It opens with the one sentence that every later chapter assumes: Taiyang disease
is a floating pulse, a stiff neck and headache, and aversion to cold. From there
it separates wind from cold -- a moderate pulse and sweating on the one side, a
tense pulse and no sweating on the other -- and gives the prescriptions that
answer to each. Cinnamon Twig Decoction and its many modifications occupy the
middle of the chapter; Ephedra Decoction appears toward the end.

The chapter is also where the methods are named: sweating, emesis and purgation,
and the rule that each is used only when the pattern calls for it. The last
passages show what happens when the wrong one is used.

This is the sample chapter from which the recording method of the whole book was
settled; the six prescriptions of the base text are given with their seventeen
ingredients and their measures, printed as the commentary prints them.

The chapter is short and entirely clinical. It distinguishes the stiff, backward
arching spasm from the soft one, gives the pulse of each, and warns that a body
already sweating must not be sweated again. It describes dampness as it attacks
from outside, as it settles in the joints, and as it rises to the head; and it
describes heatstroke as the case in which a man is hot, sweats, hates cold and
is thirsty, as against the case in which dampness and heat hold the body and the
pulse is fine and hollow.

All five prescriptions of the chapter -- Trichosanthes and Cinnamon Twig
Decoction, Ephedra plus Atractylodes, the Ephedra-Apricot-Coix-Glycyrrhiza
Decoction, White Tiger plus Ginseng, and the single drug Melon Stalk Powder --
stand in the small graphs of the commentary, four of them expressly referred to
the Synopsis of the Golden Casket. They are not printed as classic text here.

It sets out the four seasons and their proper qi, and then the qi that comes at
the wrong time -- warm in winter, cold in spring -- and names the illnesses that
follow: seasonal epidemic, cold damage, warm disease, wind warmth. It explains
how cold enters, where it lodges, how it changes, and why the same cause gives a
different illness in a strong man and a weak one. The six channels are then
taken one by one, each with the day on which it is affected, the signs by which
it is known, and the point at which it may be resolved by sweating or must be
resolved by purgation. The last paragraphs warn against treating what is not yet
settled and against treating what is already past.

Because the base text prints this chapter as continuous prose, its paragraphing
follows the sense rather than the question; the rule is stated in the notes
below.

It begins with a set piece: the three regions, yin and yang pressing on one
another, the blood and qi of the constructive and defensive, moving in and out
with the breath, moistening and spreading. Spring is string-like, autumn
floating, winter deep -- the pulse takes its shape from the season. From this
measure it argues that a pulse is called excessive or deficient only against a
standard, and that the standard is the man himself: his age, his build, his
work, the hour of the day.

The later passages turn to the pulse at the inch, the bar and the cubit, to the
five viscera each appearing at its own position, and to the signs by which a
physician knows that what he feels is not the pulse of this man but the pulse of
a season, or of a course of treatment, or of a dying body.

Cheng Wuyi's commentary is quoted selectively, marked 成注（節）.

The chapter opens by dividing the pulses into yin and yang: large, floating,
rapid, stirring and slippery are yang; deep, rough, weak, string-like and faint
are yin. From there it takes up the single pulses one by one -- slow, moderate,
flooding, tense, hollow, wiry, firm, hidden, weak, scattered, thready, deep,
slippery, stirring, intermittent -- names them, and tells what each is like
under the finger. It then turns to the mistakes a taker can make: a pulse read
before the patient has settled, a pulse taken through clothing, a pulse confused
by a full stomach or an empty one. The last passages describe the pulse after a
long illness, when the body has not yet returned to itself.

Cheng Wuyi's commentary runs beneath the classic in small graphs throughout,
glossing each name and drawing the whole into a single argument: that the pulse
is read from yin and yang, and that yin and yang are read from the five phases.
It is quoted selectively here, marked 成注（節）.

It begins with the physiology of blood: the upper burner warms, the middle burner moistens like dew, fluids are transformed to red, and the vessels fill in order from grandson to network to channel. Cut off that movement and cold lodges, blood roughens, guarding qi returns and cannot turn back — and an abscess forms. Cold turns to heat, heat rots flesh, flesh makes pus, and if the pus is not drained the rot runs inward through sinew, bone and marrow to the viscera, where it kills.

