dà gǔ kū gǎo
Also rendered: withering of the great bones (Literal, and keeps 骨 as bones) · the large bones are dried up (Closer to 枯槁 as drying rather than withering) · emaciation (Clinical summary; loses the picture entirely) · da gu ku gao (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The opening words of the chapter’s five-stage portrait of a body dying. Each of the five begins with the same eight characters — the great bones withered, the great flesh fallen in — and then adds one thing: laboured breathing alone gives six months; pain pulling to the shoulder and nape gives one month; add body heat and the breaking of the muscle masses and it is ten months; with the marrow melting at the shoulder and movement failing further, a year; and with the abdomen painful, the shoulders and body hot and the eye sockets sunken, death is immediate. The repetition is the point: the body has already reached the same state in all five, and what separates them is how much is still being consumed.
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 | (rendered descriptively) | The phrase is a description, not a named disease. |
| Common English | emaciation, or severe wasting | Both are used to summarise the passage. |
| This site | withering of the great bones | 枯 in 說文 is 槁, and 槁 is 枯木 — dead wood — so the pair describes a thing that has dried while still standing. That is what makes it the right opening for five degrees of dying: the bones and flesh have not been destroyed, they have dried out. Emaciation is a clinician's word for a body that has lost weight, and it quietly drops the bones, which are half the phrase and the half that cannot recover. |
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