kāi guǐ mén
Also rendered: opening the ghost gate (Literal; keeps the name) · opening the pores (Clinical; drops the image) · inducing sweat (Purely functional)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The upper half of the chapter’s two-handed treatment for oedema: sweat the patient. Wang Bing glosses it as opening the mysterious storehouse and sending the qi out. It is named in the same breath as cleaning the pure storehouse, so the whole treatment is: let water out through the skin above and through the bladder below. Every later Chinese discussion of 水腫 inherits this pair.
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 | open the pores, or induce sweating | Most translations reduce the phrase to its function. |
| This site | opening the ghost gate | 鬼門 is a name, not a description — the text is naming a gate and telling you to open it. Open the pores removes the image and makes the phrase sound modern; keeping ghost gate keeps the fact that the body is being described as a walled thing with gates, which is how the chapter treats it, and which is why 潔淨府 two words later reads naturally as another building. |
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Reading path
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