text: The Secret of the Golden Flower was first translated into German by sinologist Richard Wilhelm, a friend of Carl Jung, who had been introduced to the work by his Chinese teacher. The work was later translated from German to English by Cary F. Baynes. Jung provided comments to both of Wilhelms major Chinese translations, including (in 1949) the nineteen-page (pp. xxi–xxxix) foreword to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching, discussing the transpersonal aspect, and The commentary on The secret of the golden flower' (1929).
  The version that Wilhelm used for his German translation had eight chapters. According to Catherine Despeux and Livia Kohn, this edition was that of a "Supplement to the Taoist Canon" from 1834. Thomas Cleary (1991) used a different 13-chapter version, which he translated into English directly from Chinese. The five chapters missing from Wilhelm's translation are very short. According to Mori Yuria, it is possible that the prototype had 20 chapters, which would have been reduced to 13 by Shao Zhilin because they were considered redundant or less organized.
  Cleary criticized the validity of Wilhelm's translation, characterizing it as incomplete and inaccurate:
  According to Cleary:
  Cleary gives some examples of the way that the text, in his view, was commonly misinterpreted by Wilhelm and Jung, and describes such an instance in the very beginning of the text:
  However, Cleary's translated version did not provide enough information about its source documentation. Jing Haifeng (1999) and J. J. Clarke (2000) excused Jung for not being a Sinologist, and for his humanitarian concerns in alleviating suffering by providing psychological insights. Clarke also did not follow Cleary in considering that the translation used by Wilhelm was problematic.
  In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung states that he had sought a connection between Western and Eastern psychological understanding, and that for 15 years he had not found parallels in confirming the collective unconscious, until he read the German translation of The Secret of the Flower of Gold by Wilhelm. Christopher Cott and Adam Rock consider that Jungs comment left out many constructs present in The Secret of the Golden Flower. They state that there may be misinterpretations when extrapolating considerations that were not originally found in Taoist doctrine. Caifang Jeremy Zhu claims that Jungs comparison with Eastern meditation was inappropriate. He also notes that another text that was included in Wilhelms translation, the Hui Ming Jing/Ching ("The Wisdom Book of Life"), also covered by Jungs commentary, is not Taoist: it is from a branch of Mahayana Buddhism.