite a substantial way.

Dissatisfied with the esoteric concepts used at the Ridhwan School, I started figuring out how the psyche functions by myself. I googled again on 'Spirit of the Points', and this time found substantially more psychological information related to acupuncture than before. That helped me a lot with my research.

When I stumbled upon the 'Acupuncture Point Compendium 2014' by Claire-Louise Hatton, based on Worsley's Five Element Acupuncture, I realized I had found quite a lot of the missing list of psychological effects of acupuncture points. I experimented with what I found there, using acupressure and my previously developed feeling abilities.

I noticed how much reference there was to point names as indicative of pychological effects. It started to dawn on me that I might be able to translate the point names in a more descriptive way based on this information, and on my own feeling experiments.

And so I did. This work is the result of that research, of looking again and again at translations from different angles, and improving them, so as to capture the original meanings in English, for as much as possible.

Translating

As said earlier, I started translating the names of the acupuncture points based on my previous experience with translating the Yijing. For that, I used webpage technology, so as to be aware of contexts of characters elsewhere in the Chinese text.

With this work of acupuncture point name translations, I decided to make the technology I used public. So, this website makes it easy to search for Chinese characters in point names, and lists several relevant contexts on each page about translating a point name.