sī tiān
Also rendered: Governing the heaven (this site; 司 is having charge of a thing, and the heaven is the upper half of the year — the office comes through, the half-year does not) · Si tian (transliteration; how the term is written in tables of the six qi, where the office itself is the subject)
Reviewed · 2026-10-13
At a glance
The qi that has charge of the upper half of the year. Six qi take it in turn — 少陽、陽明、太陽、厥陰、少陰、太陰 — and this chapter gives all six, each with what it does: 少陽司天，火氣下臨，肺氣上從；陽明司天，燥氣下臨，肝氣上從. The form is fixed: the governing qi descends, and the viscus whose phase it opposes rises to answer it, so that what the year does to a man is written as one qi moving and one organ following. The same six come back later in the passage on the five classes, where 司天 decides which kind of creature is quiet, which breeds, and which does not come to term at all. Its counterpart is 在泉, which has charge of the lower half; the two are never both in the same half of the year.
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.
| This site | governing the heaven | the qi in charge above; the chapter uses it as an office with an occupant, and the rendering keeps that |
| Transliteration | si tian | right about the referent, and it says nothing about which half of the year is meant |
| Descriptive | the qi in charge of the first half of the year | exact about this chapter's use, and too long to stand inside a sentence that names six of them |
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