yín qì
Also rendered: overflowing qi (Keeps both the amount and the travel) · excess qi (Right about quantity, silent about direction) · leaking qi (Too accidental; here the route is rule-governed) · yin qi (Bare transliteration — and reads as yin before anything else)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The qi a viscus cannot keep to itself. Chapter 21 uses the word three times in a row, and the pattern never varies: the organ that has been spent pushes its qi out, and what spills goes to work on the organ that one overcomes — the kidney’s reaches the lung, the liver’s the spleen, the lung’s the heart. So 淫 here is a quantity and a direction at once: more than the vessel can hold, travelling a route that is already there. Chapter nine uses the same characters reversed, 氣淫, for a season that arrives ahead of its turn — the same idea of excess applied to the calendar rather than to an organ.
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 | excess qi | Their 淫 is regularly excess — the six excesses are the standard instance — and excess qi would follow that usage here. |
| Unschuld | flooding qi | He keeps the water in the graph, which gives the spreading and spends nothing on the route. |
| This site | overflowing qi | Every case in the chapter is a vessel that has run over along a channel it already governed: the liver's qi reaches the spleen because liver overcomes spleen. Excess describes a quantity and leaves the itinerary to be explained elsewhere; flooding is too violent for something the text treats as doing harm quietly. Bare transliteration is not an option here, since yin qi in English is read as the yin in yin and yang. |
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