A Discourse on the Channels and Network Vessels

Jīng luò lùn

The fifty-seventh chapter is the shortest argument in the book, and it is the chapter that tells the reader how to use what the fifty-sixth had just set up. The 《太素》 kept the two as one piece — its ninth juan runs straight from the skin regions into this text without a break — and the question asked here is the one the previous chapter had left open: if every conduit has a region on the skin, and the floating network vessels in that region change colour, whose rule do those colours follow? The answer given is a distinction rather than a rule. The conduits have a constant colour, and it is the colour of the viscus they belong to: the heart red, the lung white, the liver blue-green, the spleen yellow, the kidney black. The network vessels have no constant of their own. Those that run deep, the yin networks, keep the colour of their conduit; those that lie shallow and are read with the eye, the yang networks, change with the four seasons, and that change is not yet illness. What follows is the earliest statement of a method that later books simply assume: read the colour of the yang networks, and read it against the season. Cold predominating makes the blood congealed and sluggish, and sluggish blood shows blue-green and black; heat predominating makes it smooth and wet, and that shows yellow and red. Both are normal, and both are called no illness. Illness is named only when the five colours all appear at once, and then it is called cold and heat. The chapter closes, like so many others, with 帝曰：善 — and says nothing further, leaving the colour chart to be filled in from the chapters on the skin regions and on the five colours. Four things about the text as it is printed here. The quotation marks on the seven speeches are not in the base text and have been removed. 岐 is written 歧, as the site writes it everywhere but ch3. 見 is read jiàn twice, as it was read in the parallel line of ch56, with the 現 reading recorded in the collation. 淖 is read nào, after Wang Bing 淖，濕也；澤，潤液也; the 《太素》 gloss 丈卓反, which points to zhuó, is set out in the collation rather than adopted here.