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.
xiù dù
The mansions of the sky and the degrees they are divided into — the fixed, measurable order of heaven. Chapter 27 opens its answer with a three-part correspondence: heaven has its mansions and degrees, earth has its rivers, the human being has channels. The point of naming the sky first is that the sky is the term that is measurable: the sages set up their measures so as to answer to heaven and earth, and the physician's measures inherit that answering. The reading matters — xiù, the astronomical plural, not sù, lodging.
yíng huò
The planet Mars, the star of fire and of the south, and the one this chapter names most often of the five. Its name is its behaviour: a glimmer that confounds, because the red star wanders and doubles back and will not hold a course. Fire answers to it in surplus (歲火太過…上應熒惑星) and on revenge; metal falling short answers to it too, because fire is what rises against metal (歲金不及，炎火乃行…上應熒惑星). Twice in one paragraph, once for the circuit and once for what strikes it.
chén xīng
The planet Mercury, the star of water and of the north, and the one whose name is a time of day. It keeps close to the sun and shows itself only at its hours, and so it became the marker of them. Water in surplus answers to it (歲水太過…上應辰星), fire falling short answers to it (歲火不及…上應辰星), and it comes back a third time for the cold that strikes back at metal (復則寒雨暴至…上應辰星). The chapter pairs it with 熒惑 more often than with any other star, because water and fire are the two that answer each other.
xiàng huǒ
The second of the two fires, and the one that does the work. 相火以位 — the minister fire by its station — is half of a sentence whose other half is 君火以明: where the sovereign fire rules by giving light, the minister fire rules by holding the place it has been given and acting in it. This chapter gives it that place in so many words — 少陽之上，相火主之 — and it is worth noticing that in the chapter's own list of the six qi, the name that appears is 相火 and not 君火; lesser yin is given 熱氣, heat qi. The two fires are paired in the doctrine and not symmetrical in the list.
dūn fù
Earth going to excess. 土曰敦阜 — earth is called mounded height — and its 紀 is 廣化: 敦阜之紀，是謂廣化，厚德清靜，順長以盈，至陰内實，物化充成，煙埃朦鬱，見於厚土，大雨時行，濕氣乃用，燥政乃辟. Thick virtue at rest, growing followed to fullness, the utmost yin solid within, the world's transformations brought to completion, mist and dust shrouding the thick earth, the great rain falling in its season, the damp qi employed and the dry governance pushed aside. Its attributes: 其化圓，其氣豐，其政靜，其令周備…其象長夏，其經足太陰、陽明，其藏脾、腎…其病腹滿，四支不舉，大風迅至，邪傷脾也. The excess of earth shows as fullness — a full belly, four limbs that will not lift — and it too is told as plenty before it is told as trouble. Its viscera are spleen and kidney, the earth and the water it overcomes.
qì jiāo
The region between the qi of heaven above and the qi of earth below, and the place the chapter assigns the human being to. It is not a boundary but a habitation: 上下之位，氣交之中，人之居也. The received line the chapter then quotes puts a hinge in the middle of it — above the heavenly pivot heaven governs, below it earth governs — and says that in the region where the qi meet, the qi of the human follows and the ten thousand things go by it. Everything the chapter has measured up to this point — the steps, the ke, the initial and the middle — is measured so that this place can be found.
yuè sǐ shēng
The moon's dying and living — 月 yuè, the moon; 死 sǐ, its waning; 生 shēng, its waxing — and the chapter uses the phrase four times as the rule that sets the number of insertions: 以月死生爲數, 以月死生爲痏數. The count is spelled out once: 月生一日一痏，二日二痏，十五日十五痏，十六日十四痏 — rising by one a day to fifteen at the full, then 漸少之 as the moon dies. It is the only arithmetic in the chapter, and it is given to exactly the complaints the chapter is about — wandering obstruction, the hip, the low back — things with no fixed place. The chapter then refuses to leave it mechanical: 用針者，隨氣盛衰，以爲痏數，針過其日數，則脱氣，不及日數，則氣不冩. The moon gives the number; the qi decides. The phrase has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
yuè guō
The moon's visible circumference, treated in chapter 26 as the clock that the blood keeps. When the rim is full, blood and qi are replete and the flesh firm; when it is empty, flesh wastes, the channels empty, the defence qi leaves and the form is left alone. The clinical rule follows directly: do not supplement at the full moon and do not treat at all when the rim is empty. The chapter's physiology of the calendar rests entirely on this word being about the rim rather than the moon as an object.