tiān jì
Also rendered: the taboo of heaven (Keeps 忌 at full strength) · heaven's prohibitions (Weaker; sounds like a list rather than a danger)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The prohibitions laid on treatment by the calendar: no needling in cold weather, no draining as the moon waxes, no supplementing when it is full, no treatment at all when the rim is empty. Chapter 26 does not present these as rules of thumb but as the point at which a physician who ignores them injures the patient — hence the flat sentence that the taboos of heaven must not be unknown. The term is the chapter’s own name for its subject, and it appears once, at the close of the opening movement.
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 | heavenly prohibitions | Wiseman prefers the plural, which fits the fact that the chapter gives four of them, but it flattens the 单数 term into a category. |
| Unschuld | what heaven forbids | Unschuld turns it into a clause, which reads well in his continuous translation but loses its standing as a technical term. |
| This site | the taboo of heaven | This chapter uses the word once and uses it as a name for everything it has just said, so we keep it a noun and keep 天 as heaven, matching our rendering of 天光 and 法天則地 elsewhere on the site. |
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Reading path
Guided routes through the corpus, each built on a handful of chapters and their key terms.
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