yuān
Also rendered: aching (The ordinary word for what the dictionaries describe) · sour aching (Keeps the sour that later lexicons reach for) · deep aching (Right in feel; puts in a place where the text puts none) · yuan (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
A word that survives in the Suwen in two places and was already rare when the dictionaries were assembled. In chapter 7 it is the ache in the calf that comes with the three yang’s disease: cold and heat, abscesses below, flaccidity, reversal, and an aching shank. In chapter 21 it is the heart that aches, when true emptiness is there and the one yin governs. Nothing else hangs on the word; it belongs to descriptions where the body hurts sourly and without inflammation, which is why the dictionaries reach for sour.
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 | aching | They render 㾓 as aching in the places where it names discomfort rather than a disease. |
| Unschuld | aching / soreness | He sometimes supplies soreness where the site is a limb. |
| This site | aching | The single English word that neither promises inflammation nor asks for a location: sour aching would import the dictionary reading into the sentence, and deep aching would add a judgement the base text does not make. Given that the graph occurs twice in the whole Suwen, it also seems fair not to give it a technical English name of its own. |
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