jīng
Also rendered: Essence (Standard in English scholarship)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The stored, refined reserve of the body: slow to build, quickly spent. In this chapter it is what the intemperate exhaust through desire — a quantity that can run down, which is exactly why regimen matters.
The graph is 米 — grain — plus 青. The base sense is grain that has been picked over and refined, and the medical sense follows directly: 精 is the refined part of what the body takes in, set aside as a reserve.
The chapter treats it as finite. People of the present, it says, exhaust their essence in desire and scatter their true endowment in waste (以欲竭其精，以耗散其真). Whatever else is being claimed, the grammar is one of spending a store.
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.
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Reading path
This term belongs to Foundations — the five core concepts, in the order the Suwen introduces them.