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.
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.
mài
The pulse, considered three ways at once. As flesh it is the web of vessels; as movement it is what the finger feels at the wrist; as reading it is the chief instrument of diagnosis in this book. The five chapters open by dividing all pulses into a yang family (大、浮、數、動、滑) and a yin family (沉、濇、弱、弦、微), then name the six robbers that can make any pulse sick (弦、緊、浮、滑、沉、濇). Every quality entered beside this headword is one member of those families, and each is defined by the situation the base text puts it in rather than by a later handbook.