The body of the chapter is a register of nineteen named sores, each with its site, its appearance and its term of death — half a day for the throat, seven days for the chest, thirty for the rump, sixty for the inner thigh, a hundred for the yang and thirty for the yin. It ends with the distinction that organises the whole: an abscess does not sink in and spares the viscera; a deep sore sinks, exhausts and kills.

It opens with the Emperor's own experience — climbing a terrace, looking back from the stair, and finding himself dizzy — and Qi Bo's anatomy of the eye: each tissue assigned to a viscus, the whole gathered into the eye system that ascends to the brain. Evil striking the nape travels up that system, the brain turns, the system tightens, the essence scatters, and one object becomes two.

From there the chapter turns to the machinery of waking and sleeping. Forgetfulness, hunger without appetite, lying awake, eyes that will not open, sleeping too much and sleeping too little are all resolved into one mechanism: where guarding qi stays, in the yang or in the yin, and whether it can enter or leave in time.

Its first half explains the daily delay of intermittent fever — evil lodged at the wind palace, guarding qi descending a joint a day, so the meeting comes later each day. It then argues that thieving wind needs no particular season, only an open interstice; and the interstice opens by the moon. At full moon blood and qi are full and the skin is tight; at the empty moon the guarding qi departs, the flesh thins and the grime falls away, and the same wind goes deep.

The close is a calendar of omen: the three empties that kill suddenly, the three solids that cannot be harmed, and a month-by-month list of winds on the first day of the first month with the deaths each portends.

Each of the nine is first derived from a number: one to heaven and the lung and the skin, two to earth and the flesh, three to man and the blood vessels, and so through the seasons, tones, pipes, stars, winds and wilds. Each derivation yields a shape — a large head and sharp tip so the needle cannot go deep; a tube-like body with a round point so the flesh is not hurt; a tip like a mosquito's beak to be retained long and faintly.

The second list gives the nine instruments by name, model, length and indication, from the arrowhead at one inch six fen to the great needle at four inches. The chapter then closes with the body's correspondence to the nine wilds and a compact encyclopaedia of fives — flavours, gatherings, aversions, liquids, strainings, courses, cuttings, issuings, evils, viscera and governings — ending with the blood and qi of the six channels.

Its medical half turns the same wheel into pathology. Wind from the quarter where the Great One dwells is solid and nurtures; wind from the opposite quarter is empty and kills. Eight named winds are then mapped onto viscera, tissues and symptoms, and the chapter closes with the arithmetic of disaster: three empties meeting bring sudden death, two solids and one empty bring dripping dew and cold-heat, and three empties with a one-sided strike bring collapse and withered half-body.

The first half follows the qi out of the eye at dawn and down the yang channels of the limbs; the second gives the table of lodges against circuits, then the twenty-five marks of the clepsydra with the point where the qi sits at each — greater yang, lesser yang, yang brightness, yin division, turning over every four marks.

Its practical end is a rule of timing: needle the solid at its coming and the empty at its going, and wait until the qi is in the yang or the yin before inserting.

The first sets out five named techniques — shaking off the dust, opening the blind, removing the claw, piercing the garment, dissolving bewilderment — each with its indication and its point: Tian Rong and Lian Quan for the rebellious yang that chokes the chest; the palace of hearing at midday for the deafened eye and ear; Tian Fu and Da Zhu for the body that burns as if carrying coals.

The second movement turns to the five evils — abscess, great, small, heat, cold — and gives each its needling strategy, then widens into a theory of season and medium: you cannot move water on ice, nor needle reversion in frozen vessels; wait for warmth.

The last third is a pathology of evil qi: true, upright and evil wind; how empty evil strikes bone, sinew, vessel and flesh; and how, staying long, it becomes bone obstruction, sinew flow, intestinal flow, old growth, bone abscess and flesh abscess.

It then maps heat across the arm onto the body: elbow to above the waist, hand to below it, the back of the elbow to shoulders and back, the palm to the belly. The chapter in this edition breaks off at 「當奪」 and runs straight into a passage of the Suwen on seasonal treatment; the received text has been kept as it stands and the intrusion marked in the collation.

