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.
shí quán
Ten in ten is what the books promise and what every student is taught to say. Lei Gong puts it in the mouth of his teachers — 循經受業，皆言十全 — and immediately admits that in practice there are failures, and asks to hear how they are to be explained. The emperor does not deny the ideal; he asks 所以不十全者, what it is that keeps ten from being ten, and answers with four failures, none of which is ignorance of the channels. The phrase thus does the work of a standard: because ten in ten is claimed, every failure must be accounted for, and the four accounts are the chapter. It is worth noticing that the chapter never says the standard is false — only that it is claimed before it is earned.
sān biàn
Three ways in which needling changes what it acts on: 有刺營者，有刺衛者，有刺寒痺之留經者 — the camp is reached by letting blood, the guard by letting qi, and cold bi lodged in the channels by bringing heat within. The order is from the deepest and most substantial to the most superficial and most external, and each has its own instrument in practice: fire for the labourer, a medicated compress for the nobleman.
sān cháng
Three things a diagnosis always asks, and all three are histories rather than signs. 診有三常，必問貴賤 — the first is rank: was this man enfeoffed and then ruined; does he want to be a marquis or a king; was he noble and has he lost his power? Though no evil strikes him, his spirit is injured within and his body will fail. The second is wealth: was he rich at first and poor after? Though no evil injures him, his skin is scorched, his sinews bend, and he wastes and stumbles into contraction. The third, which the chapter carries into the same sentence, is the temper that comes of these turns — the joy and hardship, the grief and fear that follow a change of station. The point is the one the five errors keep making: the illness is in the history, and a physician who examines only the body will not find it.
sān pǐn
The three grades of the pharmacopoeia — upper, middle and lower — and the chapter's one sentence about them: 帝曰：三品何謂？歧伯曰：所以明善惡之殊貫也. The whole weight of the entry lies in the exchange just before it. The emperor has asked about 方制君臣, and the answer has been 主病之謂君，佐君之謂臣，應臣之謂使，非上下三品之謂也 — the lord and ministers of a prescription are not the graded drugs of the materia medica. Pressed on what the grades then are for, the chapter answers with 殊貫: they mark the difference in what each drug is good for and the constancy of it, so that the same drug's rank does not change with the disease while its office in a formula does. The distinction is the chapter's own, and it is why 方制君臣 and 三品 stand apart on this site.
shí èr jìn
Twelve moments at which needling must not be done: after intercourse and after needling, when drunk and after needling, in fresh anger, fresh fatigue, repletion, hunger and thirst, each counted on both sides. The reason given is physiological rather than moral: at such times the pulse is disordered, the qi scattered, and the ying and wei are opposed, so that the needle drives yang disease inward and yin disease outward. The chapter adds a period of rest for anyone who has come by carriage or on foot.
biāo běn
In this chapter the pair carries a specific and surprising assignment: the illness is the root and the physician is the tip. The Discourse on Decoctions and Fermented Liquors states it negatively — 病為本，工為標，標本不得，邪氣不服 — and this chapter states it positively: tip and root are matched, and the evil qi submits. When they are not matched, the chapter says, the consequence is 亡神失國: the spirit is lost and the state with it. So 標本 here is not a doctrine of symptoms versus causes, as it later became; it is a statement about the fit between a doctor and a case.
chuán chéng
The chapter's two mechanisms of movement, named together at the end of its long discussion of transmission. 傳 is ordered movement: the viscera hand the disease along the conquest cycle, liver to spleen to kidney to heart to lung, and each handover can be counted, so the time of death can be calculated in months, or days, or in fifths of a day and night. 乘 is movement that ignores order: one emotion empties a viscus and another's qi rides into the gap — joy empties the heart and the kidney encroaches, anger lets the liver encroach, sorrow the lung, fear the spleen, anxiety the heart. Five diseases and five encroachments give twenty-five variations, and the chapter closes the section by saying these are the names of the two things it has been describing.
shù
The word the chapter uses for what the needle goes into, in three compounds inside a single sentence: 散俞 in spring, 絡俞 in summer, 俞竅 in winter. The chapter is not naming acupoints; it is naming depth and kind — the scattered points at the partings of the flesh, the points of the network vessels, the deep orifices. The single character is the constant: a place where the channel's qi comes near enough to be reached.
zhì wèi bìng
The line that made prevention central to Chinese medicine: don't wait for the disease. The chapter closes with the image that makes the point — digging a well only once you are thirsty.
zhēn xié
True qi and evil qi, named together as a pair because what matters clinically is not either one alone but whether they have joined. Chapter 27 turns on exactly this. While the evil is still loose in the blood it rises like a swell and can be met at the instant it arrives; once 真邪以合 — true and evil have merged — the wave-swell stops rising, there is nothing to wait for, and the physician must fall back on the three regions and nine indicators and regulate by what is full and what is empty. The chapter's closing indictment is of the physician who cannot tell them apart: he takes repletion for vacuity and the evil for the true, attacks the upright, and cuts short a life that should have been long.