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.
dǎn dān
The same word 癉 set in the gallbladder, showing itself as a bitter taste in the mouth. Chapter 47 gives the mechanism in one sentence: the liver is the general within, decision is taken from the gallbladder, and the throat is its envoy; someone who deliberates often and never decides empties the gallbladder, its qi overflows upward, and the mouth is bitter. The treatment is the gallbladder's alarm and transport points.
nì cóng
The chapter uses the pair twice, and both times as something the physician is supposed to examine and fails to. First of what the late-age physician does not do: 不審逆從. Then of what he does do: 逆從到行 — he walks the pair upside down, taking what goes against for what follows. Wang Bing's gloss is severe: to treat by inverted reason is not merely to harm the patient's spirit; set such a man to advise a ruler and the state will not keep its peace. The opposite skill appears in Suwen 9 as 謹熟陰陽，無與衆謀.
nì sì shí
The name for a pulse that contradicts the season it is in. Getting a lung pulse in spring, a kidney pulse in summer, a heart pulse in autumn, a spleen pulse in winter — each the pulse of the quarter that this season's viscus cannot conquer — and their arrival hanging, cut off, sunken and rough, is one kind. The other is having no seasonal form at all: sunken and rough in spring and summer, floating and large in autumn and winter. To this the chapter adds a short list of outright contradictions — heat disease with a calm pulse, diarrhoea with a large pulse, blood loss with a replete pulse — and says plainly that they are difficult to treat. Along with the four difficulties of form, qi, colour and pulse, these are what a physician is told to recognise and state out loud.
jì zhì
The arrangement by which the spleen, having no season of its own, governs eighteen days at the turn of each of the four. Chapter 29 states it in a single clause and then explains why it must be so: the spleen is earth, earth grows the ten thousand things, and what grows everything cannot be confined to a quarter of the year. Eighteen days four times over is seventy-two, and the number is not arbitrary — it is what is left when the four seasons have each taken their own. Later medicine turned this into the doctrine that the spleen is in charge at the hinges between seasons.
sī tiān
The qi that has charge of the upper half of the year. Six qi take it in turn — 少陽、陽明、太陽、厥陰、少陰、太陰 — and this chapter gives all six, each with what it does: 少陽司天，火氣下臨，肺氣上從；陽明司天，燥氣下臨，肝氣上從. The form is fixed: the governing qi descends, and the viscus whose phase it opposes rises to answer it, so that what the year does to a man is written as one qi moving and one organ following. The same six come back later in the passage on the five classes, where 司天 decides which kind of creature is quiet, which breeds, and which does not come to term at all. Its counterpart is 在泉, which has charge of the lower half; the two are never both in the same half of the year.
zhì shén
The first of the five rules of needling in chapter 25, and the book's plainest statement that technique begins with the practitioner rather than with the instrument. Read it against the chapter's complaint: the Emperor's own mind is confounded by pity, and that confusion makes the disease worse. 治神 is the cure for that. It is not the same thing as the shen that chapter 23 says the heart stores; that is a viscus's charge, this is a discipline. The chapter restates it at the very end as a result rather than a rule: the spirit is not entangled in the many things.
zhǔ suì
To preside over a year — of the five circuits, each of which governs one year in turn, and of the qi that is said to govern it. The chapter opens by reporting that this is all the emperor was told (正五氣之各主歲爾) and closes by asking what governs when the year is governed badly. The answer is the rule of excess and deficit, and it is the one place in the chapter where the doctrine of the circuits is stated in terms a physician can use: 氣有餘，則制己所勝，而侮所不勝; 其不及，則己所不勝侮而乘之.
dū mài
The vessel that runs the spine and governs the yang vessels. Chapter 44 names it once, to complete the picture: the vessels that meet at the ancestral sinews belong to the belt vessel and connect to the governing vessel, so that the sinews are held between a girdle and a backbone.
sūn mài
The grandchild vessel — 孫 sūn, a grandchild, the furthest remove from the trunk; 脉 mài, a vessel — and the chapter gives the word its meaning by putting it at the head of a ladder: 風雨之傷人也，先客於皮膚，傳入於孫脉，孫脉滿則傳入於絡脉，絡脉滿則輸於大經脉. Skin, grandchild vessel, network vessel, great channel, each filling before the next is entered. The other passage runs it backwards: 絡之與孫脉，俱輸於經 — the network vessel and the grandchild vessel both pour into the channel, which is what makes them one family and makes the grandchild the innermost of the shallow places. A third use shows why that matters clinically: 血氣未并，五藏安定，孫絡水溢，則經有留血 — the grandchild vessel overflowing is what leaves blood stranded in the channel. The site has 孫絡, the grandchild network, from chapter 58, where it is counted among the three hundred and sixty-five; this chapter writes the word with 脉 rather than 絡, and the two are the same thing under two graphs. The word has not appeared in this form on the site before.
dà huò
Great confusion — in chapter 27, the name for a specific and serious failure: punishing where there is no fault. What makes it confusion rather than mere error is that the physician cannot distinguish the pairs: he takes repletion for vacuity, the evil for the true, following for going against. The consequence is not just that the treatment fails but that the great channels are thrown into disorder and the true qi cannot be restored. Note that the Lingshu has a chapter of the same name about a quite different matter — dizziness and forgetfulness — so the word is not automatically this chapter's sense.
dà xiě
To drain all the yin vessels at once, and the name of a fatal mistake. 取五脉者死，言病在中，氣不足，但用鍼盡大寫其諸陰之脉也 — taking the five vessels means death: the disease is within and the qi is insufficient, yet the needle is used to drain every yin vessel utterly. The word 大 here is adverbial, as it so often is in this edition: not a large drainage but a complete one. Zhang Jiebin glosses it exactly so, 大寫，謂盡瀉之, and the chapter's own line has 盡 immediately before it. The passage is the counterweight to the supplementing rule of Chapter One: the same needle, the same point, and the difference between life and death is whether the direction was read correctly.
dà lóu
A severe curvature of the spine. The chapter traces it to yang failing to open and close the pores, so that cold settles into the sinews and along the transport points.