The span allotted at birth: a hundred, in this chapter. It functions as a measure rather than a promise — the chapter’s question is why people fall short of it, and the…
The inborn perceptiveness the chapter ascribes to the infant Huangdi. Read as ‘divine’, it turns a description of temperament into a claim about gods — which the sentence does not make. What…
The stored, refined reserve of the body: slow to build, quickly spent. In this chapter it is what the intemperate exhaust through desire — a quantity that can run down, which is…
Qi is what the texts call the activity of a thing rather than the thing itself — the breath, warmth and movement by which a system does its work. This site leaves…
Not two substances, and not opposed forces: one process described from two sides. Day and night, winter and summer, rising and settling are yin-yang pairs, and health is the pair keeping its…