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.
nù kuáng
Anger and wildness as an illness rather than a temperament. Chapter 46 places it in yang: yang qi abruptly checked and unable to resolve leaves a person quick to rage, and the sign is a pulse at the neck that should be still and is not. The cure is to stop feeding yang — withhold food, and give iron filings to send the qi down.
mà lì
Railing and cursing — the abusive speech chapter 30 lists among the behaviours of severe Yangming disease. The chapter pairs it with wild talk and with the loss of the distinction between kin and stranger, and explains all of it by yang exuberance. It is one of the earliest places in the literature where abusive speech is treated as a clinical sign with a bodily cause rather than as conduct.
shǔ lòu
The running sore of the neck and axilla, classed in this chapter with 寒熱瘰癧 and traced to cold and heat toxin lodged in the vessels and not removed. Its root, the chapter says, is in the depots; its branch comes up into the neck and axilla. Treatment follows that anatomy — draw from the root, lead out the branch, let it decline and cut off the cold and heat. Prognosis is by the eye: turn the eye and look for red vessels running up and down through the pupil; one vessel means death in a year, and more means sooner.
xī gǔ
The meeting places of the flesh, named from two kinds of watercourse and then treated as though they were watercourses: the big meetings are 谷, valleys, and the small ones 谿, ravines. Chapter 58 is where the term is defined — 肉之大會爲谷，肉之小會爲谿 — and it is also where the term is given its count, 谿谷三百六十五穴會，亦應一歲, the same three hundred and sixty-five that the qi points have and that the grandchild networks have, so that the chapter's three lists answer to one year three times over. What passes along them is stated in the same sentence as the meeting itself: to run the construction and defence, and to gather the great qi. What happens when that stops is stated in the sentences after — heat collecting in them suppurates and eats inward to the marrow, cold lodging in them rolls the flesh and shortens the sinews and ends in bone impediment. The site's entry for 大谷 (id 412) carries Wang Bing's own version of the same division, made from the vessels rather than the flesh: 大經所會，謂之大谷也；小絡所會，謂之小谿. The two are not rivals; the larger division belongs to the earlier chapter and this one is the anatomical definition the phrase rests on. 谿谷 occurs six times in this chapter and nowhere else in the book under discussion here.
zhān yǔ
Speech that runs away with itself: fast, disordered, and not answering to the patient. In this book it is a yang brightness sign — the stomach is hot and its qi is not harmonising, or the yang brightness is bound within — and it appears on the second day of double contraction, after wrongful sweating, and in the case where the centre is knotted. The Suwen's 譫言 is the same thing in another shape, and the site keeps the two entries cross-referenced rather than merged.
lián zàng · lián jīng
The two destinations a counterflow can reach, and the two outcomes that follow from them. Reaching the depots means the disorder has gone past the channels into the storing organs, and the chapter gives that as fatal; reaching only the channels means it is still on the surface of the system, and the patient recovers. The distinction is one of depth, not of kind — the same evil, the same symptom, a different place.
sī wài chuǎi nèi
The chapter's closing formula, and the earliest statement in the book of what examination is. The physician does not open the body; he reads the shadow the sun casts, the form the mirror holds, the echo the drum returns. 揣 is a cautious word — to measure by estimate rather than to know directly — and the caution is the point: the inference is exact because the correspondence is exact, not because the eye is sharp. Read with its other half, 司内揣外, it covers both directions, the far read from without and the near from within, and the pair is what later medicine divides into the four examinations. The chapter asks that the formula be stored in the chamber of the numinous orchid, and the request is not decorative: a method this general was felt to be dangerous knowledge.
pì yīn
The fourth and last transmission in the chapter's rule for a disease moving from one organ to another: 所謂生陽死陰者，肝之心謂之生陽，心之肺謂之死陰，肺之腎謂之重陰，腎之脾謂之辟陰，死不治. Three of the four follow the orders of the five phases — the generating order and the overcoming order — and the fourth runs against them: from the kidney to the spleen, water to earth, the phase that is overcome turning on the one that overcomes it. That is 辟陰, the yin that goes against; 王冰 reads the phrase as earth driving water back. It is the only one of the four that the chapter closes with 死不治 on its own, because it is the only one whose direction is wrong.
zhā
What sweat meets wind and cold and becomes: a redness of the nose. Suwen 3 puts it in a list — half-sided sweating wastes one side, sweat that meets dampness gives pimples and prickly heat, rich food gives a boil, and the sweat of toil meeting wind, with cold pressing in, gives 齇; if it builds up, pimples. The graph is built on 鼻, and later texts write it 皶 or 齄.
tōng tiáo shuǐ dào
The drink itinerary, and the sentence every later account of oedema goes back to. Drink enters the stomach, wanders and overflows into essence qi, and is conveyed up to the spleen; spleen qi disperses the essence, which goes up to the lung; the lung opens and regulates the waterways and sends fluid down to the bladder; water essence is spread everywhere and runs level with the five channels, harmonising with the seasons and the yin and yang of the five viscera. Note that nothing here is a metabolism: it is a road, and the lung's job is to keep the road open.
shì xié gōng zhèng
To release the evil and attack the upright — the inversion at the end of chapter 27's indictment. The physician who does not know the three regions and nine indicators, and who does not know how to join them to the four seasons and five phases, ends up adding to the conquests instead of resolving them: he lets the evil go and strikes the upright qi. The chapter has already said the same thing in other words two lines earlier — he takes repletion for vacuity and the evil for the true — and it ends on the same sentence both times: he cuts short a life that should have been long.
qù wǎn chén cuò
The first instruction in the treatment of oedema, and the ancestor of every later Chinese formula for removing stasis. Wang Bing takes the four words as one operation on water that has stood too long in the body; Zhang Jiebin reads them word by word — 宛 is accumulation, 陳 is long-standing, 莝 is cutting grass. This site keeps the agricultural image, because the chapter opened with rice and rice straw and ends by cutting fodder inside the body.