yíng
Also rendered: the camp pulse (Literal, and keeps the enclosure image) · the barracks pulse (Same image, more military than the text is) · deep pulse (Accurate but generic — loses 營 entirely) · ying pulse (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The shape the winter pulse takes. Where the spring pulse is straight and the summer pulse rises and falls, the winter pulse is said to arrive sunken and beating — deep under the finger, held in like a camp at rest. The image is not of weakness but of containment: this is the season in which the myriad things close and store. Its excess is a pulse that feels like a flicked stone, hard and unyielding; its deficiency is a departure that hurries, and with it come lassitude, pain along the spine, scant qi, and a heart that hangs as if hungry.
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.
| Wiseman & Feng | (not a fixed term; winter pulse is read as deep/沉) | The chapter's four seasonal shapes are not all given as technical pulse names. |
| Common English | deep pulse, or the winter pulse | Both appear; the seasonal pairing is usually kept. |
| This site | the camp quality | 營 in 說文 is 市居 — dwellings set within an enclosure — and the word carries the sense of something gathered and walled in. That is what makes it the right name for the winter pulse: the qi has not weakened, it has withdrawn behind a wall. Deep is true but says only where the pulse sits, not why it sits there; camp keeps the reason in the word, and lets the excess — a pulse like a flicked stone — read as the wall gone rigid rather than as mere depth. |
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