chì hòu
Also rendered: The watchposts (this site; 斥候 is a scout, and the chapter uses it for the standing watch kept on the turning of the seasons) · The scouts (shorter, and the sentence is about where they stand rather than about them)
Reviewed · 2026-10-14
At a glance
The watchposts from which the year is watched. The chapter quotes 《大要》 for it: 彼春之暖，爲夏之暑；彼秋之忿，爲冬之怒。謹按四維，斥候皆歸，其終可見，其始可知 — the warmth of spring becomes the heat of summer, the anger of autumn becomes the rage of winter; keep to the four corners and the posts all come home, so that the end can be seen and the beginning known. The word is the chapter’s one military image for the physician’s work: what is watched is not a season but the turning of one season into the next, at the corner where it happens and before it has happened. It belongs with 四維 in the same sentence, and it is why the passage can go on at once to a counted lag of thirty days and to the seasonal pulses of 《脈要》.
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 | the watchposts | the watching kept at the four corners of the year, from which a season's turn is seen before it happens |
| Literal | the spies | exact about 斥候, and it puts a battle into a calendar |
| Descriptive | watching the quarters for the change of the season | clear, and it loses the two-graph name |
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