Title
The title Huangdi Yinfujing combines three Chinese words. The first Huangdi 黃帝 "Yellow Emperor" and last jing 經 "classic; scripture; book" are common in titles of other Chinese classic texts. For example, the Huangdi Neijing "Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic" and Huangdi Sijing "Yellow Emperor's Four Classics". The second word yinfu "hidden/secret talisman/correspondence" is an uncommon compound of yin 陰 (of yin and yang) "shady place; passive; negative; secret; hidden" and fu 符 " tally (with two halves); talisman; symbol; charm; amulet".
Fu means a seal, divided into two parts. On one half of this seal we have the visible phenomena of the world around us; this we can all see, but, the diagram being incomplete, we require the other half of the seal, that bearing the 道理 of Heaven or the Unseen World, before we can understand the why and the wherefore of the existing order of things. (Balfour 1884:49)
Fulu 符籙 "Daoist secret talismanic writing; Daoist magic formulas" refers to charms written in peculiar characters, often on yellow paper (for instance, see Jiang Shi).
English translations of Yinfujing illustrate semantic problems with the title:
- Clue to the Unseen (Balfour 1881)
- Classic of the Harmony of the Seen and the Unseen (Legge 1891)
- Scripture for Joining with Obscurity (Rand 1979)
- Scripture of the Hidden Contracts (Reiter 1984)
- Classic on Yin Convergence (Cleary 1991)
- Scripture on "Unconscious Unification" (Zhang and Li 2001)
- Secret Military Warrant Manual (Ho 2003)
- Scripture on the Hidden Talisman (Komjathy 2004)
- Scripture on the Hidden Fitness (Tsun 2006)
- Scripture of Hidden Contracts (Acker 2006)
Note the omission of Huangdi above, which all the translators render as "Yellow Emperor", excepting Komjathy's "Yellow Thearch"".
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