The Secret of the Golden Flower: The Classic Chinese Book of Life

Wonderful book but I cannot write a review ,along with zen training book by salida i am practicing zazen.great book .Buy it .

Is the Cleary translation accurate? It is totally different to others. I don't know which is most accurate. I preferred the cryptic and mystic version by Willhelm and Jung

Ripped Off! Paid for a quality book and this is a collection of photocopied pages put together as a book. Poor quality & hard to read. Will be tossing this in the fireplace!

The book is a rare golden flower indeed, a beautiful asset to humanity.However, in the end-notes, the translator very frequently criticises the previous translation as being misleading, bizarre, mistranslated, clumsy, etc. I found that incredibly jarring and petty, and really detracted from the whole; not only that, it was totally contrary to the spirit of the text. I wonder what other readers thought?

Whilst the cover looks nice,the paper quality is good and the translation by Cleary looks ok, the reading experience is marred by poor quality print. It looks like an amateurish facsimile, which is on a grey-black background with fuzzy text. This makes it barely readable in places. Harper Collins should hang their heads in shame for putting this out. It would 't have taken much effort to use OCR and typeset this cleanly on a white background. Whilst this might not bother some, Harper Ccollins should be thinking of accessibility issues such as dyslexia, myopia, visual impairment, night reading, etc.

I was recommended this translation of the Chinese alchemical classic by a friend. I had previously read and enjoyed the Wilhelm version, but it seemed to describe mystical and uinattainable experiences - interesting but not for me. This translation is very different. There are some passages of the beautiful Taoist poetry which is symbolic in nature and thus inscrutable if you don't know the symbolism (which Cleary explains in the notes and appendices) but mostly it is written in direct and practical language. It is a guide to recognizing consciousness, consciousness itself being the enlightenment that we dwell in all the time if we recognize it at its purest. Very simple (also very hard, at least for me, for more than two seconds). Cleary perfectly captures the friendly and helpful tone of the unknown author(s) and provides clear notes and explanations. he also points out where and why he has deviated from the Jung-influenced Wilhelm interpretation. It is a book I will continue reading and re-reading for life.