sī wài chuǎi nèi
Also rendered: Reading the outside from the inside (keeps both directions) · Presiding over the outer to measure the inner (literal, and it is long) · Inferring the interior from the exterior (clinical, and it is an interpretation)
Reviewed · 2026-10-25
At a glance
The chapter’s closing formula, and the earliest statement in the book of what examination is. The physician does not open the body; he reads the shadow the sun casts, the form the mirror holds, the echo the drum returns. 揣 is a cautious word — to measure by estimate rather than to know directly — and the caution is the point: the inference is exact because the correspondence is exact, not because the eye is sharp. Read with its other half, 司内揣外, it covers both directions, the far read from without and the near from within, and the pair is what later medicine divides into the four examinations. The chapter asks that the formula be stored in the chamber of the numinous orchid, and the request is not decorative: a method this general was felt to be dangerous knowledge.
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 | reading the outside from the inside | plain and exact |
| Literal | presiding over the outside, measuring the inside | exact, and it is unwieldy |
| Methodological | external examination by inference | clear, and it loses the symmetry |
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Reading path
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