Its second half turns to the man rather than the method. The Emperor picks up his own rule — only to the right man may it be transmitted — and answers it with a list of natural aptitudes: the clear-eyed for colour, the sharp-eared for sound, the slow-spoken and careful-handed for needle and moxa, the poison-handed for pressing accumulations. The test of a poison hand is a turtle pressed under a bowl for fifty days.

Each type is given a physiology as well as a character — much yin and no yang, small stomach and large intestine, small vessels and large network vessels — and from that a rule of needling: drain the greater yin swiftly, guard the greater yang's yin, drain only the network vessels of the lesser yang. The chapter closes with the bodily signs by which each type may be recognised at a first meeting.

The middle stretch is a famous litany of correspondences — ten fingers to ten days, twelve vessels to twelve rivers, twelve joints to twelve months — which the text ends with a blunt qualification: a woman is short of two joints so that she may bear children, and there are those who bear none.

The last third is technical. It traces the hand greater yin and heart master vessels through their bending and turning, explains why the hand lesser yin has no transport point of its own, and closes with the eight hollows — elbows, armpits, thighs, backs of the knees — where evil lodges and produces contracture.

From there the chapter turns to abscess. Once pus has formed, the sage cannot undo it; ten die for one who lives. The good physician therefore acts before the form appears, and writes his prescriptions down so that others may act in his place. What has already suppurated is the business of the stone and the lancet, not of the fine needle.

The middle of the chapter is a catalogue of the five counters, first for abscess and then for diseases generally, each list ending in a death within a stated time. The counters are not a miscellany. The first list concerns abscess and tracks the failure of the body's outlets: the eye, the stomach, the abdomen, the shoulder and neck, the voice. The second and third lists concern disease generally, and their terms are pulse and form — a large pulse where the body is wasting, a small tense pulse where heat persists, a pulse that fails. In every case the sign is that pulse and body no longer agree, which is the same principle as the earlier prohibition on needling when disease and pulse oppose one another.

The final movement is darker: the needle that can save can also kill, and Qi Bo explains how — by meeting and seizing the qi of the viscera at the five li, five times five, until the transports are empty. The emperor calls this inhuman, asks to hear it anyway, and swears not to use it. The last section is a warning about the needle's own power. What begins as an instrument of life becomes, in the wrong hand, a means of draining the viscera at the five li, five times over. The emperor's recoil — I call it inhuman — is part of the teaching: the technique is described so that it can be forbidden, and the jade tablet is a prohibition rather than a licence.

The chapter closes with the image of the gate: needle the one who peeps at it, and he dies in the house; needle the one who has entered, and he dies in the hall.

The second half classifies people by flesh. Fat, lard-like and fleshy are distinguished by the firmness of the knee hollow and by whether skin and flesh separate. From this follow differences in cold and heat, in the abundance of blood and qi, and in the size of the frame.

The opening section repays attention for its anatomy of stagnation. Guarding qi has a normal circuit, yang by day and yin by night; illness begins when it loses that circuit and dams in the abdomen. Treatment is therefore topographical: find where it has pooled and open the nearest gate, above at renying and tiantu, below at sanli and the qi street, or at the flank when the pool reaches through both.

The body types carry the same logic into constitution. What separates fat, lard-like and fleshy is not weight but the relation of skin to flesh and the firmness of the muscle; and that relation predicts whether a person runs hot or cold, how much blood and qi he has, and therefore how vigorously he may be needled or drained. The ordinary person is the baseline against which the three deviations are measured. Nothing here is decorative: behind each distinction stands a needle, and a depth to which it may go.

The classification is not cosmetic. It decides how much blood and qi a person has to work with, and therefore how treatment should be dosed. The ordinary person is defined at the end as the one in whom nothing exceeds and nothing is lacking, the body being proportionate to itself.

The second half takes up the case that has no such history: no exposure, no fear, and yet sudden illness. Here too the cause is inward — a hidden evil plus a movement of liking or loathing that throws the blood and qi into disorder. Because the mechanism is invisible and inaudible, it is mistaken for ghosts.

