tài chōng mài
Also rendered: Chong vessel (Transliteration, common in clinical writing) · Penetrating vessel (Older English rendering)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The Chong vessel — the ‘surge’ — tied in this chapter to the flourishing and decline of the menses. It rises and falls on the same seven-year schedule as the heavenly water, which is precisely why the two are named together.
衝 carries the sense of a current meeting an obstruction — a surge, a crossroads, a thoroughfare. As a vessel name it is usually transliterated as Chong; this site keeps “surge” because the chapter is using the word’s ordinary sense: the vessel flourishes (盛) and then declines (衰少).
The parallelism is exact. Where the heavenly water arrives, the surge flourishes; where the heavenly water is exhausted, the surge declines. Two names for one event.
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.