What drives growth in the seven-year cycles: teeth, hair, and the capacity to conceive. The single most important caution for a new reader is that 腎 here is a system of functions rather than the organ of modern anatomy.
The chapter hangs the whole of female development on one variable: at seven, kidney qi is flourishing (腎氣盛), and teeth change and hair grows; at three sevens it is even (腎氣平均) and the wisdom teeth come. Growth is the reading on a dial.
Readers coming from anatomy will look for the organ and find nothing. 腎 in these texts names a cluster of functions — growth, reproduction, the bones, the hair — that happens to share a name with the kidney.
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.