Body fluid is called jinye in TCM, including all kinds of fluids in the organs and tissues and their secretions, such as gastric juice, intestinal juice, nasal discharge, tears, sweat, urine and so on. Just like qi and blood, body fluid is also one of the essential substances constituting the human body and maintaining its life activities.
Jin and ye are always mentioned in the same breath because of the fact that, for one thing, both of them derive from food and water transported and transformed by the spleen and stomach; and for another, they can transform into each other. But they are actually different in thickness, property, function and distribution. By and large, jin is the fluid which is clear and thin and flows easily. It is distributed in the skin, muscles and orifices, furthermore, it permeates the blood vessels to keep them moistened. Ye, on the contrary, is thick fluid with flowing less easily. It is distributed in the joints, brain, marrow and internal organs to nourish them. Jin and ye may transform into each other. These two fluids are hard to be separated completely and, for this reason, they are jointly referred to as "jinye" (body fluid). In case of the impairment of jin or exhaustion of ye, the two must be identified in TDS.
The formation, distribution and excretion of body fluid are the complex physiological process in which they are accomplisbed by the joint action of many organs. As is pointed out in Basic Questions: "After food and drink enter the stomach, they are digested and transformed into food essence and then, transmitted upward to the spleen, which disperses the essence upward to the lung and the lung regulates water pathways downward to the urinary bladder. And by doing so body fluid is finally disseminated to all parts of the body along all the meridians and collaterals. This description suggests that, 1) body fluid is formed from food and water by digestion and absorption of the stomach, seperating the clarity from the turbidity of the small intestine and transformation of the spleen; 2) the distribution and excretion of body fluid are accomplished by the joint action of many zang-fu organs, such as the transforming function of the spleen, the dispersing and descending function of the lung, the steaming and ascending function of the kidney; and 3)body fluid takes triple energizer as its passegeway for distribution and excretion.
Body fluid bears two physiological functions: moistening and nourishing. Body fluid distributed to the body surface moistens and nourishes the muscles and skin with hairs; body fluid permeated through the body orifices moistens and protects the eyes, nose, mouth and other openings; body fluid infiltrated into the blood vessels nourishes and smooths then and is also the basic component of blood; body fluid poured into the internal organs nourishes and moistens them, and body fluid in the bone nourishes and moistens the bone marrow, spinal cord and brain marrow.
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