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.
bàn cì
The first of the five needlings that answer to the five zang. 半刺者，淺内而疾發鍼，無鍼傷肉，如拔毛狀，以取皮氣，此肺之應也 — insert shallowly and withdraw quickly, so that the needle does not injure the flesh, as though plucking a hair, to take the qi of the skin; this is the response of the lung. The name is exact: half a needle, because the other half would be in the flesh.
shǒu dú
Hand poison is the chapter's test for the man who should be set to pressing accumulations. After listing who is fit for what — the clear-eyed for colour, the sharp-eared for sound, the quick-tongued for disputation, the steady hand for needles and moxa, the gentle for stretching and guiding — Huang Di adds the last office: 爪苦手毒，爲事善傷者，可使按積抑痺. The hard-nailed and hand-poisoned man, the one who breaks what he handles, is the man for pressing masses and suppressing obstructions. The test is a tortoise: put it under a vessel, press the vessel for fifty days, and 手毒者 the tortoise dies; 手甘者 it comes back as it was. The passage is the Lingshu's one experiment, and its point is that the capacity is in the hand and not in the intention — which is why the chapter can assign offices at all.
jiān chéng
Metal going to excess. 金曰堅成 — metal is called hard completion — and its 紀 is 收引: 堅成之紀，是謂收引。天氣潔，地氣明，陽氣隨陰治化，燥行其政，物以司成，收氣繁布，化洽不終. The qi of heaven is clean and the qi of earth clear, the yang follows the yin in governing, the dry carries out its governance, things are brought to their completion by it, the reaping qi spreads thickly, and the transforming reaches everywhere and does not finish — the last clause is the excess showing: autumn does the whole year's work and leaves nothing for winter. Its attributes: 其化成，其氣削，其政肅，其令鋭切，其動暴折瘍疰，其德霧露蕭飋，其變肅殺凋零…其象秋，其經手太陰陽明，其藏肺肝…其病喘喝，胸憑仰息. Its viscera are the lung and the liver — the metal and the wood it withholds from — and its illness is the breath that cannot be let out: 喘喝, gasping and hoarse.
shǒu fēng
Head wind is wind caught after washing the hair; Wang Bing says the wind lodges in the head, which is why it is called head wind. Chapter 42 is the source of the clinical detail: the headache comes ahead of the wind, keeps the patient from going out, and abates on the windy day itself.
xīn bì
The first of the chapter's worked examples. The face is red, the pulse arrives racing and hard; the reading is accumulated qi in the centre, which hinders eating from time to time. Its cause is given as an outside illness taking hold of an emptied heart: brooding has weakened it, and so the evil follows in. Note that the colour, the pulse and the cause all belong to one reading — the chapter is showing what it meant by 能合脉色，可以萬全.
xīn tòng
Pain in the heart region. Chapter 45 uses it as one of its plainest clinical signs, and grades it: with fullness in lesser yin inversion, drawn into the belly in the counterflow form, and drawn into the throat in the hand heart master entry, which the chapter declares fatal.
xīn qì
The qi of the heart. In Suwen 2 it appears once, in the four reversals: against the qi of summer, Taiyang · greater yang does not grow and the heart qi is hollow within. Reading it with the penalty named earlier in the chapter — going against summer harms the heart, and autumn brings jie malaria — the two sentences say the same thing from the two ends.
xīn shàn
The chapter's worked example of reading a pulse into a named illness. 診得心脉而急 — a tight heart pulse — is 心疝, and the lower abdomen should show a form. The Emperor asks how that can be, since the heart is nowhere near the lower abdomen, and Qibo answers with the logic of the interior-exterior pairing: the heart is a male depot, the small intestine is its envoy, and the small intestine is down there. The passage is worth its place because it shows the reasoning the book expects — not a symptom list, but a chain from pulse to depot to paired bowel to place.
xīn fēng
Heart wind is the second store wind. Where the others show a colour, this one shows a temper: Wang Bing's gloss on 焦絶 makes the lips scorched and their lines broken, and 善怒嚇 makes the patient quick to anger and to shout. It is diagnosed at the mouth, because the heart governs the tongue.
xīn chè
What the first yang's disease transmits into: 一陽發病，少氣、善欬、善泄，其傳爲心掣，其傳爲隔. The first yang is the lesser yang; the disease begins with breath that is short and a readiness to cough and to purge, and what it transmits into is this — the heart pulled, and then a blockage at which food will not go down. 掣 is a drawing, the motion of something tugged rather than of something beating, and the commentaries keep the distinction: 王冰 reads the heart as pulling itself, and later writers class the sign with the palpitations that have that dragged quality. The chapter itself names it and moves on to 隔.
rè zhēng
The stage at which the heat stops sitting in the body and begins to fight the upright qi. Chapter 32 uses the word as a hinge: every one of the five depot heat diseases is written in two halves, the quiet opening signs and then the violent signs of 熱爭. What changes is not the amount of heat but whether a struggle has begun, and the struggle is what makes the patient rave, startle, fret, or double up with pain.
rè bìng
The general name for any disease in which the body is hot. Chapter 31 opens by declaring that every heat disease belongs to the class of cold damage: the heat is the visible state, the cold that was taken in earlier is the cause. The chapter then explains why some heat diseases kill and some do not — not by the degree of heat, since heat however extreme does not kill, but by whether the disease has been taken up by two paired channels at once. Heat disease is also the term the chapter uses when it turns from the acute stage to convalescence: what is left behind after a heat disease, and what must be forbidden while it is settling.