The Floating pulse travels only upon the flesh; under the finger it feels like brushing elm seeds, light as down. In the three months of autumn it is the seasonal pulse — no cause for alarm. Yet when one chronically ill meets it, the root qi is deserting — and that is truly to be feared.
Like water that flows downward, the Sinking pulse comes deep; between sinew and bone it is soft, slippery, and even. In women at the cun and in men at the chi it naturally sinks — and if it holds so through the four seasons, it is called the balanced pulse of the healthy.
✎Draft· 2026-04-09
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@misc{bencaodian-bin-hu-mai-xue,
author = {{Bencaodian Editorial}},
title = {Bīn Hú Mài Xué 濒湖脉学 (Binhu's Sphygmology) — 李时珍},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Bencao Dian: A Bilingual Knowledge Graph of Traditional Chinese Medicine},
url = {https://bencaodian.org/en/texts/bin-hu-mai-xue},
urldate = {2026-04-09},
note = {CC BY-SA 4.0}
}