jiǔ ruò
Also rendered: cautery (Literal, and period-appropriate) · moxibustion (The usual modern term) · burning moxa (Descriptive)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The therapy of the north. The land is high, the people sleep out in the open and live on milk, the cold settles into the storing organs and they swell. What is cold is warmed by burning. Wang Bing: burning with fire and mugwort is what is meant by cautery, and he notes that people of the north still practise it. The base text writes the word 爇; the received text writes 焫. They are the same word.
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.
| Common English | moxibustion | Standard in TCM English and perfectly correct for the practice as it developed. |
| This site | cautery | Wang Bing glosses the phrase as 火艾燒灼 — an act of burning, not a material. Moxibustion names the herb; this sentence names the burning. Choosing cautery keeps the sentence as it was written and does not read the later specialisation of mugwort back into it. |
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