Each entry gives the term in traditional and simplified form, its pinyin, the senses it carries in the classical corpus, the passages where it does real work, and how published translations have rendered it.
píng qì
Qibo's answer to the question of 平氣 takes one clause: 無過者也 — that which does not go past. In a chapter where everything is counted and timed, the healthy case is defined negatively, as the absence of overstepping. It is one of the shortest definitions in the Suwen, and the whole of the chapter's medicine hangs on it: know the season, know whether the qi came, and you know which of the three you are looking at.
bào jué
The one inversion chapter 48 names: the pulse arrives panting, and the person cannot speak with anyone. It stands out in a chapter given over to pulses that fix a day of death, because here the pulse is named and its sign described rather than used merely to count the days.
nèi gé
The word Suwen 2 ends its argument with. Having set out the four seasons and the root they share, the chapter says plainly that following yin and yang is life and going against them is death, and then names the condition of the man who has got it backwards: he is barred within. It is the last illness name in the chapter, and the only one that is not the consequence of a single season's mistake but of the whole orientation.
chéng
What comes after a qi and holds it down. Asked why each of the six positions has something beneath it, Qi Bo answers with the sentence the tradition never let go of: 亢則害，承乃制，制則生化 — when a thing is excessive there is harm; what bears it down then restrains it; with restraint there is generation and transformation. The six cases make the rule concrete: water under minister fire, earth under water, wind under earth, metal under wind, fire under metal, and the yin essence under sovereign fire. Without the restraint, 害則敗亂, ruin and disorder, and generation and transformation are gravely ill.
shèng dú
The capacity to withstand potent drugs, read off the body rather than the prescription. The chapter's rule is entirely physical: a thick stomach, a black complexion, large bones and fat all bear poison; a man whose bones are thin and whose stomach is slight does not. The word 勝 is doing the work — it is the same verb used of bearing a burden or being equal to a task, not of defeating an enemy — and the chapter has already used the same measure for pain, so that the two questions form a pair: what the body can bear from without, needle and fire, and what it can bear from within, the drugs. The practical consequence is a rule of dosage before dosage was numerical: the same decoction is a different dose in a different body.
zhōng shǐ
The whole course of treatment, from the first stirring of disease to its resolution. 凡刺之道，畢于終始 — the way of needling is complete in beginning and end — and the method is then made concrete: hold the wrist pulse and the neck pulse, compare them, and you know which side is excessive. The chapter's arithmetic of one, two, three and four times is the working out of this single idea, and its closing signs describe what an end looks like when treatment has failed.
xià gé
The worm obstruction below the diaphragm: food goes down and comes back only after a full day — 晬時, the turn of a day. The delay is the diagnostic: in the upper obstruction the return is immediate, here it is late, because a mass has formed below and the road is narrowed. The chapter then explains it: when the man eats, the worms come up to eat; as they come up the lower stomach empties; emptied, it is overcome by evil qi, and accumulation, abscess and constriction follow in order.
dài mài
The vessel that girdles the waist and binds the others to it. The chapter's interest in it is mechanical: it draws the sinews up, and when yang brightness fails it stops drawing, so the legs lose their use even though nothing else has changed.
fǔ yǎng
Bending and lifting — in the chapter, what has to be rescued in wind from overexertion. The whole treatment of that disease is summed up in 以救俛仰, and the days to recovery are then counted by how well the great yang can draw the essence up. Whether it means the bending of the body or the rise and fall of breathing, the commentators have kept both.
bì
Two uses in one chapter. First, the mechanical one: blood congealed in the skin by wind after waking becomes 痺, in the vessels becomes stagnation, in the feet becomes reversal. Then four named diseases — heart, lung, liver and kidney obstruction — each of which is the answer to a colour and a pulse. The modern habit of rendering the word as painful obstruction imports a definition (pain, plus blockage) that this text never gives.
qī cāng
The bitter cold of water. In the chapter it is how cold gets into a body in summer: great summerheat brings sweat, the interstices open wide, and then one meets the bitter cold of water — bathing, or cold drink, or simply the chill of water in hot weather — and it lodges among the interstices and the skin until autumn's wind completes the disease.
bāo bì
Obstruction lodged in the bladder. The chapter localises it precisely — the lower belly where the bladder is, painful when pressed — and gives the two images that carry it: as though scalding water had been poured in, and urine that comes rough. Above, the clear snivel is what the same obstruction does at the other end.