èr shí bā huì
Also rendered: The twenty-eight meetings (keeps the count and the junction) · The twenty-eight junctions (clearer anatomically, and it loses the assembly) · The twenty-eight convergences (elegant, and it is a paraphrase)
Reviewed · 2026-10-25
At a glance
The number the chapter gives to the body’s junctions, and the last of the correspondences it lists. The Emperor has just said that the needle matches heaven above, earth below and man in the middle, that it counts the patterns of heaven, measures the order of earth, separates the five viscera within and orders the six palaces without — and then adds that the channels have twenty-eight meetings, all with a complete circuit. The number is a correspondence, not an anatomy: twenty-eight is the count of the lunar mansions, and the meetings of the channels are offered as the body’s answer to the sky. What the chapter does with it is characteristically sober: having claimed the whole cosmos for the needle, it concludes that the needle can kill a man and cannot raise the dead, and that this too is the way of things.
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 twenty-eight meetings | the text's own word |
| Literal | twenty-eight joinings | exact, and it is flat |
| Clinical | the twenty-eight meeting points of the channels | clear, and it interprets |
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