陰陵泉 Yinlingquan
“Spring Beneath the Yin Mound” · SP9
Foot Taiyin · 9 of 21 · he-sea
Where. On the inner leg just below the knee, in the hollow under the knob at the top of the shinbone.
For. Bloating, swelling from fluid, knee pain.
Press. Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each leg.
陰陵泉者，水也。在膝下內側輔骨下陷者中，伸足乃得之按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
配 · Pairs with
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
症 · Often paired with
Where Yinlingquan Sits at the Inner Knee
The dataset locates SP9 on the medial aspect of the lower leg — the inner side — in the depression posterior and inferior to the medial condyle of the tibia. Unpacked landmark by landmark: the tibia is the shin bone, and its medial border is the hard ridge you can trace up the inner calf; near the top, that ridge swells into a broad, rounded knob called the medial condyle, forming the lower-inner corner of the knee. Posterior means toward the back of the leg; inferior means toward the foot. So the point hides just below and slightly behind that knob, in the shallow groove where firm bone gives way to softer tissue. Happily for beginners, this entry asks for no measuring at all: unlike the mid-calf neighbours — several of which are located on the line connecting the tip of the medial malleolus with Yinlingquan itself — SP9 is found by pure landmarks.
What lies beneath the fingertip is calm, forgiving territory. The groove shelters tendon and fibrous tissue lying close against the bone’s lower-rear margin; there is no thin membrane stretched over lung, no abdominal organ waiting nearby, nothing fragile immediately under the skin. Fittingly for a page built on gentle self-care, the licensed dataset records no specific caution for this point. That absence deserves stating plainly and equally deserves not overstating: it licenses light surface contact, never force, and every other boundary on this page still applies.
Channel context explains why a knee-side hollow carries a spring in its name. The registry draws the spleen channel ascending from the big toe up the inner leg to the chest, and SP9 marks the stretch where the route rounds the knee’s inner corner — the last station on the calf before the climb continues up the thigh. Classical texts describe the points near elbow and knee as he-sea stations, places where a channel’s qi gathers deep and full, the way rivers broaden as they near the sea; the catalogue files SP9 among them. Five-phase teaching goes further and assigns the he-sea points of the yin channels to the element water — so on this earth-natured channel, the water imagery concentrates at a single spring-like hollow, which became the tradition’s standing address for matters of damp.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit on a firm chair with the foot flat, or lie down with the knee softly supported, and give the leg a moment to go quiet. Start mid-calf on the inner side and find the hard ridge of the shin bone — the medial border of the tibia. Walk your fingers straight up along that ridge, feeling it rise steadily toward the knee, until it suddenly swells into the broad rounded knob of the medial condyle. Now let your fingertips slip off the knob’s lower edge, dropping a little below it and easing toward the back of the leg, and search for the shallow depression where firm bone yields to softer tissue. That groove — posterior and inferior to the knob — is the location the dataset describes.
Two confirmations help before any pressing begins. First, touch feather-light and compare sides: most people notice a faint, dull awareness in the true groove and little sensation a thumb-width away. Second, check your relationship to the bone. The spot should hug the knob’s lower-rear margin — press gently inward and you meet yielding tissue backed by the edge of the condyle, neither open calf muscle nor bare flat shin. If you are sitting squarely on top of the knob, slide down and slightly toward the calf; if you have drifted into the soft hollow right behind the knee, come forward and down until the bone’s edge reappears beside your fingertip.
The classic errors are few. One is stopping halfway up the calf, where the ridge is still plain bone and the groove has not yet formed; keep climbing until the ridge visibly swells. Another is sliding too far backward into the crease behind the knee, which belongs to the back of the joint rather than to the region below the inner knob. A third is losing the side of the body — the point stays on the leg’s inner face and never wraps toward the outer knee. When in doubt, return to mid-calf, find the ridge once more, and climb slowly, letting the anatomy announce itself.
Reading the Name: Spring Beneath the Yin Mound
Each character sketches part of the scene. Yin 陰 means shade, and by extension the yin side of the body’s map — in traditional geography the inner faces of the limbs belong to yin while outer and back faces belong to yang, and this point stands squarely on the leg’s inner, shaded aspect. Ling 陵 means hill or mound, and the reference could hardly be more literal: the rounded swell of the medial condyle reads exactly as a small hill rising at the inner knee. Quan 泉 means spring — water welling quietly upward in a hollow. Together the three characters paint the picture precisely: a spring in the shade, below the mound.
