yùn yǐn
Also rendered: hot pressing and pulling (Keeps both halves as actions on a body) · hot compresses and traction (The modern clinical equivalents) · ironing and stretching (Literal, and nearly what the words say) · yun yin (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
Heat laid on the body and traction applied to it — the pair the chapter prescribes for disease of the sinews, in the case of a body that labours while the mind is at ease. It belongs to the chapter’s sequence of matched treatments, and it sits in the middle of that sequence: the vessel is dealt with by cautery and puncture, the flesh by needle and stone, the sinews by this, the throat by drugs, and numbness by rubbing and wine. The old commentators are right that the logic is depth — each tissue is reached by the method that can reach it — and the sinews, which are neither surface nor interior, get the method that works by heat and by pulling.
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 | pressing with hot [substances] and pulling | They unpack the compound into its two methods, which is clearer but less compact. |
| Unschuld | [therapy with] hot compresses and stretching | He supplies the nouns a modern reader needs, at the cost of the verbs. |
| This site | hot pressing and pulling | 熨 is laying heat on and 引 is drawing a bow — both are things done, not things applied. The chapter is enumerating actions, and 'compresses and traction' turns them into objects. |
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