tiān huàn
Also rendered: The heaven-made eunuch (literal, and it keeps 天) · The natural eunuch (clear, and it loses the graph) · The heaven-made eunuch (the site's convention)
Reviewed · 2026-10-25
At a glance
The man who never grows a beard and is incapable of generation without having been wounded. The chapter sets him beside the 宦者, who has been cut and whose thoroughfare vessel is injured so that blood is drained and never returns. The heaven-made case has lost no blood: the difference is congenital. Qi Bo’s answer is 天之所不足 — the penetrating and controlling vessels are not full, the ancestral sinew does not form, there is qi but no blood, the lips and mouth are not nourished, and so no beard grows.
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 heaven-made eunuch | the text's own distinction |
| Literal | the heaven official | wrong sense of 宦 |
| Clinical | congenital hypogonadism | modern, and an identification |
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