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.
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.
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.
féi
Wind-stroke of the flaccid kind, set in this chapter against 偏枯. The difference is exact: in 偏枯 half the body will not move and it hurts, while in 痱 there is no pain at all and all four limbs fail to gather, with the mind clouded but not lost. The chapter grades the prognosis by speech — faint but intelligible speech can be treated, inability to speak cannot — and gives the order of treatment when the disease began in the yang and moved into the yin: take the yang first, then the yin, and needle shallowly.
ròu jū
Flesh abscess is the last of the six lesions. 有所結，中於肉，宗氣歸之，邪留而不去，有𤍠則化而爲膿，無𤍠則爲肉疽 — a knot forms, it settles in the flesh, the ancestral qi returns to it, the evil stays and does not leave; with heat it transforms into pus, without heat it is a flesh abscess. The sentence is the chapter's cleanest statement of what heat does: the same knot, the same place, and the only difference is whether it burns. The chapter closes on this pair with a line that covers all six: 凡此數氣者，其發無常處，而有常名也 — these several qi have no fixed place of outbreak, but they have fixed names.
jīn yè
The body's fluids, and the substance this chapter turns against the patient: when the yang of the five storing organs is exhausted, 津液充郭 — the fluids fill the frame, and the body can no longer keep company with its clothes. The word sits three lines from the treatment that removes them, which is the neat thing about the passage: the fluid is both the disease and the proof that the disease has been reached.
shí qì
What food becomes on its way through the body — the most reprinted passage in the chapter. Food qi enters the stomach and disperses essence to the liver, which in turn soaks the sinews. Its thick part returns to the heart, which steeps the vessels with essence; vessel qi flows through the channels, channel qi returns to the lung, the lung is courted by the hundred vessels, and essence is conveyed out to skin and hair. The next quotation runs the parallel itinerary for drink. What makes the passage worth watching is that nothing here is decorative: it is the account given for why the pulse at the wrist can speak for the whole frame.
xíng qì
Form and qi taken together, and weighed against the pulse in the chapter's three sentences on life and death: 形弱氣虛，死；形氣有餘，脈氣不足，死；脈氣有餘，形氣不足，生. A weak form with deficient qi dies; form and qi in excess with insufficient pulse qi dies; pulse qi in excess with insufficient form and qi lives. The three are not a scale of strength but a test of agreement: the outside and the inside must match. Where form and qi are full and the pulse is empty, the fullness is hollow and the patient dies; where the pulse is full and the outside is empty, the root still holds and the patient lives. This is the chapter's last word on prognosis before it turns to the manner of the physician.
xíng shèng sè
The second diagnostic step of the chapter. A man's form belongs to one phase and his complexion to another; when the form's phase overcomes the colour's, or the colour's the form's, the two are out of step. Such a man falls ill when the overcoming phase has its year and the year-taboo is added, and if he then meets an outside evil the illness moves. Where form and colour match, the chapter says, the man is rich and happy — the prognosis is stated in the same breath as the anatomy.
sì zhī
The arms and legs, understood as the branches of the body. Chapter 29 makes them the test case for how the spleen works: the limbs take their qi from the stomach, but the qi cannot reach the channels on its own — the spleen carries it. When the spleen is diseased and cannot move the stomach's fluids, the limbs receive nothing, their qi weakens day by day, and sinew, bone, muscle and flesh have nothing to grow on, so the limbs simply stop being usable. The chapter states this twice, once in the middle and once at the end, and the two statements differ only in whether they blame the vessel ways or the yin ways.
mǎn yǔ shí
The chapter's most quoted formula, and its cleanest piece of reasoning. Storing organs are full but cannot be filled, because what they hold is essence, which is not delivered in loads. Palaces are filled but cannot be full, because what they hold is food in transit, and it is always moving somewhere else — stomach full and bowels empty, then bowels full and stomach empty. Keeping the two English words apart is the only way to keep the formula.
miàn wáng
The face's seat of judgement, at the tip of the nose, and the one landmark the chapter names twice over. Above it lies the small intestine; below it the bladder and the uterus; and on it the colours of the two lower regions are read — in men a small-belly pain that reaches the testis, in women disease of the bladder and the womb, with the shape of the colour deciding whether the illness scatters or gathers. The name is political: the nose is where the face is governed, and the colours that appear there are the ones that concern generation. It is also the point at which the map turns from the viscera to the organs of reproduction, which is why the two paragraphs that follow are the most explicit in the book on the subject.