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.
tóng bìng yì zhì
The principle chapter 46 draws from its abscess of the neck: what is called one disease may be two states, and the state settles the treatment. While the qi of the abscess is still growing one opens it with the needle; once qi is full and blood has gathered one drains it with stone. The chapter is careful to say that both grades carry the same name — 同名異等 — so the difference is in the disease and not in the physician.
kāi guǐ mén
The upper half of the chapter's two-handed treatment for oedema: sweat the patient. Wang Bing glosses it as opening the mysterious storehouse and sending the qi out. It is named in the same breath as cleaning the pure storehouse, so the whole treatment is: let water out through the skin above and through the bladder below. Every later Chinese discussion of 水腫 inherits this pair.
guò yòng
The chapter's whole aetiology in five characters: in every season, illness arises from use beyond measure. The weight of the word rests on what the list before it has established — food to repletion, carrying weight a long way, running in fear, labour until the body sways — for those are all uses, and every one of them emptied a different viscus of its sweat. So the maxim is not about one excess but about a budget that can be spent from several accounts. It answers chapter one's advice on the other side of the ledger: there, rise and rest with regularity and do not labour recklessly; here, what happens when one does.
qí ǒu
The odd formula and the even one, told apart by the number of drugs in them: 君一臣二，奇之制也；君二臣四，偶之制也；君二臣三，奇之制也；君二臣六，偶之制也. The count is of the whole formula, not of any one rank — 君二臣三 is five and odd though it has an even lord — so 奇 and 偶 are properties of the number a formula lands on. Which of the two to use is then given as a rule of distance: 近者奇之，遠者偶之, 汗者不以奇，下者不以偶, and the size of the dose answers to it — 近而奇偶，制小其服也；遠而奇偶，制大其服也；大則數少，小則數多. The pair is thus the chapter's arithmetic of prescriptions, and it is the thing that fails first: 奇之不去則偶之，是謂重方.
guān zhēn
The nine needles considered as a set of offices. 凡刺之要，官鍼最妙 — the essence of needling lies in the official needles — and the chapter then assigns each one its post: the chan for skin, the yuan for partition flesh, the feng for channels, the di for supplementing a scant pulse, the pi for pus, the yuan-li for sudden bi, the hao for lingering bi, the chang for deep disease, the da for dropsy. To use a needle outside its office is the chapter's definition of failure.