The chapter ends with the shamans, and treats their cures without contempt: they worked because they knew which disease masters which, and where it came from. That is diagnosis, not superstition.

Water rises when pressed and subsides again, like a bag of water. Skin distension stays sunken, and the skin over it does not change colour. Drum distension is as large as skin distension but shows greenish-yellow skin and standing sinews. Intestinal swelling is a hard, movable mass that does not disturb menstruation. Stone concretion is a growing mass that does, and occurs only in women.

The sixth condition, stone water, is named in the question and never described — a gap in the received text that no commentary has been able to fill.

The distinctions are small and practical, and the chapter is a good example of how much the Lingshu can do without a single theoretical excursus. It ends with a line of treatment: drain the blood vessels, then regulate the channels.

There follows the longest catalogue in the Lingshu: five grains, five fruits, five animals, five vegetables, each assigned a flavour, and then the five colours of food, the five suitabilities for the diseased organ, and the five prohibitions. The lists are meant to be used at table, not merely contemplated.

The prohibitions run the same phase logic in reverse: what the organ's phase cannot bear is withheld. The liver, being wood, is forbidden the pungent, which belongs to metal, the phase that cuts it.

The final section gives a second, different rule — what each organ should eat when its colour is disordered — which does not contradict the first but answers a different question. The chapter closes with a reminder that the essence of heaven and earth goes out three parts for every one taken in, so that going without grain weakens a person within a day.

From these Bo Gao draws a ladder of skill. The best physician treats before the illness exists; the next, before it is full; the next, after it has declined. The inferior physician needles at the moment of attack, at the body's fullest, or when pulse and disease disagree — that is, precisely when needling can only add injury.

The conclusion is the sentence that later became a proverb: the superior physician treats the not-yet-ill. Its force here is technical rather than moral. It names the moment when the disease is still shallow enough to be turned.

From there it describes the fully formed person and then the long decline, decade by decade: running at ten, walking briskly at twenty, strolling at thirty, sitting at forty; at fifty the liver fails and the eyes dim; at sixty the heart fails and grief comes; at seventy the skin dries; at eighty the corporeal soul drifts and speech errs; at ninety the kidneys are scorched; at a hundred the spirit departs and the frame is left alone.

The decades are not merely a list of decays. Each age names the viscus that governs it and the faculty that goes with it, so the sequence reads as one movement from outward action to inward quiet: run, walk, stroll, sit, lie down. What fails first is what was most used; what is left at the end is the frame.

The last paragraph explains the short life by contrast: a shallow passage, a low wall, thin vessels, scanty blood, flesh that is not firm, and repeated injury by wind and cold. The span, in this account, is not fate but architecture.

The same logic is then extended from pain to poison and from poison to disease. A thick stomach, a dark complexion, large bones and full flesh tolerate toxic drugs; thin bone with a thin stomach tolerates nothing. Recovery follows the same grain — of two people hurt at once, the hotter recovers and the colder does not.

What the chapter offers is a rule of thumb for prognosis and dosage, stated in the plain terms of physique rather than of will.

Each channel is given a root, where its qi rises, and a tip, where it surfaces and can be reached. The roots cluster about the wrists, ankles and feet; the tips are at the head and face, the back, the armpits. Read as a set, the list is a geography of where a channel can be met — near its origin, or where it declares itself on the surface.

The second half turns to the qi streets, the four highways by which qi moving in the head, chest, abdomen and shins can be intercepted. The clinical note at the end is exact: press long enough for the finger to feel a response before needling, and expect movable pain to resolve while a painless mass does not.

Read as a set, the twelve pairs are a geography of access rather than a chart of points. The yang channels of hand and foot tip out at the eyes, the ears and the face; the yin channels tip out at the tongue, the back and the armpits. A channel can therefore be met near its root, at wrist or ankle, or where it declares itself on the surface. The qi streets apply the same logic to the trunk, where qi gathers in the head, chest, abdomen and shins and can be reached before it disperses.

