Introduced to the West With a Long Commentary by Carl Jung

The text reached Western readers substantially through Richard Wilhelm's 1929 German translation, published together with an extensive psychological commentary by Carl Jung, who read the Golden Flower's practices as a striking Eastern parallel to the process of individuation he was developing in his own psychology, and used the text to argue for a serious, non dismissive Western engagement with Chinese spiritual practice at a time when such material was widely treated as merely exotic curiosity. The Wilhelm Jung edition, later rendered into English by Cary Baynes, became enormously influential in the mid twentieth century Western reception of Daoism generally, shaping how several generations of Western readers first encountered Chinese internal alchemy.

Later scholars of Daoism, working with a fuller range of primary sources than were available to Wilhelm, have generally concluded that the Wilhelm Jung reading reflects Jung's own psychological categories at least as much as the text's original Daoist context, a caution now standard in academic treatments of the work even as the Wilhelm Jung edition remains the version by far the most widely read outside specialist circles. The Baynes English edition remained continuously in print for decades.