The name’s water theme is not decoration. Classical texts describe the he-sea stations — the gathering points near elbow and knee — as where a channel’s current runs deepest, and one traditional reading pictures qi arriving there as rivers arrive at the sea, broadening and slowing. Five-phase teaching then assigns the he-sea points of the yin channels to water, so on the spleen channel — whose element the registry records as earth — this watery office concentrates at a single spring. Earth and water meeting in one name gave classical practice a tidy shorthand: wherever dampness was the suspect, this spring stood among the first addresses considered. These are traditional frameworks for thinking about the body, offered for orientation rather than physiology.
Pinyin renders the name Yinlingquan, written Yīnlíngquán with its tone marks: yīn carries the first tone, held flat and high; líng and quán each carry the second tone, which lifts like a question. The hanzi 陰陵泉 are compact enough to memorise at a glance. Wells, springs, ravines, and seas scatter generously through the point names of the lower limbs, and this page’s neighbours join the same water theme. As with gates and courtyards elsewhere in the canon, the metaphor does real work: it tells you the tradition ranked this spot as a place where things collect and move — not a way-station passed through, but water gathering force.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded actions number eight: abdominal distension, diarrhoea, edema, jaundice, difficult urination, knee pain, paralysis of the lower limb, and insomnia. Read grouped, they tell a coherent story. Five belong to the traditional domain of water and digestion — the belly swollen and gassy, stools running loose, the flesh holding puffiness (edema), the eyes and skin taking a yellow cast (jaundice), and urine that will not flow freely. Two are local and channel-bound: a painful knee, and weakness or paralysis of the lower limb — complaints arising along the very ground the channel crosses. Insomnia closes the list, and it makes sense only inside the traditional logic explored below.
The traditional reasoning ran roughly like this, reconstructed from the general drift of the literature rather than any single citation. The spleen system was charged with transformation and transportation — churning food and moving water to where it should go. When that stewardship faltered, fluids lingered and turned turbid, and classical practice read the whole water-cluster through that single lens: distension, loose stools, puffiness, scanty urine, even the yellowing of jaundice, understood as dampness percolating where it did not belong. A further classical teaching paired the he-sea stations with counterflow qi and with disorders that run downward or leak through — which fits why a he-sea point stands at the head of old discussions of diarrhoea. And for the knee and lower limb, plain channel logic applied: where the pathway passes, its own points answer.
Insomnia enters the picture through the dampness door as well. One traditional reading held that when turbid dampness blankets the interior, clear brightness fails to rise and sleep turns heavy, restless, and unrefreshing — so damp-addressing stations occasionally appear in old discussions of troubled sleep. Honesty requires bright lines around several items. Jaundice and marked swelling are signs calling for prompt medical assessment, not self-care; lasting bowel changes, blood in the stool, or inability to pass urine belong with a clinician urgently; and lower-limb weakness or paralysis calls for professional rehabilitation evaluation. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence for any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition as history; hold the medical boundary firmly.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point found by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, spine tall but unforced, the chosen leg relaxed and the foot resting flat. Curl your index and middle fingers together and rest the pads — never the tips — in the groove below the knob. Begin with contact alone for a few slow breaths, then add small, unhurried circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath rather than grinding against the bone’s edge. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or mild warmth, never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to slow exhales so each circle rides the breath out. Swap hands and repeat on the other leg, keeping the sessions symmetrical.
Quality matters more than duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact suits the wellness register this page practises; hard jabbing teaches the body nothing and risks bruising tissue that sits close to bone. Warm your hands first on cold days, because chilled muscle guards. Choose a quiet corner over a screen, and treat the minute as a pause rather than a chore: breathe in through the nose, soften on the exhale, let the circles ride the breath out. People who keep a routine often anchor it to something already daily — morning washing, an evening wind-down — because in self-care traditions consistency, not intensity, is what compounds.
Hold the exercise as a few minutes of attending to yourself, not a treatment session. Across weeks you may notice the legs feeling lighter in the evenings, digestion feeling less sluggish after meals, or simply the satisfaction of having shown up for yourself each day. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation — pressing harder, longer, or deeper to force water off the body or a symptom away. If curiosity pulls that way, return to gentleness, shorten the session, or rest the practice for a day. The spring rewards patience, and patience is the entire method.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Begin with what the record says, because it is genuinely useful: the licensed dataset records no specific caution for SP9. Nothing in the entry warns of danger at this site, and the geography supports the calm reading — the point lies over sturdy tendon and fibrous tissue braced against bone at the knee’s inner corner, far from the chest wall, the abdominal organs, and every structure that makes some other points unforgiving. But absence of a recorded caution is not an invitation to force. Every rule that governs gentle self-care everywhere applies here in full: this is surface work, done with finger pads, on healthy skin.
