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.
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.
guī jǔ héng quán
Chapter 17's way of saying that a pulse has a shape appropriate to its season: spring answers to the compasses (round and smooth), summer to the square (full and square), autumn to the balance beam (level and light), winter to the weight (sunken and heavy). The four instruments are the vocabulary of a workshop applied to a wrist: each season's pulse is not merely different in degree, it is different in kind, and each can be measured against its own instrument. The pair 權衡 recurs elsewhere in the book as weighing in the abstract sense of judging.
bèi huà
Earth in its even state, and the phase whose even name is the name of its own work. 土曰備化 — earth is called complete transformation — and its 紀 runs: 備化之紀，氣恊天休，德流四政，五化齊脩，其氣平，其性順，其用高下，其化豐滿，其類土，其政安靜，其候溽蒸，其令濕，其藏脾，脾其畏風，其主口，其榖稷，其果棗，其實肉，其應長夏，其蟲倮，其畜牛，其色黄，其養肉，其病否，其味甘，其音宫，其物膚，其數五. Its opening pair is the largest claim any of the five makes: 氣恊天休，德流四政 — its qi answers to the bounty of heaven, and its virtue runs through the governance of all four quarters. Its five transformations are not merely level or even but 齊脩, all of them ordered together, which is why the year-rites of the earth are the ones that hold the other four. Its viscus is the spleen, its season the long summer, its number five, the number of the centre; when it falls short it is 卑監, low and confined (called 減化, the diminishing transformation), and when it goes to excess 敦阜, mounded high (called 廣化, the widening one).
jīng shuǐ
The rivers of the earth, used in chapter 27 as the middle term of the correspondence that the whole chapter argues from: heaven has its mansions and degrees, earth has its rivers, the human being has channels. Because of that correspondence the chapter can describe four kinds of weather — mild, frozen, baking, gusting — and have each one say something exact about the blood: quiet, congealed and dragging, boiling over, heaving into ridges. The image is not decorative. It is what licenses the chapter's central claim, that an evil entering a pulse behaves like a river meeting wind.