Peach Blossom Spring Translators Collective

An invitation-only collaboration under Dr. Sabine Wilms’ guidance with these goals:

Learn from the ancients,
Practice the art of reading the Chinese medicine classics as ethical, spiritual, and clinical cultivation,
Produce translations of the highest academic and clinical standards, and
Advance the profession of Chinese medicine.

My life-long dream

As a writer, translator, professor, and publisher who has worked in the field of Chinese medicine for most of my adult life and completed well over a dozen books, I know what it takes to do justice to the precious content of the Chinese medical literature.

Reading the ancient medical literature and producing accurate and authentic translations suited for contemporary clinical application is not a one-person task, but requires the expertise of multiple translators, readers, commentators, and editors. In addition, the right-brain artist, visionary, and dreamer has to collaborate with the left-brain academic, theoretician, and logician, in each of us and in our collective.

“Perfection is an impossible goal to achieve in a task as ambitious and multifaceted as the translation of texts from such a distant time and culture. And yet, we owe it to the precious nature of the classical texts and their commentaries and to the sacred importance of their medical content that we transcend our personal goals and limitations. Only in this way can we produce publications for the general public that are far greater than the sum of any of our individual efforts.”

What we are building…

Joy and Community

Reading the ancients with like-minded skilled translators is inspiring, heart-warming, and just plain delightful. As fellow students of this wisdom, we aim to bridge chasms of time and space in an international group of collaborators from around the world.
Cultivation

Immersing ourselves in the magical world of early Chinese medicine, philosophy, religion, and cosmology is deeply transformative. Producing translations is a meditation that we gift to ourselves to find peace and meaning in turbulent times.
Service to the Profession

We all know how invigorating new translations are for our field. The vast majority of the treasure trove of Chinese medical literature is underutilized because most practitioners cannot access it in Chinese. We can change that, one text at a time!
Collaborative Potential

Chinese medicine is too vast and deep for any one of us to comprehend on our own. We each bring different skills, experiences, understandings, visions, and sensitivities to the collective.
Publishing

Whether we will produce a quarterly zine or journal to share a diverse selection of shorter pieces, or create large or small individual texts, the sky is the limit. Let our imagination fly with the swallows….
A gift of abundance

As a collective, we have access not only to pooled resources but to grant applications and outside funding. We aim to produce open-access material and thereby make the results of our efforts as widely available as possible.

Peach Blossom Spring Monthly Meetings

How we are building our dream in the academic year 2023/24…

(for a schedule, see my EVENTS page)

We have 3 terms per year, and 3 sessions per term. We take summers and December off. We cover one topic in each term, and members commit to individual terms or the full year.
We meet once a month for three hours on Zoom, generally on the last Thursday at 9-12 PST, with December and July and August off.
You study the term’s homework package, work on the text throughout the term, produce a translation of your assigned part (alone or in collaboration), and participate in the discussion forum and monthly reading. Collaboration in any publications is optional but encouraged.
Each term, Dr. Wilms selects the source text and creates a workbook that includes the following elements: A critical edition and Pinyin transcription, an introductory article on the historical and medical context, a list of key vocabulary to study, footnotes on difficult characters, textual or grammar issues, etc, and a list of key questions to contemplate.
In addition, Dr. Wilms supervises the ongoing discussion and answers questions to prepare for each text reading in our discussion forum, assigns individual segments for each student to work on, provides critical feedback on translations, and leads our text reading sessions. She also steers, facilitates, and finalizes the publication process, including layout, critical review, and editing.
Fall term 2023 (10/5, 10/26, 11/30): Suwen 1-3.
Winter term 2024 (1/25, 2/22, 3/28): Nanjing
Spring term 2024 (5/2, 5/23, 6/27): Formulary literature on attuning the blood.
Fall term 2024 (9/26, 10/24, 11/21): Advanced grammar lessons?
Members commit either to a single term at $270 for three monthly sessions or to the full year at $600.

Will you come play with us?

Are you interested in joining working groups on Gynecology, Neijing studies, Qi cultivation, formula and bencao classics and commentaries, case studies, and more? In that case, you must either have graduated from all three levels of my Triple Crown training program, or have obtained the specialized skills that are necessary to produce authentic, accurate, and culturally sensitive translations of Chinese medicine classics through solid academic training in classical Chinese elsewhere. If that is the case, I would love to hear from you, and you can CONTACT ME HERE. Otherwise, maybe consider taking my Triple Crown training program. For this, the first step is to FILL OUT THE TRIPLE CROWN ADMISSIONS SURVEY, and I will get in touch with you to let you know where you fit in.