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 zhèng
The table's way of saying that a year's musical note is the upright one for its element, so that no separate name is needed: 太陽、太徴、太陰、戊辰、戊戌同正徴. The four kinds of it are written over twelve rows of the table, one to five times each — 同正徴一、同正宫三、同正角三、同正商五 —and the construction has one outside extension, 諸同正歲 in the passage on jueyin governing the heaven, where it marks a year in which every one of the six qi agrees with the season it enters, so that 氣化運行同天 and there is nothing for the year's own qi to do. Both uses turn on the same idea: 同正 is agreement, and agreement is the absence of a difference worth naming.
zhèn xīng
The planet Saturn, the star of earth and of the centre, and the one this chapter names whenever the earth circuit moves or the water circuit fails. Its name is what earth does: to press down and settle, holding the other four to their seasons. Earth in surplus answers to it (歲土太過…上應鎮星), and so does water falling short, because when water is short it is damp that rises (歲水不及，濕乃大行…上應鎮星); and it comes back a third time for the flood that follows (大雨至，埃霧朦鬱，上應鎮星).
yú yuán shàng wū
Getting over walls and onto roofs — the strongest of the behaviours chapter 30 lists for severe Yangming disease, and the one that prompts its sharpest question: how can a sick man do what he could not do when well? The answer is that the four limbs are the root of all the yang, and when yang is exuberant the limbs become full enough to do what they could not do before. The ability is real but it belongs to the disease.
shǎo qì
In chapter 22 it comes with what may be the chapter's most accurate clinical phrase: too little qi to carry on the breath. The lung has run short, not in air but in the power to continue it, and the sentence catches something every clinician recognises — the pause before the next breath is where it fails, not the breath itself. Deafness and a dry throat arrive in the same sentence, which places the shortage squarely at the lung and nowhere else.
hè hè
Blazing heat, the first of the three states in which needling is forbidden. The rule the chapter draws from it is the one it is famous for: at the very height of a fit, any attack ruins; follow the decline and the undertaking prospers. Treating malaria is a matter of timing, not of force.
jiān jué
A collapse brought on by prolonged overwork: yang qi becomes distended, the essence is consumed, and by summer the condition breaks out as sudden blindness, deafness and loss of consciousness. The chapter compares it to a dyke bursting.
sì shí cì fǎ
The chapter's middle, and the reason it spends so long on the calendar: each season has its own depth and its own kind of point, and needling against the season produces a named harm. The chapter lists twelve of them, one for each wrong pairing of season and division, each with the symptom that will tell you what you did. Then it gives the rule in eight words: 春夏秋冬，各有所刺，法其所在.
róng píng
The name Suwen 2 gives to the three months of autumn. Growth has stopped; things stand at their measure. The rule drawn from it is the rule for autumn: sleep early and rise early, get up with the cockerel, calm the will so as to soften the flaying of autumn, gather the spirit and the qi in, and let the lung qi be pure. Breaking it harms the lung, and winter brings food-diarrhoea.
qī sǔn bā yì
The rule of taking from the yin and adding to the yang — the one thing the chapter says must be known if the two are to be regulated at all: 能知七損八益，則二者可調；不知用此，則早衰之節也. What follows in the chapter is the accounting. At forty the yin qi is already half and the way a life is lived begins to fall off; at fifty the body grows heavy and the ears and eyes dim; at sixty the yin withers, the qi is greatly spent, the nine orifices no longer run freely, and the lower is empty while the upper is full. Set against that is what the same knowledge buys: ears and eyes clear, body light and strong, the old made young again and the young better governed. Wang Bing reads the numbers as the yin's seven and the yang's eight, which is why the phrase is a rule of proportion and not a list.
zhèn āi
A named needling method for the upper body: on a 丙丁 day one may not 振埃 at the shoulder, throat and 廉泉. The image is a hand brushed down a sleeve — the evil is superficial, and the needle scatters it rather than chasing it. The chapter gives only the prohibition, so what survives of the method is its name and its region: above the collarbone, in the throat. With 發矇 and 去爪 it forms a trio of methods named by gesture.
shàn
A painful swelling, named in chapter 48 twice over: once as what a large, tight, sunken pulse in the kidney or liver makes, and once as what tightness in the third yin makes. The chapter then splits it by site — heart shan when the heart pulse is racing, slippery and tight, lung shan when the lung pulse is sunken and racing — so that one name is held while the pulse alone decides which viscus is meant.
shàn jiǎ
Two abdominal complaints named as one phrase in chapter 18, and given twice. The first time from a pulse: 寸口脉沈而弱，曰寒熱及疝瘕、少腹痛 — sunken and weak at the inch opening means alternating cold and heat, together with shan and jia and pain in the lower abdomen. The second time from a different pulse arriving at the same place: 脉急者，曰疝瘕少腹痛. What the chapter is doing is matching a quality of the pulse to a region of the body; both a sunken weak pulse and a tense one land in the lower abdomen.