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.
shén mén
The pulse at the wrist on the heart channel, and the pulse this chapter takes when the water circuit is in surplus: 歲水太過，寒氣流行，邪害心火 — water in surplus strikes the fire of the heart — and so it is 神門, the heart's pulse, whose stopping means death. Its name is the last of the five and completes the set: wood takes Chongyang, fire takes Taiyuan, earth takes Taixi, metal takes Taichong, water takes Shenmen, and in every case the pulse taken belongs to the phase that the circuit in surplus strikes. The chapter names the pulse and gives its verdict; it never says why that pulse, and the five together say it.
huá sè
The two poles by which chapter 28 judges every case it is asked about. Slippery means the qi is still travelling — there is something moving, and where something moves there is life; rough means the blood and qi have lost their fluency and the pulse is dragging. The chapter applies the test again and again, in almost identical words: slippery follows and rough is counterflow; slippery lives and rough dies; slippery-and-large is called life and hanging-and-rough is called death. Nothing else in the chapter is used as consistently.
ruǎn ruò
The late-summer quality of the pulse, and the only one of the five the chapter states without an image: 長夏胃微耎弱曰平, slightly soft and weak, with stomach qi in it, is balanced; weak much and stomach qi little is spleen disease; and where the other four are said to kill when they stand alone, this one is given as 但代无胃曰死 — the intermittent pulse without stomach qi — the softness having failed so far that the beat itself drops out. Softness appears again at the end of the chapter as the good sign it is: the balanced liver pulse is 耎弱招招, like lifting the tip of a long bamboo pole.
sàn
The scattered quality: a pulse without root, whose beats come apart instead of gathering. It appears once in the five chapters, and once is enough: 傷寒欬逆上氣，其脉散者死，謂其形損故也 — a cough with rebelling qi, and a pulse that scatters, means death, because the body has already been damaged. The entry therefore records the one occurrence and the reason given for it, and refuses to build a shape out of later handbooks.
qī zhěn
The seven things that single a probe out. Examine the nine probes and ask which one is unlike the rest: the one that is alone small is diseased, alone large is diseased, alone swift is diseased, alone slow is diseased, alone hot is diseased, alone cold is diseased, alone sunken is diseased. The chapter then does something unusual — it admits that these signs can lie. If the seven signs appear but the nine probes still follow one another, the patient does not die; the diseases of wind and the monthly disease look like the seven signs and are not them. It is only when a seven-sign disease is joined by probes that have themselves gone bad that death follows, and then with hiccup and belching.
jīng jīn
The system of twelve tracts that bind the skeleton and are named after the channels they follow. They begin at the toes or fingers, knot at the ankle, knee, hip and nape, and end in the head; they never enter a zang or fu, and so their diseases are all on the surface: cramp, contracture, a joint that will not bend, a mouth drawn aside. The chapter's closing rule is the whole of their pathology — cold arches them back and tightens them, heat lets them go slack, and where heat is present the heated needle is forbidden.
liù biàn
The six pulse qualities the chapter has just run through five times, taken together and given rules of treatment. The six are urgent, slow, large, small, slippery and rough; each was given in a 甚 and a 微 form for every zang, and now each is given a cause and a needle: 諸急者多寒，緩者多𤍠，大者多氣少血，小者血氣皆少，滑者陽氣盛，微有𤍠；濇者多血少氣，微有寒. The treatment section that follows is the most practical page in the chapter — deep and retained for the urgent, shallow and quick for the slow, hit the vessel and press the hole for the rough — and it ends with the one case that is not needled at all: 諸小者，陰陽形氣俱不足，勿取以鍼，而調以甘藥也.
liù jīng
The six vessels — three yang and three yin — taken together as the frame for clinical description. Chapter 45 is one of the places in the Suwen where they are used exactly that way: first what inversion looks like in each of them, then the counterflow form, down to the hand vessels at the end.
liù mài
The chapter's own name for the six channels read at the wrist, and the point at which its two answers meet. The first answer names them one by one and gives each its pulse-shape at the hand great yin; the second gives them their places in a family and then runs them in pairs. What makes them 'six' rather than 'six separate things' is the sentence that follows the list: 此六脉者，乍陰乍陽，交屬相并，繆通五藏，合於陰陽 — they are now yin, now yang, they join and belong to one another, and they thread the five viscera in crisscross. So no pulse belongs to one viscus, and no viscus is read from one pulse. The rule for reading them is given last: 先至爲主，後至爲客 — what arrives first is host, what arrives after is guest. The six are therefore a system with a time-order, not a list of correspondences.
liù shí shǒu
The sixty heads of the extraordinary and the constant: an ancient diagnostic writing in sixty sections, named here and now lost. The chapter says 奇恒之勢，乃六十首 — the configurations of the extraordinary and the constant are sixty in number — and then states what a physician does with them: 診合微之事，追陰陽之變，章五中之情，其中之論，取虛實之要，定五度之事，知此乃足以診. So the sixty heads are not sixty diseases but sixty heads of reading: the finest agreements, the changes of yin and yang, the conditions within the five viscera, and from them the crux of deficiency and excess and the five measures. The number sixty is the old round of the calendar applied to diagnosis, as the sixty-year cycle is.
chǐ zhī pí fū
The skin of the forearm, felt as a third witness beside the colour of the face and the movement of the pulse. The chapter pairs them one by one: an urgent pulse and the skin is urgent, a slow pulse and the skin is slow, a small pulse and the skin is reduced, a large pulse and the skin rises, slippery with slippery, rough with rough. Then the rule that makes the region worth examining: 善調尺者，不待於寸 — one who is good at the cubit need not wait for the inch. The passage is the earliest systematic statement of what later needling called 尺膚診, and its logic is the same as the drumstick's: the inside and the outside are one event.
cù
The skipping quality: a rapid pulse that stops once and returns. The book defines it against its twin: 脉來緩，時一止復來者，名曰結；脉來數，時一止復來者，名曰促 — the same single stop, knotted when the pulse is slow, skipping when it is rapid. Its cause is yang excess (脉陽盛則促，陰盛則結). Later in the book the same character is the ordinary verb 'to hurry' (當促其間) and the adjective 'to shorten' (再逆促命期); neither is a pulse, and both are marked.