Terminology revision

In this book, we (my research team) established a new system of tea science and philosophy, which is based on the human body meridian system of the Traditional Chinese Medicine. The new system was proved by many experiments and cohort exploration. Interestingly, although the meridian system was proved by the research, some recent hypotheses of the meridians were rejected. For example, one of the twelve meridian channels is Xinbao channel, and people suppose that Xinbao is the pericardium according to the terminology of western medicine. However, in our experiment, the Xinbao is clearly thymus, which is located tightly with the pericardium and has all the expected functions of the Xinbao channel. Therefore, we changed the name“pericardium meridian”into“thymus channel”. The same reason is for the revision of“SAN JIAO meridian”into“three-gland channel”which has been though to related to no organs while through our experiments this meridian is related to three endocrine glands, i.e., pituitary, thyroid, and adrenal glands. The Small Intestine meridian and Large Intestine meridian are focused onto the duodenum and colon with experimental evidences. Duodenum (and jejunum) was the exact concept of Xiaochang (literal small intestine) defined in the original Chinese medicine scripture, The Yellow Emperor's Canon of Medicine , in which Xiaochang and Huichang (ileum) were differentiated, and therefore, Xiaochang is not exactly small intestine of modern anatomy. By the way, the rectum of large intestine is actually controlled by the Gladder channel. The revisions were listed in the following table.

For the spelling of Yim-Yaŋ instead of Yin-Yang, we considered the original concepts of this couple of terms, Yim as going inside and Yaŋ as coming outside. When one pronounces [-m], the breath goes inside, while [-ŋ] will let breath comes outside. That was why traditional Chinese pronounced this couple of words as Yim and Yaŋ. However, in the recent several hundred years,Mandarin Chinese has lost the -m ending. Here we keep using traditional Chinese to express the original concepts.