fú luò
Also rendered: Floating network vessel (this site; a network vessel near enough the surface to be seen in its region) · Superficial collateral (the usual modern acupuncture rendering)
Reviewed · 2026-10-02
At a glance
The network vessel as it shows itself on the surface — the one the chapter asks you to look for, six times over, in each of the six regions: 視其部中有浮絡者. It is not a class of vessel but a vessel in a place, near enough the skin to be seen, and the whole visual method of chapter 56 hangs on it. Read its colour — much blue-green is pain, much black obstruction, yellow and red heat, much white cold, and all five together cold and heat — and when it is full, 絡盛, the evil has begun to move in and lodge in the conduit. The site’s entry for 浮 on its own (id 634) is the autumn quality of the pulse; this is the other use of the same graph.
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.
| This site | floating network vessel | read by its colour, in the skin region belonging to its channel |
| Modern acupuncture | superficial collateral | usually counted among the fifteen collaterals rather than treated as a region-by-region finding |
| Literal | floating net | 浮 floating, 絡 the floss that crosses, both kept here in their plain sense |
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