A Discourse on Regulating the Channels

Tiáo jīng lùn

Sixty-two is the chapter in which the Suwen says what it means by deficiency and excess. The chapters around it count things – three hundred and sixty-five points, fifty-nine houses of the qi, fifty-seven water points. This one argues, and it argues in four movements, each answering a question the Emperor puts in turn. The first movement is a list, and the list is the whole man. There are five excesses and five insufficiencies, one pair for each depot: the heart stores the spirit, the lung the qi, the liver the blood, the spleen the flesh, the kidney the will. Ten states, and each one gets the same three things – what it looks like when it is out of measure, what it looks like before blood and qi have pooled and the depots are still settled, and the needling that answers it. The pattern repeats five times, and the repetition is the teaching: excess is drained through the vessel that is full, insufficiency is supplemented through the vessel that is empty, and the faint disorder – the one that has not yet entered the channels – is treated by moving qi, not by letting blood. The second movement is the theory, and it is the reason the chapter is quoted. Excess and deficiency are not quantities; they are positions. Blood and qi are one thing moving, and when they pool in one place they are absent from another. Where the qi has pooled, the blood is empty; where the blood has pooled, the qi is empty. What is present is excess, what is absent is deficiency – and the same pooling carried upward is the great counterflow that kills outright unless the qi turns back. The third movement asks where the evil comes from, and the answer divides the world in two. What arises in the yang is got from wind, rain, cold and heat, and it comes in through the skin, from the grandchild vessels to the network vessels to the great channels, making the vessel hard and large and the flesh unpressable. What arises in the yin is got from food and drink, from lodging and place, and from joy and anger – and here the chapter is striking, because the mechanism it gives is domestic: joy sinks the qi, grief disperses it, cold food steams the middle, and the blood congeals. The four sentences that follow – yang empty gives cold without, yin empty gives heat within, yang full gives heat without, yin full gives cold within – are then each explained as a failure of circulation in a specific place, not as a statement about temperature. The fourth movement is the manual. The great draining opens the gate, goes in with the qi and comes out with the qi, leaves the outer gate unclosed and shakes the way wide. The supplement that pursues waits for the out-breath, closes the hole of the needle on all four sides so that the essence cannot escape, and brings the needle out only when the qi has arrived. Then the closing rule, which is the most quotable thing in the chapter: treat disease in the vessels in the blood, in the blood in the network vessels, in the qi in the defence, in the flesh in the partings of the flesh, in the sinews in the sinews, in the bone in the bone – with a burnt needle for the tight places, a fire-heated needle and a poultice for the bone, criss-cross needling when the body hurts but the pulses do not, and the great needling when the pain is on one side and the vessel on the other. Examine the nine probes, and the way of the needle is complete.