ruǎn ruò
Also rendered: soft and weak (Literal) · weak (The single word most often used) · soft (Loses the weakness, which the chapter grades) · pliant and feeble (Literary)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The late-summer quality of the pulse, and the only one of the five the chapter states without an image: 長夏胃微耎弱曰平, slightly soft and weak, with stomach qi in it, is balanced; weak much and stomach qi little is spleen disease; and where the other four are said to kill when they stand alone, this one is given as 但代无胃曰死 — the intermittent pulse without stomach qi — the softness having failed so far that the beat itself drops out. Softness appears again at the end of the chapter as the good sign it is: the balanced liver pulse is 耎弱招招, like lifting the tip of a long bamboo pole.
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 | weak | Most pulse writing reduces the pair to weak. |
| This site | soft and weak | The two graphs are doing different work: 耎 is pliant under the finger, 弱 is lacking in force, and the chapter needs both — it is the softness that belongs to late summer and the weakness that, when it grows, becomes the intermittent pulse that kills. Weak alone would make 微耎弱 曰平 read as a contradiction, since a weak pulse is not what one expects to be called balanced; soft and weak lets the reader see that a certain yielding is correct in its season and only the excess of it is disease. |
Search the glossary
Reading path
Guided routes through the corpus, each built on a handful of chapters and their key terms.
See all reading paths