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.
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.
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.
shén
Not a soul and not a god: the alertness by which a person notices, responds and is present. It is the half of a person that can be kept within or scattered outward, and in these texts it can be nourished, wearied, or lost.
shèng rén
The figure the texts use for a person who gets it right — not a moral paragon but someone whose conduct matches the way things actually work. In Suwen 2 the sage is the one who follows the seasons and treats illness before it exists.
yí jīng biàn qì
The whole therapy of high antiquity, and the title of this chapter. Wang Bing glosses the two verbs plainly: 移 is to shift, 變 is to alter, and both are done so that evil does not injure the upright and the spirit is restored and strong and guarded within. The chapter's argument is that this used to be enough, and is not any more — not because the method was lost, but because the kind of person it worked on no longer exists.
nèi xiàn
The needle's sinking inward past the depth proper to the site — the single cause chapter 52 gives for most of the mishaps it catalogues. It appears seven times, and each time the sentence says what the sinking reaches: the vessel at the guest-host point (inner leakage, deafness), the qi at the supraclavicular fossa (qi leaks out, panting and coughing) and at the cubital fossa (qi gathers, and the arm will not bend), the bladder three cun below the inner thigh (involuntary urination), the lung between the ribs (cough), and simply the flesh of the calf (swelling). It is the same fault chapter 51 calls 反, reversal: not a different needling, but this needling carried one level too far.
lù lù
Sweat pouring off and not stopping. The third of the three prohibitions, and the one that completes the set: scorching heat, a pulse that cannot be read, and sweat that will not stop. At that point the disease is in counterflow and cannot be treated.
kǔ yù
Chapter 22 states both halves for each viscus, and everything else hangs from them. The liver suffers urgency and desires dispersal; the heart suffers laxity and desires softness; the spleen suffers dampness and desires relaxation; the lung suffers rising qi and desires gathering; the kidney suffers dryness and desires firmness. The first half tells you what to expect when the organ is ill and what foods to forbid. The second half tells you which flavour is a gift and which is a drain — since a flavour that gives the organ what it wants supplements it, and one that denies it drains it.
bǔ xiě
The two things a needle does. Drain: 寫曰：必持内之，放而出之，排陽得鍼，邪氣得泄 — hold it and put it in, let it out, push the yang aside so the needle gets through, and the evil qi escapes. Supplement: 補曰：隨之隨之，意若妄之…外門已閉，中氣乃實 — follow it, follow it, as if absent-minded, until the outer gate is shut and the qi within is full. The rule behind both: 徐而疾則實，疾而徐則虚 — slow in and quick out fills, quick in and slow out empties. 寫 is the base graph of 瀉.
bǔ xiè
This is the chapter's most practical teaching and its most counter-intuitive. Every viscus has one flavour that supplements it and another that drains it, and the pairing is decided not by the phase the viscus belongs to but by what the viscus wants: the liver desires dispersal, so acrid — which is the metal flavour, the phase that conquers wood — supplements it. Bitter firms the kidney but drains the spleen; sweet relaxes the spleen yet drains the heart. A flavour is not a property, it is a lever, and which way it moves depends on the organ at the other end.
kě hàn kě xiè
The chapter's rule for treating the six-channel progression, stated as a boundary at three days. While the three days are not yet full the disease is in the three yang and has not entered the depots, so it can be sweated out; once the three days are full it has gone inward, so it must be drained. The principle behind the rule is given in the line that precedes it: treat by opening the vessel of whichever depot is affected, and the disease will decline day by day. The rule tells you when; that line tells you what to open. The chapter returns to the same logic at the end, where summerheat must be let out with the sweat and not stopped.
jié cì
A piercing that is not retained. In the sinew chapter it always follows the heated needle and always carries the same measure: 以知爲數，以痛爲輸 — stop when the patient feels the thing, and take the painful spot as the point. The name distinguishes it from the retained needling of the channel chapter, where depth and the count of breaths are what matter; here speed is the technique.