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.
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.
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.
xuè
What this chapter says about blood is all motion. It returns to the liver in sleep, and whatever it reaches can then do its work: the eye sees, the foot walks, the palm grips, the fingers take hold. Wind striking a body just woken congeals it, and where it congeals determines what follows — obstruction in the skin, stagnation in the vessels, reversal cold in the feet. All of blood belongs to the heart; all of qi belongs to the lung.
yǒng qiè
Temperament treated as a clinical datum. Everything chapter 21 lists — walking at night, falling, taking fright, wading into water — happens to everyone; what differs is what happens next. In the brave the qi moves through and the matter closes; in the timid it lodges, and a lodging becomes a disease. So the chapter makes this the announced rule of examination: look at whether a person is bold or timid, and at the state of bone, flesh and skin, and you have the method. Note that the pair is not a judgement: the text never praises one side, it only says the prognosis is written there.
píng rén
What the whole chapter measures by. A balanced person is not an ideal of vigour but a set of numbers: the pulse moves twice on the out-breath and twice on the in-breath, once more as the breath settles, five times in all, with the deep long breath counted in on top. That count is the standard, and because the physician himself is not ill he can use his own calm breathing as the ruler against which the patient's pulse is read. Everything else in the chapter is a distance from this mark: one beat to a breath is scant qi, three with agitation is warmth, wind or impediment, four or more, or a pulse that now races and now stalls, is death.
míng táng
The hall Huang Di sits in at the opening of this chapter, and the room the Suwen uses whenever the business is the ordering of a year rather than the treatment of a patient. The chapter's sentence gives it four verbs — sit, set right, look out over, examine and establish — and all four belong to the calendar: 始正天綱，臨觀八極，考建五常. What follows from the hall is not a remedy but a question about why two orders of things fail to agree.