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.
tǔ
Earth, the phase to which the spleen belongs, and in chapter 29 the premise of an argument rather than a mere correspondence. The chapter's reasoning runs: the spleen is earth; earth rules the centre; earth grows the ten thousand things and takes heaven and earth as its law; therefore the spleen reaches from the head to the feet and can no more be confined to one season than earth can be confined to one quarter. Everything the chapter concludes about the spleen — that it rules no season, that it is delegated eighteen days in each, that it is what carries the stomach's fluids outward — follows from this.
tǔ wù mù
The chapter's explanation of why the sound of wood alarms a patient with Yangming disease. Yangming is the vessel of the stomach, the stomach belongs to earth, and earth is the phase that wood conquers; so the sound that belongs to wood reaches a body already disposed against it. The proof offered within the chapter is the contrast: metal, which does not conquer earth, leaves the patient unmoved. The phrase is the shortest form of a rule that runs through the whole book — that a phase answers to whatever conquers it.
shí yì
Eating well and yet wasting away — food passes through without building flesh. Named twice in chapter 37, from two different transmissions, making it the clearest case in the chapter of one illness with two sources.
shí yǐn yǒu jié
The first of Suwen 1's three ordinaries. 節 is a joint in bamboo, hence a measure and a limit: not abstinence but a bounded practice.
shí yǐn bù jié
Intake that has lost the measure that should govern it. Chapter 29 sets it beside rising and resting out of season, and names the pair as the cause of damage that yin receives — as opposed to the wind and empty evil that yang receives from outside. The consequence the chapter gives is anatomical: what yin receives enters the five depots, and there it produces distension, fullness and blockage above and food-diarrhoea below, which in time becomes intestinal flux. The chapter is not preaching temperance; it is assigning a class of disease to a class of cause, and doing it with the same even hand it uses everywhere else.
shí ròu zé fù
The dietary prohibition with which chapter 31 closes its discussion of convalescence: when the heat disease is a little better, eating meat brings relapse and eating much leaves residue. The two halves forbid different things — one a kind of food, one a quantity — and together they complete the chapter's account of why heat diseases linger. The mechanism has already been given: while heat is stored, grain qi and it press against each other and two heats join. Meat is hard to transform and feeding is easy to overdo, so both reignite what was settling.
quē pén
The hollow above the collar bone, named for what it looks like — a basin with a piece out of it. Chapter 59 counts it twice, once in each of two lists: 缺盆各一 under the foot lesser yang, where it stands in a run that goes from behind the jaw carriage down to the ribs and out to the hip, and 缺盆外骨空各一 under the foot yang brilliance, given as the bone opening just outside the basin. Later practice knows it as Quepen, the twelfth point of the stomach channel, and the site has already met its neighbours in this book — 人迎 (id 382), 三里 (id 1408). What this entry adds is the arithmetic: the chapter is not naming localities so much as keeping two ledgers, and a place belonging to two vessels is entered in both. From Wang Bing onward that has been the standing explanation for why the separate totals overshoot the three hundred and sixty-five the chapter announces, and 缺盆 is the plainest case of it. 缺盆 occurs twice in this chapter and nowhere else among the chapters transcribed on the site so far.
xū xié
Evil that enters through an emptiness — the seasonal wind that arrives from its own quarter at its own time and finds the body undefended. Chapter 26 distinguishes it from 正邪, the mild evil that slips in through open pores when the body is exerted, and the distinction is clinical rather than moral: the empty evil is deep and must be avoided altogether, the upright evil is slight and no one notices it. The chapter's severity comes from the sentence about two emptinesses meeting — the body's and heaven's — which is where the evil reaches the bone.
diān jí
The falling disease — fits, seizures, and the derangements that go with them. Chapter 28 judges it entirely by the pulse: a pulse that beats large and slippery will settle of itself in time, while one that is small, hard and racing means death and no cure. Pressed on whether the disease is vacuous or replete, Qibo gives the answer that inverts the usual rule — vacuous, it can be treated; replete, the patient dies — because here repletion means the evil has taken hold and vacuity means it is loosening.
jīng shén
The pair the texts treat as the inner treasury: essence is what is stored, spirit is what is alert. 'Keeping them within' (內守) is this chapter's plainest statement of what health consists in — and the modern sense of the word as 'mind' is a narrowing to only one half.
jīng qì
The qi of the essence: what the viscera store and what is spent in begetting. Suwen 1 uses it at three points on the same road — at sixteen it overflows and is spent, and yin and yang harmonise, so a man can beget children; at fifty-six it is scant, because the heavenly water is exhausted; and by the end of the counts the essence qi of heaven and earth itself is spent, so that even those whose span exceeds its measure cannot pass the bound. Those who have the way breathe it instead of spending it, which is why they can beget children at a hundred.
zhěn yào
The chapter's title word, and the question the Emperor opens with: 診要何如. What the chapter gives as the answer is unexpected — before any symptom it gives a calendar of where the human qi sits in each month of the year, and then the season's needling rule that follows from it. Diagnosis here is not a technique applied to a patient; it is knowing where you are in the year and what depth that calls for. The second half of the chapter then takes 診 as far as it can go: the recognition of how the channels end.