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.
zhōu bì
The obstruction that travels. The chapter opens by describing a pain that shifts up and down with the vessels, left answering right, and Qibo answers that this is 衆痺, not 周痺; the true 周痺 lies in the blood vessels, goes up and down with them, and cannot cross from side to side, each attack keeping to its place. The naming is given at the close: it is not in the depots, it has not come out to the skin, it sits alone between the flesh and the sinews, and true qi cannot go all round — therefore it is called circulating. Needling follows the direction of the pain: below first if it travels down, above first if it travels up.
qīng zhuó
The pair that organises the chapter. What receives grain is turbid, what receives qi is clear; the clear is poured into the yin and the turbid into the yang. The chapter then follows the two through the throat, the lung, the stomach and the channels, and ends with the rule that makes them clinically useful: the clear qi is slippery and the turbid rough, so needle the yin deep and the yang shallow — and when clear and turbid interfere, adjust by number. The pair is physiological, not moral: turbidity is what has been used, clarity what has not.
qīng yáng
The light, clarified half of qi, the half that rises. Suwen 5 uses the pair 清陽／濁陰 four times in a single breath and once more at the end of its cosmology: the clear becomes heaven, leaves by the upper orifices, opens the interstices, fills the four limbs; the turbid becomes earth, leaves by the lower orifices, walks the five viscera, goes home to the six palaces. The scheme is the chapter's way of saying why one body has an upper half and a lower half at all, and why qi and flavour part company on the way in. 清陽 is not a substance the chapter isolates; it is the direction a part of the qi takes.
pēi xuè
Blood that has come out and congealed. The chapter uses it twice in one entry on nosebleed that will not stop: while the clotted blood is still flowing, take the foot greater yang; for the clot itself, take the hand greater yang; if that fails, prick below the wrist bone; if that fails, bleed the popliteal hollow. The word is precise and the sequence is the point — a nosebleed that has begun to clot is no longer the same condition as one that runs, and the channel changes with it.
cū lǐ
The diagnostic sign the chapter returns to three times, and the one that carries its whole argument from wood to man. Coarse grain means the interstices are open and the flesh is not firm, and from that follow three susceptibilities in order: wind, obstruction, and — through the same openness — the lodging of evil that becomes accumulation. The word is the exact opposite of 小理, fine grain, which marks the small and well-guarded viscus; the next chapter uses the same pair to read the size of the viscera from the skin, since coarse means large and fine means small. In this chapter the comparison is with timber: a wood of loose grain drinks the rain and splits, a wood of close grain turns the axe. 麤 is the base text's graph for 粗 and is kept as printed.
bái hēi féi shòu
The four variables by which the chapter grades a patient before it grades the needle. The question is put at the turn of the chapter: pale or dark, fat or thin, small or tall — does each have its own number? The answers that follow sort men into the fat, the thin, the ordinary, the strong-boned and the infant, and give each a depth and a speed. 白黑 is complexion and 肥瘦 is flesh, and the chapter joins them into one compound because together they name what the physician must look at before choosing a needle; the whole second half of the chapter is the elaboration of that one question.
róng wèi
The two directions of one thing: what flows inward to nourish, and what circles outward to guard. The site carries the halves separately, as 榮氣 (id 1036) and 衛氣 (id 219); chapter 58 carries the pair, and it carries it five times, always in the same way — not as two substances doing two jobs but as one movement that is either going on or has stopped. The chapter's grammar for it is small and exact. Where they run, nothing needs saying. Where they are checked, they overflow the wrong way round — 榮衛稽留，衛散榮溢，氣竭血著 — and the body reads hot without and short of breath within. Where they do not move at all it suppurates, and the pus eats inward through marrow and outward through the great flesh behind the knee. Where they cannot lodge — 積寒留舍，榮衛不居 — cold has taken the place they should be standing in, and the flesh rolls, the sinews shorten, the inside becomes bone impediment and the outside becomes insensitivity. The remedy given is equally small: 疾冩無怠，以通榮衛, drain promptly without slackening, to put the construction and defence back in motion. Note the graph: the chapter writes it once with water on either side, 滎, which this site reads róng, taking it for the same word; chapter 44's 滎 is the brook point and stays xíng.
róng qì
The nourishing qi, paired with the defence qi. This chapter's use of the pair is unusually tidy: it takes one complaint — flesh that has stopped answering — and divides it, numbness to construction qi and loss of use to defence qi, then states what happens when both are vacuous. It also leaves the crux untouched: the defence qi is called replete in one clause and vacuous in the next, and the site transcribes both as they stand.
zhuān jīng
The heart as the single place where the essence of the five viscera is gathered undivided. The chapter's opening anatomy reads: 夫心者，五藏之專精也；目者，其竅也；華色者，其榮也 — the heart is the concentrated essence of the five viscera, the eye is its orifice, the bloom of the face is its glory. 專 is not 'special' but 'undivided': the five essences are not five separate stores but one essence gathered at the heart, which then goes out at the eye and shows on the face. This is what lets the whole chapter argue about tears from the heart: what leaves the eye is what the heart holds.
cháng shù
The opening table of chapter 24 and the one the whole chapter hangs on: each of the six channels has a fixed allotment of blood and qi, and the allotment is a fact about the person rather than about the illness. It is the reason the chapter can end with six needling rules instead of six opinions — where a channel is plentiful you may let, and where it is scant you may not. Readers should note that the graph 數 is read shù here and shuò in the chapter's phrase for repeated fright; the two senses sit six paragraphs apart in the same text.
mù zì
The corner of the eye. The sentence runs 夫一水不勝五火，故目眦盲 — one water cannot overcome five fires, and so the corner of the eye goes blind. The five fires are the five viscera's yang; the one water is the essence. In reversal the yang gathers above (陽氣并於上), the fire alone gives light (則火獨光也), and the corner, where the eye's vessels gather, is scorched. The base writes 眦 and not 眥, and the site prints the base's form.