dǎo yǐn àn qiāo
Also rendered: guiding, pulling, pressing and lifting (Four verbs, following Wang Bing's gloss) · daoyin and anqiao (Pinyin; turns four verbs into two nouns) · breathing exercises and massage (Modern paraphrase)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The therapy of the centre, and the only one of the five that the text says came out rather than came from. The land is flat and damp, the food is plentiful and the work is light, and the illnesses are weakness, reversal, cold and heat. Wang Bing glosses all four syllables: guiding and pulling means shaking the sinews and bones and moving the joints; pressing means pressing down on the flesh; lifting means raising the hands and feet briskly. He adds that people of the centre use it as the proper way of nourishing the spirit and regulating the qi.
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 | daoyin and massage | The usual pairing in TCM English; convenient, but it flattens the phrase before the reader meets it. |
| This site | guiding, pulling, pressing and lifting | Wang Bing glosses the four syllables one by one — shaking sinews and bones, moving the joints, pressing the flesh, briskly raising hands and feet. The phrase is four actions in a row, not two disciplines with names. Translated as four verbs the gloss survives; rendered as two nouns it is gone. |
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