The scheme is the five phases read as vulnerability. Each colour names the phase that the opposing season can injure, so that the question who will fall ill becomes the question which phase this body is short of. Long summer is given a wind of its own, and a separate rule besides: a complexion that is not uniform marks an unstable constitution, and instability is itself a risk.

The second half turns from wind to character, and begins by separating two things ordinary speech confuses. Enduring pain is not courage. There are brave men who stop at the first pain and cowards who do not flinch under it; what decides is the thickness of the skin, the firmness of the flesh, the slackness or tautness of the tissues. Courage, by contrast, is anatomy: deep-set eyes, long straight brows, a transverse burner, an upright heart, a large firm liver, a full gallbladder set to one side — a body built to hold qi.

The coward is the same list reversed: eyes large but shallow, burner running lengthwise, breastbone short, liver system slack, gallbladder hanging unfilled, stomach and intestines pushing outward, the ribs hollow beneath. His anger cannot fill his chest, and what rises falls again, which is why it does not last.

The last exchange is the chapter's most quoted. Wine is the essence of grain; its qi is fierce and swift; it distends the stomach, drives qi upward, floats the liver and sets the gallbladder athwart. For a moment the coward is the equal of the brave, and when the qi fails he repents. The name given is 酒悖, the wine rebellion: courage borrowed from a liquid, and returned.

The text writes 盻 for 盼 in the description of the frightened man, and 慓 for 剽 in the qi of wine; both are reproduced as printed.

The middle of the chapter sets out the colours themselves. Blue-black is pain, yellow-red is heat, white is cold — a triad so terse it has the force of an axiom, and one that recurs in every later text. Around it the chapter builds a method: the colour is read where it appears, in its own region; a sunken bone beneath the region means illness cannot be escaped; an encroaching colour means illness severe but survivable. Colour that moves upward worsens, colour that scatters downward like cloud is about to remit.

The pulse is brought in beside the face, and the two are read together. The inch mouth at the wrist governs within, the man's ying at the neck governs without; slippery, small, tight and deep at the wrist means the illness is within and worsening, while a large, tight, floating neck pulse means it is without. The chapter does not choose between face and pulse; it sets them side by side and lets each correct the other.

Its most famous passage is the map of the face. Court to head and face, tower to throat, centre of the tower to lung, lower limit to heart, straight below to liver, left of the liver to gallbladder, below to spleen, above the square to stomach, centre to large intestine, kidney beside it, navel at the kidney, and so on down to the bladder and uterus — then cheekbone to shoulder, arm, hand, breast, back, thigh, knee, shin, foot. It is a complete projection of the body onto the face, and it is given without argument, as a thing known.

Notice how the projection is ordered. The centre line of the face carries the viscera in something close to their anatomical sequence, lung above heart, liver and gallbladder to the left, spleen below, stomach and intestines at the centre, kidney beside the navel, bladder and uterus at the lowest point; the sides carry the limbs outward from cheekbone through shoulder and arm to hand, then inward again through thigh, knee and shin to foot. Nothing is argued and nothing justified: the map is inherited knowledge, older than the chapter that records it, which is why the closing sections can refer back to it as though the reader had it by heart.

Read beside the pulse, the face supplies what the wrist cannot — where, rather than merely whether. That is the chapter's real contribution: not a code of colours but a grid, on which colour becomes location and location becomes an organ.

Two death signs close the diagnostic section with unusual force: red on both cheekbones or black at the court, each as large as a thumb, means sudden death even though the illness seems to be improving. The final section returns to the map and adds the rule of left and right, of man and woman, and of colours that are sharp above or below. The chapter ends with the five colours assigned to the five viscera and the five tissues — the same scheme, brought back to its simplest form.

The text writes 顔 for 顏, 眦 for 眥, and 肺合脾 where the five joins require 肺合皮; each is reproduced as printed.

What is then transmitted is a method for reading two pulses. The inch mouth at the wrist governs within, the ren ying at the neck governs without; in health they answer each other like two ends of a stretched cord, with the neck slightly fuller in spring and summer and the wrist slightly fuller in autumn and winter. The whole chapter is an elaboration of that comparison: so many times greater, so many channels affected; agitated or not; abundant, vacuous, tight or intermittent; and for each, a rule — drain, supplement, moxa, bleed, or take the channels.

