bái hàn
Also rendered: white sweat (What the base text says, and no more) · cold sweat (The common reading, given as fact) · profuse sweat (Keeps the quantity, drops the colour) · bai han (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The sweat that closes the reverting-yin passage, and the only treatment in the chapter’s second half that is not needling. The one yin governs; true emptiness makes the heart ache; counterflow qi lodges and presses; white sweat breaks out. The instruction is to regulate the food and harmonise the medicine, and to treat at the lower transport points. Commentators differ on what white means — a sweat pale and cold from depletion, or a loan-graph for the sweat of the po — and the base text simply has the one word, so the reading is left open here.
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 | white sweat | They translate 白汗 as written and leave the interpretation to commentary. |
| Unschuld | white sweat | Likewise literal, with a note on the 魄汗 reading. |
| This site | white sweat | Translating it as cold sweat would settle a question the base text has left open, and would settle it in the place where readers most need to see the doubt: this is the sentence that decides whether the term means depletion, or the po, or something now lost. Keeping white also keeps the colour doing work, since the chapter that begins this whole sequence is built on colours and their correspondence. |
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