What drives growth in the seven-year cycles: teeth, hair, and the capacity to conceive. The single most important caution for a new reader is that 腎 here is a system of functions…
The reproductive endowment: it arrives at fourteen (二七) and is exhausted at forty-nine (七七). The chapter treats fertility as a measurable substance on a fixed schedule, not as a matter of temperament…
Not a second kind of qi, but the same qi unobstructed. 真 is doing the work of ‘genuine’: when craving and agitation subside, what follows of itself is the real thing rather…
The pair the texts treat as the inner treasury: essence is what is stored, spirit is what is alert. ‘Keeping them within’ (內守) is this chapter’s plainest statement of what health consists…
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…