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.
zhēn shí
The chapter's name for everything a physician does from the outside, and the thing it demotes in a single clause: 鍼石，道也 — the needle and the stone are a method, nothing more. Chapter 12 had already listed the stone of the east and the nine needles of the south as regional inventions. Chapter 14 takes the same implements and asks what they are worth when the patient's spirit is gone. The answer is nothing, because they are a dao and not a cause.
bāo luò
The network of the womb, tied to the kidney and through the lesser yin vessel to the root of the tongue. Chapter 47 explains the loss of voice in the ninth month by it, and then refuses to treat it: the network will open again after the birth, and the only rule the chapter lays down is the one it quotes from the Canon of Needling — do not detract from what is insufficient.
jiǔ qiào
The body's nine openings — the seven in the head and the two below. Chapter 28 brings them in only at the close, as the last of three things it traces back to a source: jaundice and mania come from counterflow that has lasted, the five depots out of balance come from the six palaces shut up, and headache, ringing in the ears and the nine orifices failing to work freely come from the stomach and intestines. The claim is anatomical as much as it is clinical: what is highest is fed by what is lowest.
shuǐ jiāng bù rù
The terminal sign of the double-affected case in chapter 31: no fluid will go down and the patient recognises no one, and death follows on the sixth day. The chapter has already said that the double-affected patient cannot escape death; this line fixes the date and gives the sign by which the end is recognised. It also completes a thread running through the whole chapter — the return of appetite marks the turning point on the tenth day, and the loss of the ability to take anything marks the end here.
bù yuè
The chapter's word for a woman's menses stopping, and it comes in the same sentence as 隱曲: 二陽之病發心脾，有不得隱曲，女子不月. The disease begins in the heart and the spleen; the heart governs the blood and the spleen holds it, and the monthly flow fails. What gives the word its weight is where it stands. The same sentence sends the disease on into 風消 and then into 息賁, 死不治 — so in this chapter the failure of the menses is not a small complaint attached to a large one, but the first sign of a disease that goes on to dry the flesh out and then to kill. The chapter gives no treatment; it gives the sequence.
bù kě guà yǐ fà
Too fine for a hair to hang on — the margin by which the moment can be missed. Chapter 27 states it twice within four lines, once as a definition ("not to be hung by a hair" means waiting for the evil's arrival and then releasing the needle) and once as the mark that separates the physician who knows the trigger from the one who does not. It is the concrete form of the chapter's two prohibitions: the evil's coming cannot be met, its going cannot be pursued. Between those two, everything depends on a hair.
chūn xià yǎng yáng, qiū dōng yǎng yīn
The line that set the pattern for seasonal therapy, and one of the most argued-over sentences in the corpus. Read simply, it says: work with the season's own movement instead of against it.
ròu kē
Flesh that has stopped answering: it does not feel, and later it cannot be used, while looking entirely unchanged. The chapter attributes the numbness to construction qi and the loss of use to defence qi, and adds the line that makes the whole passage a diagnosis rather than a description — when body and will no longer have one another, it is called death.
shén líng
The inborn perceptiveness the chapter ascribes to the infant Huangdi. Read as 'divine', it turns a description of temperament into a claim about gods — which the sentence does not make. What is being described is an unusually quick child.
zhēn
The metal needle, as opposed to the stone of 砭石 (id 453) and as the first element of the site's entries for 九鍼 (456), 鍼石 (504), 内鍼 (850), 員利鍼 (877) and 鑱鍼 (1084). Chapter 51 uses the graph twice and both uses are about the same thing: the level at which the needle is to stop. To carry it one level further is 反, reversal — to pass the flesh is to strike the sinew, and to pass the sinew is to strike the bone.
zhēn kǒng
The puncture the needle leaves, and the one thing chapter 53 says must be handled after the needle is withdrawn: 入實者，左手開鍼空也；入虚者，左手閉鍼空也 — for repletion the left hand opens it, for vacuity it closes it. Read with the two lines before it, the reason is plain: repletion is qi having come in, vacuity is qi going out, so the opening is left open to let qi escape and pressed shut to keep it from escaping. 空 is read kǒng here, as 王冰's gloss has it, not kōng.