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.
tòng bì
The obstruction in which cold qi prevails. Cold is what makes pain, and the chapter says so twice: once when it names this kind, and again when it explains that obstruction which has gone deep enough to blunt the construction and defence stops hurting, because the pain was the cold and the cold is no longer the whole of it.
mén xún
Palpating and following along — the first two of the eight manipulations chapter 27 requires before the needle is inserted, and then, at the end of the chapter, the method the physician falls back on when the pulse stops swelling: 審捫循三部九候之盛虚而調之. The pairing matters because it is two acts and not one: the hand laid on to feel what is there, and the hand run along the channel to find where things change. The Lingshu uses the same wording for the same preparation, so this is standard procedure rather than an invention of the chapter.
chuǎn
In chapter 21 panting is not a disease of the chest but a report about where a person has been. Night walking sends it out from the kidney, a fall and fright from the liver, terror from the lung, wading through water and stumbling from the kidney and the bone. In each case the pant names the viscus that spent itself, and the overflow that follows attacks the viscus that one overcomes. Whether the episode closes or leaves something behind is decided by temperament: in the brave the qi moves through and that is the end, while in the timid it lodges and becomes disease. Elsewhere the word describes a pulse that comes driven and broken, and there too it keeps this sense of effort rather than of illness.
chuǎn míng
What comes of the four rebels: 陰爭於内，陽擾於外，魄汗未藏，四逆而起，起則熏肺，使人喘鳴. Yin is fighting inside, yang is disturbing outside, the sweat of the corporeal soul will not stay in, and the four counterflowing qi rise. When they rise they scorch the lung, and that is what makes a person pant and wheeze. 喘 is the racing breath and 鳴 the sound it makes — the chapter's word is the two of them, and the mechanism it gives is a fire: the lung is scorched from below by qi that has turned round and gone up.
shī qì
Breaking wind while coughing — the sign of small intestine cough, which arises when a heart cough has gone on long enough to pass into the palace paired with the heart.
diān jí
The illness of the crown of the head, and in chapter 47 an illness a child is born with. The base text writes 巔, from 山; the received text writes 癲, from 疒. This site follows the base text and keeps the two apart, the more readily because the chapter itself locates the disease: marrow, whose master is the brain.
yùn shú
菀熟 is the chapter's account of how the illness started, and it is a phrase the commentators divide over. 八風菀熟，五藏消爍，傳邪相受: the eight winds pent up and ripening, the five viscera consumed and melted, the evil transmitted and received. 菀 is 郁, pent and unable to disperse; Yang Shangshen glosses 菀熟 as 蓄積, stored up. 熟, ripened, is read 熱 by Wu Kun, Ma Shi and Zhang Jiebin — pent up until it turns to heat — and the base text's 熟 is kept here with that reading recorded in the collation. The phrase matters because it is the chain Huang Di says Lei Gong's answer left out: he named a viscus without asking where the illness came from.
yù fā
The moment a pent-up qi lets go. The chapter treats it twice: once in the 治則 for 少陰司天, where the prescription is 折其鬱發，先取化源，無使暴過而生其病也; and once at the very end, in the five treatments, where 火鬱發之 is itself the cure for pent-up fire. Between the two sits the longest passage of the chapter, five paragraphs on 土鬱之發、金鬱之發、水鬱之發、木鬱之發、火鬱之發, each naming its sign in weather and in men and closing with its season and its number — 怫乃發也，其氣四. The chapter's whole account of disaster is the working out of these two graphs.
yì
The pharynx — the passage at the back of the throat, and specifically the place that the foot Taiyin vessel networks as it rises. Chapter 29 names it once, in the sentence that answers the chapter's last question: Taiyin's vessel penetrates the stomach, belongs to the spleen and networks the pharynx, and it is through that vessel, not through the membrane, that the spleen can move the stomach's fluids. The chapter's careful separation of 喉, 咽 and 嗌 — airway, gullet, and the site the vessel reaches — is the earliest clear statement of the distinction in the literature.
pí tū
A landmark below the navel, and the one place in this chapter where the text stops to say where a needle should start. 病在少腹有積，刺皮𩩻以下，至少腹而止 — with a gathering in the lesser abdomen, needle from below the 皮𩩻 down as far as the lesser abdomen, and stop there. Wang Bing fixes the spot: 臍下同身寸之五寸橫約文, the crease five inches below the navel, and warns on the same breath that one must not go deep there. What the graph meant is contested and always has been; what the sentence asks for is not — a starting point on the surface, measured downward.
piān kū
In the seventh chapter, what comes of the third yang and the third yin falling ill together: one side of the body withers, the limbs go flaccid, and the four limbs cannot be raised. The word is the ancestor of the later 半身不遂 — but it says withering, not paralysis, and it is worth keeping which half of the body is named.
chè yī
Piercing the clothes is the fourth of the five joints. Its case is a man whose yang is in excess and whose yin is not enough: within, heat; without, heat; 内𤍠相摶，𤍠於懷炭 — the heat is like carrying coals, so that he cannot bear cloth next to him nor sit on a mat, the seams of the skin are shut and no sweat comes, the tongue is scorched, the lips dry, the throat parched, and he no longer cares whether his food is good. The method is to pierce all the extraordinary transports of the yang — 盡刺諸陽之奇輸 — a set of points with no fixed place, together with 天府 and 大杼 three times each, 中膂 to take the heat away, and the foot and hand greater yin filled to stop the sweat. When the heat goes and the sweat thins, the cure is quicker than taking off a coat: 疾於徹衣.