shén cáng xíng cáng
Also rendered: the spirit stores and the form stores (Literal) · the five spirit depots and the four form depots (Adds the counts, drops the pairing) · the numinal stores and the bodily stores (More theological than the text) · shen cang xing cang (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The nine stores of the body, split two ways. Five are spirit stores — the liver, heart, spleen, lung and kidney, which hold something invisible and can be ruined past repair; four are form stores, which hold the shapes of things. The number comes from the arithmetic of the chapter: three sectors of three probes make nine, the nine answer to the nine regions, and the nine regions become the nine stores. What the chapter does with the distinction is blunt: when the five are ruined their colour must go dull, and once the colour has gone dull there is death. The whole nine-fold scheme, in other words, lands on a single clinical remark about the face.
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 | the spirit depots and the form depots | 藏 is depot in their nomenclature; 神 is spirit throughout. |
| Unschuld | the five long-term depots of the spirit and the four long-term depots of the physical appearance | He spells the distinction out. |
| This site | the spirit stores and the form stores | 藏 read zàng is a storeroom and that is the role the chapter gives it: these nine are where something is kept, and the split is about what is kept — the five keep what cannot be seen, the four keep shapes. Depot is the correct technical term and is used elsewhere on this site, but it is a warehouse word, and the point here is closer to a cupboard in a house: the chapter's next sentence is that when what is inside goes bad, you can see it on the face. |
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