Reading the body བརྟག་ཐབས་
Before any treatment, the menpa reads the disorder — chiefly by touching the pulse and looking at the urine, with a corroborating glance at the tongue. Each discloses which humor is disturbed, where, and how far. Explore them below.
⚠ Pending menpa verification
The physician lays three fingers on the radial artery of each wrist, reading the patient's left wrist with the right hand and the right wrist with the left. Each fingertip reads two organs by rolling to its two halves — a solid (vital) organ on the thumb-side, a hollow one on the outer edge — so the two wrists together disclose twelve organs.
- Read at dawn, before food, drink, stimulants or exertion have stirred the humors; the patient first rests until the pulse is calm.
- The physician reads with the opposite hand — right hand on the patient's left wrist, left hand on the right — the three fingers a rice-grain apart, the thumb resting by the patient's thumb.
- The index sits about a finger-width below the wrist crease; index, middle and ring then press ever more firmly (skin → flesh → bone), reading the upper, middle and lower body.
- Each fingertip reads two organs by rolling: the thumb-side half a solid (vital) organ, the outer half a hollow one.
- A healthy pulse beats five times to one of the physician's breath-cycles — faster is hot, slower is cold (a child's beats six, an infant's eight).
On the left wrist of a man — surface pressure, resting on the skin.
The twelve organ positions
What the pulses look like
Felt at the surface and hollow beneath the finger, it rises then vanishes under pressure and skips at intervals — like a bubble that empties and floats up again.
Quick, forceful and tight like a taut, twisting cord — it strikes the finger hard and fast, overflowing its channel.
Submerged and declining — one must press deep to find it. It beats slowly and faintly, sinking away from the finger.
A robust, full and prominent constitutional pulse — Wind-like in character. A person of any sex may have it; it is established first, then read against (not confused with) the disease pulses.
A fine, thin and quicker constitutional pulse — Bile-like; slender under the finger but regular.
The ‘bodhisattva’ (neuter) pulse — smooth, supple, long and even, Phlegm-like. The most balanced constitutional pulse, and the most auspicious.
Not a fixed type but a quality — a thin, taut beat that twists and coils side to side, like a plucked lute-string (most marked in the Bile and spring pulses). When a beat also wanders in strength and place, it is read as the changing ‘spirit’ (gdon) pulse.
One of the death signs read at the pulse — long silences broken by sudden darting beats, like a fish flicking then still. A grave prognostic sign.