Reading paths — guided routes through the classics - Classica Sinica Medica https://classicstcm.com/paths/ Read the Chinese medical classics in the original, with pinyin and English on the same line. Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:19:49 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.3 Reading the numbers https://classicstcm.com/paths/learning-the-numbers/ Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:35:55 +0000 https://classicstcm.com/paths/learning-the-numbers/ Ages, cycles and counts — and why they are usually the argument, not the trimming.

]]> Classical Chinese medicine counts. Ages arrive in sevens and eights, cycles in sixties, vessels in threes and twelves — and the counting is usually load-bearing rather than decorative.

Read Suwen 1 with a pencil and write out the seven-year cycle as a table: age, state of kidney qi, what changes. The argument of the chapter becomes obvious once it is in columns.

Then do the same for the eight-year cycle given for men, which the chapter states without pausing to explain.

]]> Start here: Suwen 1 https://classicstcm.com/paths/start-with-suwen-1/ Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:35:54 +0000 https://classicstcm.com/paths/start-with-suwen-1/ The one chapter to read first, and how to read it in four passes.

]]> The first chapter of the Suwen is the best first text in the corpus: it is short, it is prose rather than dialogue-by-apostrophe, and it states the whole programme of the book in a few hundred characters.

  1. Read On Innate Vitality in Antiquity once through in English, without stopping for the characters.
  2. Read it again with the pinyin line showing, and say it aloud.
  3. Take the four terms that carry the argument — 氣, 精, 神, 天年 — and read their entries.
  4. Return to the chapter and read the original line with the pinyin hidden.

Everything else on the site is built on this pattern: original, pinyin, and English on the same line, with the terms linked.

]]>