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.
zhāi jiè
The fasting and abstaining by which a person is made fit to approach what is holy, and the condition this chapter attaches to its own discourse: 非齊戒不敢發 — without it, he does not dare bring the text out. The chapter writes 齊, and the received text writes 齋; the site follows the base for the graph and the received text for the reading, which is what it does elsewhere with a base graph whose meaning is settled. What is being guarded is not the paper. It is the reader: the discourse has been laid in the chamber of the spirit and is to be handed on with care, and the fasting is what makes a person able to receive it.
féi qì
One of the five accumulations, the one belonging to the liver. The chapter gives it in the liver's pulse series: 微急，爲肥氣，在脅下，若覆杯 — a slightly urgent liver pulse gives fat qi below the flanks, like an overturned cup. The place is the liver's own region, and the image is precise: a rounded mass whose edge can be felt and whose underside cannot. Later texts made the five accumulations a system — 肥氣 for the liver, 伏梁 for the heart, 痞氣 for the spleen, 息賁 for the lung, 奔豚 for the kidney — and this chapter is where four of the five names first stand together, each attached to a pulse rather than to a doctrine.
fēi yáng
Flying yang — the vessel that later acupuncture calls 飛揚, the network point of the foot greater yang. Chapter 41 gives it a brushed sensation at the painful spot and, at its worst, grief and fear; it is needled above the inner ankle where it meets the yin link vessel.
láo lǐ
The two grain preparations of the chapter's title, and the reason the chapter is called what it is. Qibo's answer about how to make them is entirely about the material — rice, cooked over rice straw, because rice is complete and straw is firm. That answer is the point: these are the mildest medicines in the book, made from food, and the chapter measures the decline of the age by how far they no longer reach. 湯液 is the clear broth; 醪 and 醴 are the wines, turbid and sweet respectively.
fā rè
Heat issuing from the body. The book's point is not that fever is present but when: in cold damage it may have begun or not, and the aversion to cold is what cannot be missing. Where fever stands with aversion to cold the illness is of the yang; where there is no fever at all the illness is of the yin; and where fever comes with thirst and no aversion to cold it is warm disease, a different road altogether.
piào hàn
The quality of qi in the well-fed and the powerful, and the reason they cannot be needled like common men. 夫王公大人，血食之君，身體柔脆，肌肉軟弱，血氣慓悍滑利 — their bodies are soft and brittle, their flesh slack, and their blood and qi fierce, bold and smooth. The consequence is technical: 氣滑即出疾，其氣濇則出遲，氣悍則鍼小而入淺 — slippery qi lets the needle out quickly, rough qi holds it, and fierce qi needs a small needle and a shallow insertion. Hence 刺布衣者，深以留之；刺大人者，微以徐之. The passage is the book's clearest statement that technique follows constitution, and it is also a piece of social observation: the rich are not merely different in rank, they are different in flesh.
huǒ ruò
Moxibustion, named by its action rather than its material. The chapter pairs it with needle and stone at the very first question: the strength of the bones, the firmness of the flesh, the thickness of the skin and the density of the interstices all differ, and the pain of needle, stone and fire differs with them. The answer is a rule about tissue rather than about disease — hard bone, soft sinew, slack flesh and thick skin bear pain, and bear fire too; hard flesh with thin skin does not. Fire is thus treated as a stimulus of the same order as the needle, to be judged by the same bodily measure, and the chapter's later questions about black complexion and strong bone extend the same logic to the point where a man may be said to bear moxa at all.
lòu
What cold becomes when it sinks into the vessels and stays: a fistula. The sequence in Suwen 3 is exact — opening and closing fail, cold qi follows in, and there is great hunching; sunk into the vessels it becomes fistula; lingering in the flesh it turns the qi of the transport points oppressive, so that what follows is a readiness to fear and to be terrified. Later usage takes 瘻 as the sinus that will not close.
wǔ wèi
The five flavours — sour, salty, sweet, bitter, acrid — each nourish one of the five viscera and, taken to excess, injure another. Suwen 3 puts it bluntly: what yin generates has its root in the flavours, and the five palaces of yin are wounded by them.
wǔ xíng
Chapter 22 gives the definition the whole book works from, and gives it in a single breath: the five phases are metal, wood, water, fire and earth, and they are by turns noble and by turns base. Note the order — this chapter names metal first, not the generating sequence used elsewhere — because what matters here is not production but rise and fall. A phase is noble when its season is present and base when it has passed, and from that alternation everything in the chapter follows: which viscus each season belongs to, which days favour it, when illness will ease and when it will crush, which flavour supplements and which drains. Read as elements, none of this would hold together.
wǔ zàng
The five depots — liver, heart, spleen, lung and kidney — which store the essences rather than transmit them. This chapter has them wounded in turn by the evils proper to each season.
wǔ rù
Chapter 23 opens with the shortest of its tables and the one that underwrites the rest: each of the five flavours goes to its own viscus. Note that the matching is by phase and not by taste — sour and the liver are both wood, bitter and the heart both fire — so the entry is not a remark about palates. It is the premise for the fifth entry in the chapter, the five prohibitions, where a flavour is forbidden precisely because of where it arrives.