The first of Suwen 1’s three ordinaries. 節 is a joint in bamboo, hence a measure and a limit: not abstinence but a bounded practice.
Suwen 1’s phrase for a life with a schedule. It sounds trivial and is not: in these texts sleep and waking are the first thing the seasons change, and irregularity is named…
Suwen 1’s ideal ending: not that the body lasts, but that the body and the person’s alertness last together and finish together. The opposite is a body outliving its own presence.
The line that set the pattern for seasonal therapy, and one of the most argued-over sentences in the corpus. Read simply, it says: work with the season’s own movement instead of against…
The line that made prevention central to Chinese medicine: don’t wait for the disease. The chapter closes with the image that makes the point — digging a well only once you are…
The lowest of the four grades in Suwen 1’s ladder — below the sage, above everyone else. What distinguishes the worthy is effort: they follow what the sages established by rule rather…
The figure the texts use for a person who gets it right — not a moral paragon but someone whose conduct matches the way things actually work. In Suwen 2 the sage…
The chapter’s word for people who have not been worked on: their food seems fine, their clothes sufficient, and high and low do not envy one another. It is a description of…
Both a road and a method, and the texts lean on both senses at once. ‘Knowing the Way’ (知道) is not assent to a doctrine but knowing how to conduct a life;…
Not a soul and not a god: the alertness by which a person notices, responds and is present. It is the half of a person that can be kept within or scattered…