The universal boundaries, spelled out. Stop at once on sharp, electric, or radiating sensation, and do not resume that day. Skip the point over broken, irritated, or infected skin, and pause during feverish illness. Be cautious after any knee or lower-leg injury or surgery until ordinary movement feels comfortable again. Pregnant readers should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice, as a matter of general prudence rather than a recorded warning about this point. Anyone living with a diagnosed circulatory condition, or taking prescribed medication with blood-thinning effects, does better to ask their clinician before regular pressure of any kind — again a general caution about pressure practices, not a special property of this point.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, never diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical care — not a pressure routine — for yellowing of the skin or eyes, sudden or one-sided swelling, diarrhoea lasting beyond a couple of weeks or any blood in the stool, difficulty passing urine, a knee that is hot, badly swollen, locking, or giving way, or new weakness in a leg. Persistent symptoms of any kind belong with a licensed practitioner, medical or East Asian medical as suits the complaint. The spring offers most people a quieter gift than miracles: a few honest minutes of care for the legs that carry them all day.
Yinlingquan — the Spring Below the Yin Mound — rests in a hollow beneath the rounded knob at the top-inner corner of the shin, where the spleen channel rounds the knee on its climb from the big toe toward the chest. Classical practice reached for it whenever water misbehaved: bloating, loose stools, swelling, reluctant urine. This guide walks you through finding it and pressing it safely.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Yinlingquan without knowing anything about cun?
- Good news — this point needs no cun at all. Use the shin’s inner ridge as the whole map: start mid-calf, walk your fingers straight up the hard bony edge until it swells into the rounded knob at the top-inner corner of the knee, then slip just below and slightly behind that knob into the shallow groove you find there. That ridge-plus-knob-plus-groove recipe reproduces the dataset location without any ruler — indeed, several neighbouring calf points are the ones measured from Yinlingquan, not the reverse.
- Is pressing Yinlingquan myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on the surface is reasonable self-care for healthy adults, and notably the licensed dataset records no specific caution for this point — it sits over sturdy tissue close to bone, far from the vulnerable structures that make chest and neck points demanding. Reasonable is not unconditional, though: keep pressure light, stop on sharp sensation, avoid broken or infected skin, and pause during fever or after a fresh knee injury.
- What did classical practice use Yinlingquan for?
- The traditional record lists abdominal distension, diarrhoea, edema, jaundice, difficult urination, knee pain, paralysis of the lower limb, and insomnia. Classical teaching tied most of that portfolio to the spleen system’s charge over transforming food and moving water — dampness, in one word — which is why the water-themed he-sea spring dominated old discussions of swelling, loose stools, and scanty urine. Those are traditional frameworks, preserved for context, not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why would a knee-area point matter for digestion and swelling?
- Because the tradition filed the body by channel and function, not by modern organ systems. Points near the knee and elbow were taught as the deep-gathering stations of each channel, and five-phase teaching assigns those stations on the yin channels to water. On the spleen channel — the system traditionally charged with moving water — that made this spring the natural address for anything the tradition read as fluid gone astray. It is coherent traditional bookkeeping, not a physiology claim.
- Can acupressure at Yinlingquan replace seeing a doctor about my swelling?
- No. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not a diagnostic tool, and swelling in particular can have causes — heart, kidney, liver, vein, or medication-related — that deserve proper assessment. New, sudden, one-sided, or worsening swelling always merits prompt professional attention. Think of the two as different floors of the same building: daily self-care lives downstairs, and clinical medicine keeps upstairs the consulting room you visit when symptoms persist, puzzle you, or escalate.
Sources
- 01WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (2008), World Health Organization — nomenclature conventions.
- 02A Manual of Acupuncture, Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker — point-name tradition, he-sea theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for SP9 Yinlingquan — location, point class, actions, and indication record.
Last reviewed
牌記This leaf, for machines
Old books ended with a colophon saying who printed them. Every leaf here carries the same facts as structured data for agents and search, with no layout in the way.
- GET /en/points/sp9/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/sp9/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/sp9/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "SP9",
"name": {
"en": "Yinlingquan",
"gloss": "Spring Beneath the Yin Mound",
"zh-Hant": "陰陵泉",
"zh-Hans": "阴陵泉"
},
"channel": {
"id": "SP",
"order": 9,
"of": 21
},
"location": {
"text": "On the inner leg just below the knee, in the hollow under the knob at the top of the shinbone."
},
"for": [
"bloating",
"swelling from fluid",
"knee pain"
],
"press": {
"text": "Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each leg.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/sp9",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}