shǐ dào
Also rendered: The envoy road (keeps the sense of something sent) · The messenger's way (vivid, and it personifies) · The breath passage (clinical, and it chooses one reading)
Reviewed · 2026-10-25
At a glance
The channel whose length is a prognosis. The chapter has just described the body that reaches a hundred years — a deep and long envoy road, high and square foundations and walls, a regulated camp and guard — and then, asking why others die before their time, gives the same features in the negative: the road is not long, the walls are low. Two readings have been offered and both are kept here: the nostrils, where breath comes and goes, and the road of the spirit in the region of the philtrum. Either way the argument is the same, and it is architectural: depth and length mean that what passes is slowed and protected, and a house whose gate is short is a house that wind enters. The word 使 matters — what travels is sent, and the road is the course it is sent along.
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 envoy road | the text's own image |
| Literal | the road of what is sent | exact, and it is long |
| Clinical | the airway and its depth | clear, and it decides the ambiguity |
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