Faint fine pulse · mai wei xi

In brief

A pulse faint in force and fine in width at once. In this chapter it opens the disease: with a wish only to sleep it defines lesser yin, because the yang is too weak to fill the vessels and the spirit too dim to stay awake. It returns near the end in a heavier form — faint, fine and deep, with the patient lying down, sweating without vexation, wanting to vomit, and later diarrhoea and restlessness — where the chapter reads it as a fatal sign. Elsewhere it appears after purging and sweating, with shivering, as the mark of both inner and outer depletion. The quality is thus never incidental: it measures how much yang remains, and whether it can still be warmed back.