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.
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.
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.
sè mài
What the emperors of high antiquity prized and what the former teacher handed down. The chapter says three things about them: that they are the essential point of prognosis; that colour answers to the sun and pulse to the moon; and that the changes of colour answer to the pulses of the four seasons. Yang Shangshan explains the pairing by yin and yang — colour shows outwardly and so is yang and answers to the sun; the blood of the pulse is seen inwardly and so is yin and answers to the moon. Wang Bing explains it by timing: the correspondence fixes the period of the prognostication.
rèn mài
The vessel running up the front of the body. In this chapter it 'opens' (通) when the heavenly water arrives and 'empties' (虛) at seven sevens: the vessel is what carries the schedule, not what sets it.
luò mài
The vessels that branch from the channels. The chapter uses them to explain one of its six kinds of sleeplessness: when the lung's connecting vessels turn counter and cannot follow the channels up and down, they lodge in the channel, but because disease of the connecting vessels is slight, the person rises and rests as usual and only the breathing gives it away.
cùn kǒu
The pulse at the wrist, and the place that became the standard one to feel it. In this chapter it is the yin half of the comparison: one degree fuller means ceasing yin, two lesser yin, three greater yin, four or more is 關陰. When both it and 人迎 are four times too full, the condition is 關格, and the chapter gives that a prognosis in plain words.
jué gǔ
The point above the ankle known later as 懸鐘 (Gallbladder 39), named here for the place where the bone appears to end. The chapter needles it with a chisel needle, letting blood, for the shank pain that cannot be pressed — the marrow-adhering disease. It is one of only three points the chapter names outright.
yíng
The shape the winter pulse takes. Where the spring pulse is straight and the summer pulse rises and falls, the winter pulse is said to arrive sunken and beating — deep under the finger, held in like a camp at rest. The image is not of weakness but of containment: this is the season in which the myriad things close and store. Its excess is a pulse that feels like a flicked stone, hard and unyielding; its deficiency is a departure that hurries, and with it come lassitude, pain along the spine, scant qi, and a heart that hangs as if hungry.
jīng gǔ
The tuberosity at the base of the fifth metatarsal, the last landmark of the leg measurement. From the outer ankle to it is three cun, and from it to the ground is one cun. In this chapter it is a bone and nothing more; the same name later becomes the name of the bladder channel's source point, which lies on the same prominence, and the commentators who read the point back into the measurement confuse a landmark with an address.
jīng mài
The chapter opens its answer by conceding what everyone knows. Twelve channels, three hundred and sixty-five connecting vessels — 此皆人之所明知，工之所循用也. The point of naming them is not to teach anatomy but to remove an excuse: a physician who fails has not failed for want of a map. The map is public, counted, and old. What is not public is the use of it — 精神不專，志意不理，外内相失，故時疑殆 — and the first of the four failures is precisely to diagnose without the principle of yin and yang, going against and following. The channels are therefore the chapter's floor, not its ceiling: everything it counts as a failure happens above them, in the physician who has the count by heart and still cannot read the case.