liǎng shén
Also rendered: The two spirits (keeps the graph and its difficulty) · The two potencies (interpretive, and it avoids the ghost) · Yin and yang (the common gloss, and it is not in the sentence)
Reviewed · 2026-10-25
At a glance
The pair whose engagement produces the body. The chapter has just asked how what is one qi comes to be distinguished into six names, and the first answer is this: the two spirits engage, join and form the shape, and it is always born before the body — this is called essence. The sentence is the book’s shortest account of conception, and its difficulty is the word 神. It is not the alertness of a living person, which the same graph names elsewhere; it is the potency of the two parents before there is a person at all. Later readings take the two as yin and yang, or as the father’s and mother’s essence, and the ambiguity is kept here rather than resolved.
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 two spirits | the text's own words |
| Literal | the pair of spirits | exact, and it is opaque |
| Clinical | the two parental essences | clear, and it is an interpretation |
Search the glossary
Reading path
Guided routes through the corpus, each built on a handful of chapters and their key terms.
See all reading paths