jié luò
Also rendered: the knotted network (Literal, and keeps 結 as a knot) · the bound network (Same image, less tactile) · congested network vessels (Clinical paraphrase, loses the knot) · jie luo (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
A network vessel that has tied itself up, and the last of the chapter’s treatments. When the upper is replete and the lower empty, one feels along the vessel for the knot, needles it and draws blood, and the point is stated plainly in the text — 以見通之, so that it is seen to open. The word is the same 結 that elsewhere names bound-up qi and accumulations; here it names something a fingertip can find and a needle can undo.
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.
| Wiseman & Feng | bound network vessels | Their 結 is consistently bound when it describes qi or vessels that have tied up. |
| Unschuld | knotted network [vessels] | He keeps the concrete knot. |
| This site | the knotted network | 結 in 說文 is 締 — tied fast — and the text gives the word something to be tied around: you search for it (索), you needle it, and you draw blood until it is seen to open. Bound is the correct technical word and is used elsewhere on this site for bound-up qi, but here the knot is a thing under the finger, and knot says that in one syllable. Congested would turn a location into a state, and the rule depends on it being a location you can find. |
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