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.
dào
Both a road and a method, and the texts lean on both senses at once. 'Knowing the Way' (知道) is not assent to a doctrine but knowing how to conduct a life; the second chapter's line about the sage practising it and the fool merely wearing it depends on that.
dé
Not moral goodness in the English sense. De is what something has and does by being itself — and when heaven 'stores' it (藏德), the point is that its efficacy is invisible rather than displayed.
tāng yè
The first resort of the physicians of middle antiquity: ten days of it, to drive out the illnesses of the eight winds and the five obstructions; and if ten days is not enough, herbs are added. The chapter grades eras by what they reach for — invocation in high antiquity, decoction in the middle, and in the late age both decoction and needle used too late. The Suwen has a whole chapter on the subject (湯液醪醴論), where the liquor is made from rice and fermented, and where the same pair 標本 appears.
fú gǔ
The image by which the chapter states that colour, pulse and the skin of the cubit cannot disagree. 夫色脉與尺之相應也，如桴鼓影響之相應也，不得相失也 — their response is like that of drumstick and drum, shadow and echo; they must not lose one another. Three images are used and each adds something: the drumstick and drum are simultaneous, the shadow follows the form without interval, the echo answers the sound without choice. The conclusion drawn is not ornamental but diagnostic — 故知一則爲工，知二則爲神，知三則神且明矣 — since the three always agree, one who reads one is a workman, two a spirit, three both.
míng míng
What the physician sees and no one else does. Chapter 26 defines it precisely: it means that form, qi, construction and defence do not appear outwardly, and yet the practitioner knows them, because he has cross-matched the sun's warmth, the moon's phases and the floating and sinking of the seasonal qi. The word carries the chapter's epistemology — looked at, it has no form; tasted, it has no flavour — and it leads straight into the closing passage on spirit, which is dark at first and then brightly, singularly clear.
yǎo míng
窈冥 is what Huang Di says he asked about. Lei Gong answered out of the Canon of the Pulse, and the rebuke is that a written book cannot answer a question about what is not written: 吾問子窈冥，子言上下篇以對，何也. Wang Bing identifies the deep and dark with 形氣榮衛, the form, qi, blood and defence that do not appear outside and that the skilled physician alone knows — the same 冥冥 that Suwen 26 calls 視之無形，嘗之無味. The word thus stands at the head of the chapter's method: what must be read is precisely what cannot be seen.
chóng fāng
What the chapter prescribes when the first formula fails: 奇之不去則偶之，是謂重方. The failure is not of the drugs but of the count — an odd formula has not cleared the disease, so the even one is laid beside it, and the two together are a doubled formula. It is the third of four terms in one sequence, and the sequence is the chapter's answer to a physician who has tried the plain rule: 近者奇之，遠者偶之 gives the ordinary choice, 重方 gives what to do when it does not work, and 反佐 gives what to do when 重方 does not work either. 重 is read chóng: the formula is not heavier, it is repeated.