shèn fēng
Also rendered: renal wind (Clinical-sounding but imports a modern organ concept) · nephrotic wind (Coins a word the text does not support)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The fourth case, and the one the chapter spends the rest of its length on: wind in the kidney, with the face swollen and speech impaired. Asked whether it may be needled, Qi Bo answers that in vacuity one must not — and then describes, sign by sign, the wind water that follows five days after the wrong needling. The disease is less the point than the prohibition.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Wiseman & Feng | kidney wind | They keep 腎 as kidney, the organ of the water metabolism, which is exactly what goes wrong here. |
| Unschuld | kidney wind | Unschuld likewise leaves 腎 untranslated as kidney, so the English matches the Chinese term for term. |
| This site | kidney wind | We keep kidney and wind. The case turns on whether the kidney's vacuity may be needled, and both halves of that question survive in the plain rendering. |
Search the glossary
Reading path
Guided routes through the corpus, each built on a handful of chapters and their key terms.
See all reading paths