jué hàn
Also rendered: the final sweat (Keeps the order of events) · sweating at the point of death (Expands it into a description) · cold sweat (Clinical; not the same sign)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The sign the chapter gives for the end of the greater yang: 其色白，絶汗乃出，出則死矣. It is not ordinary sweating — the tradition describes it as sweat like oil or like beads, that comes out and does not run. It is the one sign in the chapter given as a threshold: before it, dying; when it appears, death. It is also the only one of the chapter’s signs whose name later medicine kept.
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 | final sweat, or sweating of exhaustion | Both are used; the second is a description rather than a name. |
| This site | the final sweat | 絶 is to cut a thread — silk plus a knife — and what is cut here is the qi. Final keeps the order of events the chapter insists on: the sweat does not accompany death, it precedes it and marks it, 出則死矣. Sweating of exhaustion would make it one symptom among several; the chapter gives it as the sign that the end has arrived. |
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