Pulse Diagnosis: You Were Trained in a Diviner's Craft | Operation 1 of 9

Pulse diagnosis is a diviner's craft, and you were trained in it without being told. In this first lesson of Operation 1 of 9, I show you what pulse diagnosis in Chinese medicine actually is, where it sits in the nine operations, and why the pulse image (脈象 mai xiang) is a divination term hiding inside your own clinical vocabulary. You have taken a pulse ten thousand times. Three fingers, both wrists, wiry, slippery, a diagnosis. Nobody ever told you what kind of act that is. Not what it finds. What it is. It has a name, it is older than your medicine, and the receipt at the end is a word you already use. What this lesson covers: the four examinations (望聞問切, looking, listening and smelling, asking, palpation) as one skill pointed at four surfaces; correspondence, the engine that lets a trained reader see the inside on the outside; the oracle-bone shell and the wrist as the same operation on a different surface; what the old pulse training built in the practitioner that a semester of technique could not; and the character 象 (image) that 脈象 shares with the Yijing's hexagram images. Chinese medicine divination, named, mapped and receipted, for the practitioner who has been doing it blind. THE SECRET MENU INDEX (free, by email): every operation running unlabeled in your Chinese medicine training, mapped, with the sources beside it. https://zachary-lui.kit.com/f6fa3a92ab BECOME A FOUNDING MEMBER of The Secret Menu: one live hour a month, recorded, on the operation the members choose, plus every monograph after garlic, members only. $45 a month plus tax at the founding rate, and that rate holds for as long as you stay a member. The public rate is $75 plus tax from September 28, the day of the first class (noon Eastern). https://buy.stripe.com/fZubJ00Yu1C3fX... Subscribe for the rest of the nine operations. Next up is Operation 2 of 9, Five Element Theory: You Learned the Whole Engine and Nobody Turned It On. CHAPTERS 0:00 Pulse diagnosis: the ancient roots of pulse reading 0:49 Divination as a trained skill 2:20 The engine called correspondence 5:04 The hidden receipt in your vocabulary: 脈象 SOURCES Wiseman and Feng, A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine (Paradigm, 1998), entry 脈象 Elisabeth Hsu, Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone Books, 1999) Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes (Columbia University Press, 1994), Xici I Paul W. Kroll, A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Brill, 2015), entries 象, 相 Paul U. Unschuld, Nan-ching: The Classic of Difficult Issues (University of California Press, 1986), Difficulty 61 David N. Keightley, Sources of Shang History (University of California Press, 1978) Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing (Society for the Study of Early China, 2000) Primary texts: 周易 繫辭上, 難經 六十一難 (ctext.org) Every claim above carries its source, edition named. IMAGES "Chinese doctor feeling the pulse of a patient", watercolour, Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0). "Cunkou pulse palpation", Chinese woodcut, 1817, Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0). Inscribed turtle plastron 丙86, Academia Sinica, photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Boym and Cleyer, Clavis medica, 1686, plate 5 (public domain). This channel is an educational and energy-practice channel. It is not traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, or clinical care, and nothing here is medical treatment, diagnosis, or advice. I am not acting as a regulated health practitioner in this content. If you have a health concern, see a qualified medical provider. Classical Chinese medicine, TCM diagnosis, acupuncture theory and Chinese medicine history for practitioners and students. Magick, through the medicine you already practise. #PulseDiagnosis #ChineseMedicine #Divination