Three-Ingredient Cup Moth Cocoon Powder

天漿子 is worth naming rather than leaving opaque. It is the cocoon, with the overwintering larva or pupa still inside, of the oriental cup moth — 雀甕 in the older materia medica, "sparrow jar", because the hard ribbed cocoon looks like a tiny crock. The moth is Monema flavescens, also written Cnidocampa flavescens, a limacodid whose caterpillar carries stinging spines. The cocoons were collected off fruit-tree twigs in winter. It is a different insect from the silkworm standing beside it in this formula, and no part of the silkworm or any other cocoon in the cabinet is a substitute for it. Three insects and arachnids, one of each, ground together — the tradition's most concentrated form of the wind-extinguishing idea, where a creature that moves in spasms is given to a child who is moving in spasms. **Contains scorpion, a neurotoxic animal venom. The patient is a child, the dose is given as 一字, a pinch, and the text gives no dose by weight anywhere.** Nothing in three insects reaches the dehydration and electrolyte loss behind this child's convulsion, which is set out at sinhyo-san-soa. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.