The scheme is arithmetical and cumulative. One, two, three times greater on the neck point to the three yang of foot and hand; the same on the wrist, to the three yin. Four times greater on either side is not a further channel but a barrier — overflowing yang or inner closure — and there the text says plainly that death is not to be treated. The numbers are therefore not a scale of severity but a map with an edge, and the edge is the instruction to stop.

The final paragraph adds a distinction the rest of the book rarely makes so explicitly: a craftsman may bind the method before it is full, but only one who binds it when full can teach the world. The difference is not skill but completeness, and the chapter leaves it there, with the great numbers repeated once more as a formula and a closing rule about urgent and weak pulses.

The text writes 干 for 于 in the comparison of the wrist and neck, 縻 for 糜, and 冩 for 寫; each is reproduced as printed.

Twenty-five is not an arbitrary count. Each viscus has five variables — size, height, hardness, uprightness, slant — and five times five is twenty-five; the six fu add their own five, but the text never multiplies them out, and the arithmetic stays deliberately loose. What matters is the principle: the organs are not ideal forms but individuals, and the range of variation is finite and therefore knowable.

Then comes the question that governs everything after. Some people live out their span untouched by wind and cold; others never leave a screened room and still fall ill. Qi Bo's answer is not about fate but about structure. The five viscera differ in size, height, hardness, straightness and slant; the six fu differ in size, length, thickness, knotting and slackness. Twenty-five variations, each with its own consequences. The chapter then does something no earlier text had done at this scale: it assigns a sign to each variation.

The signs are read from the surface. Red colour and fine grain mean a small heart; a long breastbone point means a firm one; broad shoulders and a sunken throat mean a high lung; lifted lips mean a high spleen; high ears mean a high kidney. The list runs through the five viscera twice — once as consequences, once as diagnostic marks — and the second list is the more remarkable, because it converts the body's visible frame into a map of the organs hidden inside it.

A third question turns from the individual viscus to the overall type. Five small viscera make a man little ill but much given to grief; five large ones make him slow and hard to grieve; five high ones, fond of lofty gestures; five low ones, fond of standing below others; five hard ones, free of illness; five brittle ones, never free of it; five upright ones, harmonious and liked; five leaning ones, crooked and given to theft. The caricature is deliberate: these are types, not diagnoses.

The clinical yield is a doctrine of susceptibility rather than of disease. A brittle heart is prone to consumption and wasting; a low lung to pain below the ribs; a leaning spleen to fullness and distension. None of these is a diagnosis. Each is a predisposition, and taken together they amount to the earliest systematic account in Chinese medicine of what later centuries would call the constitutional type.

The last section extends the same logic to the six fu, matching each to a tissue — lung to skin, heart to vessels, liver to sinew, spleen to flesh, kidney to bone — and reading the state of the fu from the state of the tissue. Thick skin means a thick large intestine; slack skin, a long one; bent yang channels, a knotted small intestine. The chapter ends with a single sentence that states its method: look at the outer correspondences, and you will know the inner viscera. That sentence is the practical form of the doctrine of outer examination set out two chapters earlier.

The title, ben zang, means the root of the viscera — not their anatomical origin but the ground of their variation. The argument is that this ground is laid down at birth and can be read for life: the same frame that tells you a man has a large heart tells you he will not be hurt by grief. That is a strong claim, and the text makes it without hedging.

The Emperor's question at the outset — why some are never ill — is answered twice, and the two answers do not quite meet. The first is structural: a well-framed body resists. The second, at the very end, is methodological: read the outside and you will know. Between them lies the whole chapter, and the gap between them is the space in which the practitioner works.

The text writes 悦 where received editions read 悗, 掲 for 揭, and 麽 for 么; each is reproduced as printed.

The comparison is worked out in detail. Early-flowering trees are cut down by spring frost; thin-barked ones split in long rain; firm and brittle alike break in a storm. Five kinds of injury are listed, and the chapter turns at once to the human counterpart: what is hurt is always the branch, never the sound trunk, and man's constant illnesses come from the joints, skin and pores that are not firm, where evil can lodge. From here the chapter becomes a diagnostic manual.

