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Huangdi Neijing · The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon
Lingshu 42 · The Transmission of Illness
Read in English. Switch to Original for word notes, or select text to ask a question.
The Yellow Emperor said: “I have received the nine needles from you and privately examined the various methods. Some use guiding and stretching, circulating qi, lifting and rubbing, moxibustion, warming, needling and the named burning method, or drinking medicines. May one hold exclusively to one, or must one practice them all?”
The lifting/rubbing and burning terms have anomalous graphs in the supplied text. Their historical method categories are retained without adding procedures.
Qi Bo said: “The various methods are methods for many different people, not methods that one person must practice in their entirety.”
The Yellow Emperor said: “This is what is meant by keeping to the one without losing it, whereby the myriad things are encompassed. I have now heard the essentials of yin and yang, the principles of emptiness and repletion, disorders of shifting and displacement, and conditions that can be treated. I wish to hear about the transformations of illness: excessive transmission, severance and failure that cannot be treated. May I hear them?”
Qi Bo said: “Essential is your inquiry into the Way! Its clarity is like waking in daylight; its difficulty like the closed eyes of night. If one wears and practices it, spirit develops with it. Practicing it fully, spirit apprehends it of itself. The principle of bringing spirit to life may be written on bamboo and silk, but cannot simply be handed down to descendants.”
The restriction on transmission to descendants is retained. Older readings explain it as insight that cannot be conferred merely through inheritance, rather than a prohibition on recording the teaching.
The Yellow Emperor said: “What is meant by waking in daylight?”
Qi Bo said: “Clarity about yin and yang is like the resolution of confusion or waking from drunkenness.”
The Yellow Emperor said: “What is meant by the closed eyes of night?”
Qi Bo said: “Silent, it has no sound; obscure, it has no form. Hair breaks and the interstitial texture opens; proper qi tips and is displaced. Excessive harmful influence spreads, passes and flows through blood vessels. Great qi enters the zang, causing abdominal pain and excessive flow below. This course can bring death, not life.”
The phrase concerning hair and its texture is compressed in the source. The opening of the interstices is its contextual reading; no missing course is added to the Chinese.
The Yellow Emperor said: “What happens when great qi enters the zang?”
Qi Bo said: “If illness first arises in the Heart, after one day it goes to the Lung, after three days to the Liver, after five days to the Spleen. If it has not ceased after three days, death follows: at midnight in winter, at midday in summer.
“If it first arises in the Lung, after three days it goes to the Liver, after one day to the Spleen, after five days to the Stomach. If it has not ceased after ten days, death follows: at sunset in winter, at sunrise in summer.
“If it first arises in the Liver, after three days it goes to the Spleen, after five days to the Stomach, after three days to the Kidney. If it has not ceased after three days, death follows: at sunset in winter, at the early meal in summer.
“If it first arises in the Spleen, after one day it goes to the Stomach, after two days to the Kidney, after three days to the back and Bladder. If it has not ceased after ten days, death follows: when people settle for the night in winter, at the late meal in summer.
“If it first arises in the Stomach, after five days it goes to the Kidney, after three days to the back and Bladder, after five days it rises to the Heart. If it has not ceased after two days, death follows: at midnight in winter, after the sun passes midday in summer.
“If it first arises in the Kidney, after three days it goes to the back and Bladder, after three days it rises to the Heart, after three days it goes to the Small Intestine. If it has not ceased after three days, death follows: in the great morning in winter, at the early afternoon meal in summer.
“If it first arises in the Bladder, after five days it goes to the Kidney, after one day to the Small Intestine, after one day to the Heart. If it has not ceased after two days, death follows: at cockcrow in winter, in the later afternoon in summer.
“Illnesses transmitted successively in this order all have their stated fatal time and must not be needled. Those that skip one zang, or two, three or four zang, may be needled.”
All seven sequences, repeated intervals and seasonal times are retained as historical prognoses, without converting traditional meal-times into clock hours or treating the intervals as modern predictions.
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