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.
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.
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The puncture the needle leaves, and the one thing chapter 53 says must be handled after the needle is withdrawn: 入實者，左手開鍼空也；入虚者，左手閉鍼空也 — for repletion the left hand opens it, for vacuity it closes it.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.
jiǔ biàn
Nine methods answering to the nine changes of disease: shu, distant, channel, luo, partition, great-drain, hair, ju and scorch needling. The list moves outward from the point itself to the opposite side of the body and finally to fire, and it is the earliest taxonomy of technique in the book. Its companion list, the twelve sections, follows immediately and works by compound insertions instead.
jiǔ zhēn
The therapy of the south. The land is low, mist and dew gather, the people eat sour and fermented food, their grain closes up and they cramp. What is needed is the fine needle — Wang Bing: fine means small, and the small needle regulates the waxing and waning of the vessels. Yang Shangshan reads the nine needles as the fine needles. Wang Bing closes by saying the southerners hold them in high honour.
jiǔ qì
Anger, joy, grief, fear, cold, heat, fright, labour and thought — the nine things chapter 39 says move qi, and therefore the nine things it says produce illness. Each is given a direction: up, slack, dispersed, down, drawn in, let out, disordered, spent, knotted.
zhì shù
治數之道，從容之葆 — the way of treatment lies in its numbers, and what preserves it is the unhurried reading. The two are put together because either without the other fails: numbers without ease become 坐持寸口，診不中五脉, a wrist held and a pulse not reached; ease without numbers becomes 妄治時愈，愚心自得, a lucky cure taken for a method. The sentence that follows is the chapter's darkest: 百病所起，始以自怨，遺師其咎 — when the hundred illnesses arise, the physician first blames himself and then leaves the fault with his teacher. 治數 thus stands at the point where the art becomes accountable: it is the measure by which a failure can be called a failure at all.