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.
shěng
A blight that falls, and in this chapter always a blight that falls *somewhere*: 其眚東、其眚南、其眚四維、其眚西、其眚北. It is paired with 災 throughout, and the two are not the same word — 災 is the disaster, and 眚 is where and on whom it lands. Each of the five passages that give it a direction goes on to give the viscus and the places the illness lodges in, so that a direction, an organ, and an outside are named together: wood falling short has its calamity in the east, its viscus the liver, its illness within in the flanks and without in the joints. The graph began as a film over the eye, and the sense of a visitation that spoils came from that.
huái zǐ
To be pregnant. Chapter 40 turns it into a rule of diagnosis: the body has the illness and yet there is no deviant pulse — the pulse does not testify against the pregnancy.
qì yī ér zǒu
One of the behaviours chapter 30 explains in the severe stage of Yangming disease: the patient casts off his clothes and runs. The chapter's explanation is heat — Yangming governs the flesh, its vessel is rich in blood and qi, evil lodging there turns to heat, and a body full of heat cannot bear clothes. The same behaviour recurs in the later literature as a stock sign of mania, but chapter 30 gives it no mental cause at all.
jiǔ ruò
The therapy of the north. The land is high, the people sleep out in the open and live on milk, the cold settles into the storing organs and they swell. What is cold is warmed by burning. Wang Bing: burning with fire and mugwort is what is meant by cautery, and he notes that people of the north still practise it. The base text writes the word 爇; the received text writes 焫. They are the same word.
jiǔ cì
The pair of external methods the Suwen sets against drugs: burning moxa and needling. Chapter 24 reaches for it twice — once as the treatment for disease of the vessels, and once as what the back transport points are measured for. The graph the base text writes deserves a note of its own: 剌 with the phonetic 束 is a separate word meaning perverse, and it stands here for 刺, to pierce. Every one of the chapter's eight occurrences is to be read cì, and the closing six-channel rules settle it — they are rules about letting blood, and 剌 là would make nonsense of them.
biàn
The second half of 物生謂之化，物極謂之變, and the half that makes the sentence a warning. A thing's being generated is transformation; a thing's arrival at its extreme is change. The chapter then uses the word exactly that way: 動靜相召，上下相臨，陰陽相錯，而變由生也 — when motion and stillness call to one another, the upper and the lower press on one another, and yin and yang cross, change arises out of it. Change is not growth; it is what growth produces when it has gone as far as it can.
chāng yáng
Flourishing yang — the vessel later acupuncture calls 復溜, on the foot lesser yin. Chapter 41 gives it the gravest entry in the chapter: pain into the breast, blank sight, and at its worst an arched back with the tongue curled and speech gone.
jīng qì
The qi that travels the channels, and specifically its arrival — the event chapter 25 builds its whole technique around. The chapter's sequence is precise: wait for the empty to fill and the full to empty, then when the channel qi has arrived hold on to it and do not let it go. Depth and shallowness lie in the will, far and near are as one, and the hand is like gripping a tiger. The term is the hinge between the chapter's theory and its practice: everything before it is preparation, everything after it is what you do in the instant you have.
jīng suì
The channel tunnels — 經 jīng, the warp; 隧 suì, a hidden course, which 王冰 glosses 隧，潛道也 — and the word is the road a channel runs in rather than the channel itself. This chapter uses it five times and leans on every one. It says what they are for: 五藏之道，皆出於經隧，以行血氣. It says what follows if they are not kept: 血氣不和，百病乃變化而生，是故守經隧焉 — guard the tunnels, which is the sentence the chapter's whole counsel hangs on. It writes the treatment of qi on them: 氣有餘則冩其經隧…不足則𥙷其經隧. And it closes its account of method with them: 刺此者，取之經隧，取血於營，取氣於衛. The word is not the same as 脈 or 絡, and the chapter keeps the three apart: the network vessel is where blood is drawn from, the channel is what must not be struck, and the tunnel is the course that is guarded and drawn on. It has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
huò luàn
Sudden confusion of the bowel — vomiting and purging together, coming on at speed. Chapter 28's entry for it is pure practice and no prognosis: needle five beside the transport points, and three at the foot yang brilliance and above it. It stands in a run of entries that all begin with 暴, suddenly — the sudden abscess, the sudden abdominal fullness, the sudden grief, the sudden inversion — and what groups them is not the organ affected but the way they arrive.
chōng yáng
The pulse at the instep where the stomach channel's qi surges through, and the pulse this chapter takes when the wood circuit is in surplus. The rule the chapter follows, without ever stating it, is that a circuit in surplus strikes one phase and the pulse taken is that phase's own channel pulse: 歲木太過，風氣流行，脾土受邪 — wood in surplus strikes the earth of the spleen — and so it is 衝陽, the stomach's pulse, whose stopping means death. 絶 here is the pulse ceasing, not the channel being cut; the chapter says of all five pulses that when it is 絶 there is death and no cure.
cì
The graph that the 1550 base text writes where modern texts write 刺, to needle. It is a scribal variant, not a different word: throughout this chapter it is read cì and means the act of needling a channel. Chapter 32 is built on it — the title itself means needling heat, and the chapter's whole procedure is to name the channel to be needled for each depot's heat disease. The site transcribes the base graph and reads the intended word.