The Secret of the Golden Flower is indeed a powerful treatise on
awakening the hidden potential of a universal human being, and it is in
reality an even better and more useful book than Wilhelm, Jung, or Baynes
thought it to be. However immature his rendition may have been, I am
deeply indebted to Richard Wilhelm for introducing this extraordinary text
to the West, for it could otherwise have gone unnoticed for decades, even
centuries, amidst the hundreds upon hundreds of Taoist and Buddhist
treatises awaiting translation.
It can therefore be said that it is because of Wilhelm's efforts that this
new English version of The Secret of the Golden Flower has come into
being. It is to further inquiries into ways of approaching universal
psychology and mental wholeness in general, and to further inquiries into
development of the researches initiated by Wilhelm and Jung in their
presentation of this book in particular, that I have undertaken to follow up
on their work with a new and complete rendition of The Secret of the
Golden Flower
Because the still-current Wilhelm/Jung/Baynes edition of this manual
contains dangerous and misleading contaminations, a primary consideration
of the new translation was to make the contents of The Secret of the Golden
Flower explicitly accessible to both lay and specialist audiences. This is
partly a matter of translation and partly a matter of presentation.
