shí jiǎ
Also rendered: The stone mass (keeps 瘕 as mass and 石 as hardness) · The stony concretion (clinical, and it overstates the material) · A fixed mass in the womb (explanatory, and it gives the site)
Reviewed · 2026-10-25
At a glance
The mass that sits in the womb and stops the menses. Cold qi lodges at the uterine gate, the gate closes, the qi cannot pass, and the blood that should have been discharged is not; it clots and stays, grows day by day until the belly looks like a pregnancy, and the menses no longer come on time. The chapter adds that it occurs only in women and can be guided out. Set against 腸覃 the pair is exact: one is outside the intestine, moves under the hand and leaves the calendar alone; the other is inside the womb, is fixed and abolishes the calendar. The name 瘕 is worth keeping — it is the word for a mass that is not simply a tumour, and the stone in it says hardness rather than material.
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 | the stone mass | the text's own image |
| Literal | stone false-growth | exact, and it is obscure |
| Clinical | a hard mass of retained blood in the womb | clear, and it explains |
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