Archives: Glossary

Each entry gives the term in traditional and simplified form, its pinyin, the senses it carries in the classical corpus, the passages where it does real work, and how published translations have rendered it.

  • 痺厥

    bì jué

    Impediment inversion · bi jue

    Winter's pair: obstruction and inversion, named together. Suwen 4 lists them last in its catalogue of what each season is prone to, and last again in the catalogue of what a disciplined year avoids — 冬不病痺厥、飱泄而汗出也. Why the two are one subject is the chapter's own physics: winter stores, and the failure of storing is both a stopping and a reversal. What stops is the 痺; what reverses, so that the hands and feet go cold while the root is at fault, is the 厥. The site carries both graphs singly as well — 痺 as bi · obstruction, 厥 as inversion — and this entry is for the pair as the chapter uses it.

  • 甚紀五分

    shèn jì wǔ fēn

    In the worst case, a difference of five parts

    How far out a year may be. The passage asks what happens when the qi above and the qi below do not match: 天氣不足,地氣隨之;地氣不足,天氣從之 — and then says how much of the difference will be visible. 大要曰:甚紀五分,微紀七分,其差可見. Read with the sentence before it (故上勝則天氣降而下,下勝則地氣遷而上,多少而差其分,微者小差,甚者大差,甚則位易氣交,易則大變生而病作矣), the figure is a threshold: the discrepancy is always there, and only when it grows does it turn into disease. It is the chapter's last word on degree, and the only place in it where a difference is given a number.

  • 内關

    nèi guān

    Inner Obstruction

    The name given when the wrist pulse is four times the neck pulse, as 溢陽 is given when the neck is four times the wrist. The image is of a gate barred from within: the yin has swollen until it can no longer let the yang through, and the verdict is blunt — death, beyond treatment. It is the exact counterpart of overflowing yang, and the pair marks the chapter's outermost reach: at one, two and three degrees the disease is still named by channel, at four it is named by a failure of passage. Note that the graph is 關, a gate, and not 内關 the point on the forearm; the two are homographs and nothing more, which is why the site keeps the phrase as a diagnostic name and not as an acupuncture one.

  • 内風

    nèi fēng

    Inner wind · nei feng

    Inner wind is the wind of the bedchamber: caught when the body has been opened by sweating and is therefore unprotected. It stands in the chapter's catalogue between leaking wind (caught drinking) and head wind (caught washing the hair) — each named for the act that left the body open.

  • 不仁

    bù rén

    Insensitivity · bu ren

    Numbness — the tissue that no longer reports. Chapter 24 gives it a cause and not merely a description: a body subjected repeatedly to fright and fear, in which the channels and networks no longer get through. The word is worth a note because it is the book's moral vocabulary turned to a clinical use, and because the chapter attributes it to a life rather than to a pathogen. It is also the only one of the five forms and wills whose treatment is entirely external, which follows: if the trouble is that the part does not answer, the methods are the ones that address it from the outside.

  • 内鍼

    nà zhēn

    Inserting the needle · na zhen

    Bringing the needle in — insert. Chapter 27 is the clearest statement in the Suwen of the respiratory timing of insertion, because it gives both techniques and they are opposites: in draining one inserts on an inhalation and withdraws on the exhalation, so that the great qi comes out; in supplementing one inserts at the end of an exhalation and withdraws on an inhalation, so that the qi cannot get out. The reading nà is what makes the phrase a verb; read nèi it would be a location, and the sentence would have no predicate.

  • 腸癰

    cháng yōng

    Intestinal abscess

    Abscess within the bowel. Chapter 45 names it once, as the complication that makes counterflow inversion in lesser yang untreatable — the only entry in the catalogue with a prohibition rather than a treatment.

  • 腸澼

    cháng pì

    Intestinal flux · chang pi

    Dysentery — a flux from the bowel, carrying blood, white froth, or pus and blood. Chapter 28 treats it as a set piece, asking four questions in a row and matching what is passed against what the pulse is doing: with blood, heat in the body kills and coldness lets live; with white froth, a sunken pulse lives and a floating one dies; with pus and blood, a pulse hanging on the edge of breaking kills and a slippery large one lives; and when neither heat nor the hanging pulse is present, it comes back to the same test — slippery and large is life, hanging and rough is death.

  • 腸覃

    cháng tán

    Intestinal Massing

    The first of the two abdominal masses, and the one that moves. Cold qi lodges outside the intestine and wrestles with the guarding qi; the qi can no longer nourish, something ties and binds, evil qi rises and a fleshy polyp grows. It begins the size of a hen's egg and enlarges until the belly looks like a pregnancy; in long cases it lasts for years, feels hard under the hand, shifts when pushed, and the menses come on time. That last clause is the whole diagnosis: a mass outside the womb leaves the womb's calendar intact, and it is exactly what separates 腸覃 from 石瘕, which sits in the womb and stops the menses. The name is thus a description of behaviour — a thing that extends along the gut, outside it — rather than of shape.

  • 腸風

    cháng fēng

    Intestinal wind · chang feng

    Intestinal wind is wind that has lingered long enough to reach the interior. Wang Bing gives the mechanism: with wind in the intestines the food is not transformed and passes out as it went in. It is the only entry in the chapter's catalogue of 'how it was caught' that is named for duration rather than for an act.

  • 腸痺

    cháng bì

    Intestine obstruction

    Obstruction lodged in the intestines. Its signs pair a thirst that does not come out the other way with a strife of the central qi, and the chapter adds the diarrhoea that now and then breaks out: the food comes out as it went in. It belongs to the two palace obstructions the chapter names, reached through eating and drinking rather than through a season.

  • 厥

    jué

    Inversion

    Reversal: a failure of the qi at the root that shows itself in the extremities — cold hands and feet, or hot soles, and in its counterflow form, loss of awareness. Chapter 45 is the Suwen's treatise on it, and it gives the word one anatomy: the lower body, the foot, and the paths yin and yang take through them. The site renders 厥 inversion throughout, following the existing entries for 煎厥 and 薄厥.