A Discourse on the Water and Heat Points

Shuǐ rè xué lùn

Sixty-one is the last of the four chapters that the Suwen gives to the surface of the body and the places on it where a needle goes. Fifty-eight counted three hundred and sixty-five points; fifty-nine listed the houses of the qi, channel by channel; sixty located those points as openings in the bone. Sixty-one does something none of them do: it asks why. Why does the kidney govern water? Why does sweat that meets wind become swelling? And having answered, it gives the numbers that the other three only implied – fifty-seven points for water, fifty-nine for heat – together with the rule for which of them to take in which season. The physiology is compact and it is the reason the chapter is quoted. The kidney is called the gate of the stomach: when the gate does not open and close freely, water collects and follows its own kind, overflowing into the skin as swelling. The kidney is the female depot, the yin depot; the earth qi that rises belongs to it and it is this that makes the fluids. Exert yourself, sweat from the kidney, and let that sweat meet wind, and the fluid can neither return inward to the depots and palaces nor get outward past the skin: it lodges in the dark openings, which is to say the sweat pores, and becomes wind water. Root in the kidney, tip in the lung – swelling and a big belly below, panting and no lying down above. Then the counting. The fifty-seven water points fall into three groups: five rows above the seat, two rows above the crouching hare, and one row above the ankle called the great surge, the descending course of the kidney vessel. All of them are the yin network vessels of the depots, and all of them are where water lodges. The fifty-nine heat points fall into five groups – twenty-five on the head, eight for the chest, eight for the stomach, eight for the limbs, ten beside the transport points of the depots – and the chapter is careful to say what each group is for: to let the hot counterflow of the yang out, to drain the chest, the stomach, the four limbs, the five depots. The seasonal rules that follow are the most quotable thing here, and they read like a manual. In spring the channels lie deep and the qi is too scant to enter far, so take the network vessels and the partings of the flesh. In summer the vessel is thin and the heat smokes the partings of the skin, so take the full channels – the yang vessels – and pierce the skin only. In autumn the yin is only just prevailing and cannot reach deep, so take the transport points for the yin evil and the confluence for the yang. In winter the greater yang lies submerged, so take the well to send the yin counterflow down and the gushing point to make the yang solid – and, the chapter adds, do that and spring brings no stuffed nose and no nosebleed. It ends on a single line that closes the whole question of cold and heat: when cold is extreme, it gives rise to heat. As printed here the text follows the base in every place but two. The twenty-one sets of modern quotation marks that came with the transcription, one around each speech, are taken back out, as in chapters fifty-four to sixty. And 冬取井滎, which the base wrote 榮, is given in the received form 滎, the gushing point, on the user's ruling; it is read xíng. Both are recorded below. 空 is read two ways in this one chapter: kǒng in 汗空, because Wang Bing glosses it 孔, and kōng in 髓空, the bone opening, as ruled in chapter sixty. 冩 is kept as the base writes it and read xiè; 沈 likewise, read chén; 𤣥, 玄 in its older form, read xuán. 胕 is read fū, though a rival reading fù is noted. 鼽 is qiú, and here – unlike chapter fifty-nine, where it was the cheek bone – it is the stuffed nose.