máo zhé
Also rendered: breaking of the hair (Literal, and keeps both words) · the hair breaks (Closer to the Chinese word order) · brittle body hair (Descriptive of the state rather than the event) · mao zhe (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The sign that stands at the end of all five true visceral pulses. Each of the five has its own shape under the finger and its own colour in the face — the liver’s is like running a finger along a blade and the complexion green-white, the heart’s like a string of coix seeds and red-black — and each closes with the same three words: 毛折乃死, when the body hair breaks, then death. It is the one sign the chapter repeats five times without variation, and it is not a pulse sign at all: it is something you see on the body when the lung, which governs the skin and its hair, can no longer send anything to the surface.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Wiseman & Feng | (rendered descriptively where it occurs) | Not a fixed term in their glossary. |
| Unschuld | the body hair breaks | Keeps the event and marks the hair as body hair. |
| This site | breaking of the hair | 折 in 說文 is 斷 — a clean snap, not a withering — and that is why the phrase is frightening: the chapter does not say the hair thins or falls, it says it breaks, the way something already dead breaks. Unschuld's body hair is right and is what 毛 means here (說文: 眉髮之屬及獸毛), so the only question is whether to keep it; adding it costs nothing and prevents the reader from thinking of the hair of the head. |
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