Five constitutions follow, each with its own question and its own sign: the person prone to wind with soaking sweat, whose flesh is loose; the person prone to consumption and wasting, soft in the five viscera yet hard in temper, whose anger drives qi upward until heat consumes the flesh; the person prone to cold and heat, with small bones and thin arms and a lower face of different colour; the person prone to blockages, with coarse grain and unfirm flesh; and the person prone to accumulations, with thin dry skin and a stomach and intestines that let evil linger. The five are the chapter's title.

Modern readers will recognise the five as a first essay in constitutional medicine: the question is no longer what the wind does, but what sort of body receives it, and the answer is read off the surface — flesh, bone, colour, skin.

The last exchange lifts the whole into time. Form explains who falls ill; the year explains when. Establish the year, and the phase that is high or low will show whether the disease rises or turns dangerous — and this is what the chapter calls the rule of the five changes. The movement from wood to body to season is continuous, and the same metaphor carries it: grain, joint, phase.

The text writes 麤 for 粗, 麽 for 么, and 臗 where received editions read 䐃; each is reproduced as printed.

Sun and moon cast a shadow; water and mirror hold a form; drum and echo answer a sound. Each is an inside read from an outside, exactly and without delay, which is the argument of the title. The physician does not open the body; he reads the shadow, the reflection, the echo. When the five tones are unclear and the five colours dim and the viscera are stirred, the same law still holds.

The closing formula — the far examined from outside by measuring what is within, the near from within by measuring what is without — is the earliest statement in the book of what later becomes the four examinations. The request for secrecy that follows is not decorative: a method this general was felt to be dangerous knowledge.

The text keeps 於 beside 于 and writes 摇 for 搖; both are reproduced.

The second half turns the same logic into a needling table. Five viscera, five changes, five transporting points; five times five is twenty-five, and with the source points added, six times six is thirty-six. The correspondences are then listed in the compact form the book prefers — colour, season, tone, flavour, day — and converted one by one into a rule of selection: viscus to well, colour to spring, time to stream, tone to river, flavour to sea. The chapter ends by explaining why flavour is said to govern the sea: the diseases in question are seated in the stomach and arise from food and drink.

Read together, the two halves are a single argument about scale. The same five-phase scheme that orders the year orders the day, and the same scheme that orders the day orders the choice of point. Nothing here is new doctrine; what is new is the compression, and the insistence that a rhythm observed at the bedside can be converted directly into a rule for the needle.

The text writes 巳 for 己 in the spleen's days, and 榮 for 滎 in the spring point; both are reproduced as printed.

The second half reverses the figure. Here the evil is not abundant but lodging, and the dreams shift from emotion to landscape and social scene — hills and fire, forests, marshes, ruined houses, towns, quarrels, beheadings, cellars, bowing. The list runs through the five viscera first, then the six fu, then the genital organ, neck, shin, limbs and bladder, and ends with fifteen. The counts are the chapter's spine: twelve abundances to be drained, fifteen insufficiencies to be supplemented, each with the same formula, "when it arrives, treat it, and it stops at once."

The chapter is less a theory of dreaming than a checklist for reading one. What matters is the organ named, not the scene; the scene is only the organ's signature.

The text writes 䐈 for the fatty tissue of the bladder region, where received editions read 脂.

The table is the substance of the chapter. Seven viscera are given as points of departure, and from each the disease is followed through a fixed number of days until death, with a seasonally paired hour at which death falls due — midnight in winter, noon in summer, and so on through cockcrow and sunset. The numbers differ from organ to organ, and the hours are chosen so that the same disease kills at opposite ends of the day according to the season. It is a prognostic schema, not a pathology: nothing is said of what is transmitted, only of how long it takes.

The last sentence draws the practical line. When the transmission follows the full chain, needling is forbidden; when a viscus is skipped, or when the disease has moved two, three or four organs rather than the whole series, the needle may be used. The chapter therefore ends where the physician must decide, with a rule for when the table does not apply.

The text writes 暝 in one place and 瞑 in another, and keeps 柰 for 奈; both forms are reproduced.

