Oral Transmission

Kǒu wèn

The title means what it says: this is material the master gave by word of mouth, not from the written canon, and the chapter opens with the Emperor dismissing his attendants to receive it. What follows is the most systematic anatomy of everyday reflex in the book — twelve ordinary events, each asked as a single question, each answered with a mechanism and a pair of points.The twelve are yawning, hiccup, sighing, shivering, belching, sneezing, drooping of the limbs, weeping, deep sighing, drivelling, ringing in the ears, and biting one's own tongue. The answers are mechanical in the best sense. Yawning happens because yin gathers below while yang has not yet gone, and the two pull against each other. Hiccup happens because old cold and new grain qi collide in the stomach and rebel upward. Sneezing happens because yang qi is harmonious and full and issues from the nose. Each is a small physiology, complete in itself.The chapter's high point is weeping. The heart is named master of the viscera, the eye the gathering place of the ancestral vessels and the road of the upper fluids, mouth and nose the doors of qi. Grief moves the heart, the heart shakes the viscera, the viscera stir the ancestral vessels, the vessels open the fluid road, and tears come. If the tears do not stop, the fluid is exhausted, the essence is not irrigated, and the eye goes blind. The condition has a name — seizing the essence — and the passage is one of the earliest accounts anywhere of what we would call dry eye progressing to loss of sight.The closing paragraph is a summary, and it makes a claim worth pausing on: wherever the evil is, there is deficiency. Twelve conditions that look like excess are all traced back to emptiness, and the treatment is tonification. It is a small manifesto, and it governs much of what follows in the book.Read as a set, the twelve answers also form a diagnostic index. Each pairs one involuntary act with one mechanism and one or two points, and the points are almost always on the channel that governs the act rather than on the place where it shows. Yawning is kidney, hiccup is lung, sneezing is bladder, drivelling is kidney again, ringing ears is the ancestral vessels. The pattern is not a list of remedies but a way of asking: which channel is short of qi, and what small sign does that shortage produce?The two long speeches in the middle — on weeping and on the twelve evils — are where the chapter earns its place. The first is a chain of causation from emotion to organ to vessel to fluid to sight, each link stated as a consequence of the one before and none of them left to inference. The second is a general principle about empty orifices that later medicine would apply far beyond the twelve examples given here, from tinnitus to the failing memory of age.