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.
shào huǒ
The mild fire the body keeps and lives on — the counterpart of the strong fire, and the one the chapter credits with generating the qi: 少火生氣. Suwen 5 gives it three clauses set against the three of the strong fire — its qi is at its full, it gives the qi birth, and the qi feeds it. The reading of 少 is shào, as in 少陽 and 少陰: not 'little fire' by quantity but the younger, milder fire, which is why the same paragraph can say the qi eats the lesser fire without contradiction. Wang Bing takes it as the source of the generating qi, and that is the sense later medicine kept when it opposed the physiological fire to the pathological one.
gān qì
The qi of the liver, and the sixth thing to fail in the man's eight-year count. At fifty-six the liver qi declines and the sinews can no longer move — the one place in the count where the chapter names the tissue along with the organ, because the sinews belong to the liver. It comes after the yang qi fails in the upper part at forty-eight and before the heavenly water is exhausted, and it is the last failure before the body is said to have reached its extreme in every part.
duó jīng
The depletion named at the end of the chapter's account of weeping. The heart is master of the five depots and six palaces, the eye gathers the ancestral vessels and is the upper road of liquid, the mouth and nose are the gates of qi; when sorrow moves the heart, the depots shake, the ancestral vessels respond, the liquid road opens, and tears come. The liquid is what irrigates the essence and moistens the hollow openings; let the weeping not stop and the liquid is exhausted, the essence is not poured, and the eye has nothing to see with. That is why it is called robbing the essence. The treatment is to supplement the pillar of heaven beside the neck.
shào fù
The lower abdomen, the region below the navel. The word appears once in this chapter, in the ceasing yin entry, alongside distension and stopped passages — the picture the conduit's inversion gives when its vessel is obstructed in the pelvis.
fèi qì
The qi of the lung. Suwen 2 gives it both the rule and the penalty: the rule for autumn is to keep the will from reaching outward so that the lung qi is pure, and the penalty for getting autumn wrong is that Taiyin · greater yin does not gather in and the lung qi is scorched and full. It is the one of the four storehouse qi in this chapter that the text tells you how to keep as well as how it fails.
yè zhé
Leaf-Hiding is the first of the eight palaces and the one the year turns on. 太一常以冬至之日，居叶蟄之宫 — on the winter solstice the Great One dwells there, and after the round of the other seven it returns: 四十五日，日復居叶蟄之宫，曰冬至矣. The name is a calendar image rather than an anatomical one: 蟄 is the insect's winter hiding, and the palace is the north, the point at which the year's qi is most withdrawn. The chapter uses it twice more — the day of the solstice is the day on which wind and rain are watched, and a wind from the south at that moment is 虚風, the evil that will be stored in the bone until spring.
xiǎo dà
The lesser and the greater — 小 xiǎo, small; 大 dà, great — which in this chapter means urine and stool. The chapter sets the rule in four words: 小大不利治其標，小大利治其本. When the passages do not flow, the branch is treated; when they flow, the root is. It is the same reasoning it has just applied to fullness in the centre, and it is the second of only two situations in the chapter that reverse the order of treatment. Later the same rule is written from the other end — 先小大不利而後生病者，治其本 — and read plainly it contradicts the first sentence; 張介賓 takes the two as mutually explanatory rather than opposed, and the base text is printed as it stands. The catalogue that follows is full of the same thing in other words: 小便閉 four times, 閉塞不通 once, 腹脹 three times.
mìng mén
In this chapter the life gate is the eye: 太陽根于至陰，結于命門，命門者，目也. The definition is given in four characters and is not argued, because the chapter's business is to say where each channel is knotted, and for taiyang the answer is the eye. The name matters because later medicine gave 命門 to a place in the kidney and made it the source of the body's fire; that sense is not here and must not be read back. What is here is a topographical statement: the yang of the foot taiyang gathers at the organ of sight, which is why the eye is where its diseases show and where its points are taken.
xià jiāo
The lowest of the three burners, separating from the coiled intestine and pouring into the bladder. Grain and water lie together in the stomach, become dregs, and descend into the large intestine; the seeping part goes down by a separate course and filters into the bladder. The chapter's proof of it is the wine: wine enters after the grain and leaves as urine before it, because its qi is fierce and clear. Its image is a drain — what is carried away and not kept.