A Discourse on the Yangming Vessel Explained

Yáng míng mài jiě

Chapter 30 is short, and it is the strangest chapter in the Suwen so far. It takes a set of behaviours that look like nothing else in the book — a man who cannot bear the sight of people or of fire, who starts in terror at the sound of wood while bells and drums leave him unmoved, who tears off his clothes and runs, climbs walls and rooftops he could never have climbed when well, sings, rails and curses at kin and stranger alike, and goes for days without eating — and it explains every one of them from a single premise. Yangming is the vessel of the stomach, the stomach is earth, and Yangming is the vessel richest in blood and qi of all the channels. Earth is averse to wood, so the patient starts at the sound of wood. Yangming governs the flesh and its vessel is full of blood and qi, so when evil lodges there the body heats, and a man in heat cannot bear fire. When Yangming goes into counterflow he pants and is distressed within, and a man distressed within cannot bear company. The chapter then draws its one prognostic line: if the counterflow reaches the depots the patient dies, if it reaches only the channels he lives. The second half explains the astonishing strength of the delirious patient by the same logic. The four limbs are the root of all the yang; when yang is exuberant the limbs become full, and fullness lets a man do what he could never do in health. Heat fills the body, so the clothes come off; yang fills the person, so the speech becomes railing and the shame that governs kin and stranger disappears. What the chapter describes is what later literature calls mania, and it is worth noticing how entirely it is explained without reference to the mind: no failure of will, no disorder of spirit, only a vessel too full of blood and qi, an earth that hates wood, and limbs that have more yang in them than they know what to do with.