The answer is the most abstract sentence in the book. Yin and yang, Qi Bo says, have names but no form. They can be counted to ten, divided to a hundred, dispersed to a thousand, extended to ten thousand. The scheme is therefore not a single fixed table but a method of assignment, and the chapter's two halves are two different assignments made by the same method: first the months and days, then the five viscera. Nothing in the second half repeats the first, and nothing contradicts it either.

The therapeutic corollary is also stated in the negative. Because the qi of the body migrates with the seasons — left in spring, right in summer, right in autumn, feet in winter — the chapter ends not with where to needle but with where not to: four prohibitions, one for each quarter. The whole is less a doctrine of points than a warning about timing, and it is placed at the head of the second half of the book, where the Ling Shu turns from the nine needles to the calendar of the body.

The text uses 夘 for 卯 and keeps 於 beside 于; both are reproduced as printed.

Qi Bo then sorts qi by origin. What receives grain is turbid, what receives air is clear; the clear goes into yin, the turbid into yang, and each carries a little of the other, which is what makes the system work and what makes it go wrong. The picture is almost hydraulic: clear rises to the lungs, turbid descends to the stomach, the stomach's clear rises to the mouth, the lungs' turbid descends into the channels and settles in the sea.

The clinical rule that follows is one of the book's most durable: needle yin deep and retain, needle yang shallow and withdraw quickly — because the clear is slippery and the turbid is rough. It is a small chapter, but it supplies a rationale, rather than merely a prescription, for one of the most basic differences in needling.

The answers are consistently physiological. Fainting is loss of qi where blood was already deficient. Spurting is slippery blood in a full body with much yin. Black turbid blood that will not spurt is stored yang qi that has not been drained. Watery blood is fluid that has just entered and has not yet blended. Swelling is qi arriving before blood. Pallor is a separation of yin and yang. Vexation is a channel emptied through its luo. And the patient who loses much blood and does not falter is the one whose yin and yang were both full to begin with.

What unites them is a single idea: bleeding a luo is not a local act. It moves qi, it can empty a channel through its outlet, and its effects depend on what was in the vessel before the needle arrived. The chapter closes with the practical sign — vessels that stand out firm and red, small as needles or large as chopsticks — and with the warning that the measure, once lost, is answered by the case itself.

The middle section turns from body types to the movement of qi and blood, using two images — opening a channel above a deep pool, and clearing a dug course. Both describe treatment as the removal of an obstruction rather than the application of force; the water does the work once the gate is open.

The last third is the chapter's most quoted part, a compact account of the direction of the twelve channels, followed by a long description of the thoroughfare vessel, which rises to the nasopharynx, descends to the inner thigh and shin, and sends a branch to the instep. It is here that the book explains why the lesser yin, alone among the yin, appears to run downward — because the thoroughfare vessel runs with it. The chapter ends not with a rule but with admiration.

The graded rules are worth setting side by side, because they show a single principle applied five times. The fat and the strong who are heavy are needled deep, long and many; the thin, the brisk and the infant are needled shallow, brief and few. What changes is not the aim but the amount of injury the patient can bear. The ordinary person, being neither, is needled by the regular number — which is to say that the "regular" is a middle term, not a standard.

The thoroughfare vessel passage is also the chapter's answer to a puzzle in the channel system. If all yin runs upward to the chest, why does the lesser yin of the foot appear to descend? Qi Bo's reply is that what descends is not the channel but the sea that flows beside it, sending branches to the nasopharynx above and the instep below. It is a good example of how the book solves anatomical objections by redescription rather than correction.

The chapter's other half is a piece of physiognomy. A broad bright hall, a high foundation, square cheeks and ears whose lobes hang free are read as signs of abundant blood and firm flesh, and therefore of a patient who will bear needling and recover. The reverse picture — a pinched hall, a low wall without foundation, lobes turned outward — is read as danger even before illness arrives.

Both halves rest on the same assumption: the face is not a mask but a surface on which the interior is legible. The text calls the offices 閲, readings, and the envoys 使, which is to say that colour is something the zang sends out rather than something the skin produces. It is a small chapter, but it fixes the vocabulary that later face-diagnosis would use.