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.

  • 痺氣

    bì qì

    Obstructing qi · bi qi

    The chapter's answer to cold that comes from inside a person who is not thinly dressed and never took cold: there is much obstructing qi, yang qi is scant and yin qi abundant, and the body is cold as though just drawn out of water. Not a disease name so much as a state — the qi is blocked, and warmth is what blocked qi cannot deliver.

  • 痺熱

    bì rè

    Obstruction heat

    In chapter 43 the answer to why some obstructions run cold and some hot is a matter of proportion. Much yang and little yin lets the disease qi prevail; yang meets yin and the disease comes out as heat. The chapter needs a name for it and makes one by putting the two graphs together.

  • 同病異治

    tóng bìng yì zhì

    One disease, different treatments

    The principle chapter 46 draws from its abscess of the neck: what is called one disease may be two states, and the state settles the treatment. While the qi of the abscess is still growing one opens it with the needle; once qi is full and blood has gathered one drains it with stone. The chapter is careful to say that both grades carry the same name — 同名異等 — so the difference is in the disease and not in the physician.

  • 偏風

    piān fēng

    One-sided wind · pian feng

    One-sided wind is what wind becomes when it strikes a transport on one side of the body rather than settling in a store. Chapter 42 sets it beside 偏枯 (withering on one side), and one line of commentary — Slippery Shou's, cited by Guo Aichun — holds that the opening list's 偏枯 should in fact read 偏風.

  • 發矇

    fā méng

    Opening the Blind

    A named needling method, listed under the prohibitions: on a 甲乙 day one may not needle the head, nor 發矇 in the ear. The name says what it does — it opens a film, and what it opens here is the ear, later comment identifying the points inside the auditory meatus. Two things follow. First, early needling had methods named for their effect rather than their site. Second, even a good method has days on which it must not be used.

  • 開鬼門

    kāi guǐ mén

    Opening the ghost gate

    The upper half of the chapter's two-handed treatment for oedema: sweat the patient. Wang Bing glosses it as opening the mysterious storehouse and sending the qi out. It is named in the same breath as cleaning the pure storehouse, so the whole treatment is: let water out through the skin above and through the bladder below. Every later Chinese discussion of 水腫 inherits this pair.

  • 煩冤

    fán yuān

    Oppressed and aggrieved

    煩冤 is the symptom that runs through both halves of the chapter. It appears first in Lei Gong's question: 肝虚、腎虚、脾虚,皆令人體重煩冤 — deficiency of liver, kidney or spleen all make the body heavy and the chest oppressed. It returns in Huang Di's reading of the case: 欬嗽煩冤者,是腎氣之逆也, cough with oppression is the kidney qi rebelling. The word is not 煩躁, fretful agitation; 冤 carries the sense of being bent and unable to straighten, so the whole phrase is a fullness that has no way out. That is why it belongs with 體重 and with 欬嗽 rather than with restlessness.

  • 悒悒

    yì yì

    Oppression · yi yi

    A closed-in, brooding discomfort — the feeling of something shut up inside. The chapter uses it as the last sign of the ceasing yin malaria: fearfulness, shortness of qi, and an oppressed belly. Doubled, it is a state rather than a moment.

  • 泄風

    xiè fēng

    Outpouring wind · xie feng

    Outpouring wind is wind lodged in the interstices: Wang Bing's gloss turns on the word 泄 — with wind in the interstices the sweat pores open and the sweat is driven out, which is why it is called outpouring. Its signs are sweat that soaks the clothes, a dry mouth, and an inability to labour.

  • 溢飲

    yì yǐn

    Overflow rheum · yi yin

    Chapter 17's account of what happens when a man drinks heavily while very thirsty: the fluid does not stay in the stomach and intestines but passes easily into the space between the flesh and the skin, and that is 溢飲. The chapter's reason for discussing it here is diagnostic: a liver pulse that is soft and scattered, with a complexion that is still glossy, points to overflow rheum rather than to injury — where a hard and long liver pulse with a complexion that is not green points to blood collected under the flanks from a fall.

  • 淫氣

    yín qì

    Overflowing qi · yin qi

    The qi a viscus cannot keep to itself. Chapter 21 uses the word three times in a row, and the pattern never varies: the organ that has been spent pushes its qi out, and what spills goes to work on the organ that one overcomes — the kidney's reaches the lung, the liver's the spleen, the lung's the heart. So 淫 here is a quantity and a direction at once: more than the vessel can hold, travelling a route that is already there. Chapter nine uses the same characters reversed, 氣淫, for a season that arrives ahead of its turn — the same idea of excess applied to the calendar rather than to an organ.

  • 溢陽

    yì yáng

    Overflowing Yang

    The state in which the neck pulse is four times the wrist pulse and both large and rapid: 人迎四盛,且大且數,名曰溢陽,溢陽爲外格 — overflowing yang is outer obstruction. The image is of water that has left its channel: the excess is not strength but a failure of containment, and the treatment is to open what is blocked rather than to add anything.