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.
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.
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.
biǎo lǐ
The pairing by which the six channels are organised into three couples: greater yang with lesser yin, lesser yang with ceasing yin, yang brightness with greater yin. Chapter 24 gives the pairing for the foot and then for the hand, and the hand list is the interesting one — where the foot says ceasing yin, the hand says the heart master, which is how the text names the pericardium when it needs to keep it distinct from the foot channel of the same name. Note that exterior and interior here are a relation between channels, not the depth of a disease; the chapter's own use is anatomy, not diagnosis.
jīng zhōng
The second word of the chapter's title, and the whole of its second half: 願聞十二經脉之終奈何. What follows is the book's anatomy of dying — six passages, one for each pair of channels, naming the signs by which you will know that this channel has finished: the eyes carried upward, the sweat that comes at the end, the face black, the teeth seeming to lengthen. The chapter's last line calls them 十二經之所敗, the ruin of the twelve channels.