At a glance
Pathogenic factors named for how they arrive: they strike where defence is thin (虛) and get in unnoticed (賊). The instruction that follows — avoidance in season (避之有時) — is the corpus’s earliest statement of preventive regimen.
Both adjectives describe the manner of entry, not the nature of the thing. 虛 — empty — says the body has a gap; 賊 — thief — says what got in took advantage of it. Neither word says what the wind is.
Which is why the remedy named here is timing rather than treatment: avoid them in season (避之有時). Prevention in these texts is scheduling before it is pharmacology.
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.
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Reading path
This term belongs to Foundations — the five core concepts, in the order the Suwen introduces them.