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.
tài chōng
In the sixth chapter, the name for what lies behind the sage as he faces south, and the region in which lesser yin runs. This is a region of the body, not the great surge vessel of the first chapter: the two share a name and an image, but the sixth chapter is not talking about a vessel.
tài yáng
The first of the three yang. In the sixth chapter it is the channel that lies above lesser yin, whose root is Zhiyin on the small toe and whose knot is the gate of life — Wang Bing takes the gate of life to be the two eyes. Its office is the open: the outermost of the three, turned toward the surface.
tài yīn
The first of the three yin. It lies below broad brightness, is named where the surge lies lowest, roots at Yinbai on the inner side of the great toe, and holds the office of the open — the outermost of the three yin.
sān xū
The three emptinesses are the three deficiencies of time. 乘年之衰，逢月之空，失時之和，因爲賊風所傷，是謂三虚 — to ride a year of decline, meet a month whose moon is empty, and lose the harmony of the season, and then be hurt by a thieving wind: that is the three emptinesses. The chapter's claim is that they decide death: 三虚者，其死暴疾也, and that a physician who does not know them 工反爲麤 — turns crude. The set has two uses. In chapter 77 it explains why the same wind kills one man and not another: 三虚相摶，則爲暴病卒死. In chapter 79 it explains why the same wind kills in one year and not the next. Against it stands 三實, the same three in their favour, which the chapter seals in the golden casket.
sān shí
The three fullnesses are the exact reverse of the three emptinesses. 逢年之盛，遇月之滿，得時之和，雖有賊風邪氣，不能危之也 — meet a year at its height, a month at its full, and a season in its harmony, and even thieving wind and evil cannot endanger a man. Huang Di receives the answer with unusual warmth — 善乎哉論！明乎哉道！請藏之金匱，命曰三實 — and then Shao Shi adds the sentence that keeps the doctrine honest: 然此一夫之論也, this is the account of one man. The three are therefore not a promise for a population but a rule for an individual, which is why the chapter can hold both the three emptinesses and the three fullnesses without contradiction.
sān zàng
The three viscera are the spleen, liver and kidney, and the chapter names them 土木水參居, earth and wood and water dwelling together — a child knows that much, Huang Di says, because they sit side by side below the diaphragm and their pulses therefore come out looking like one another. That is exactly why they matter: 脾虚浮似肺，腎小浮似脾，肝急沈散似腎, and a physician who does not match kinds will read one for another. The chapter's correction comes at the end of the case: 一人之氣，病在一藏也，若言三藏俱行，不在法也 — one man's qi falls ill in one viscus, and to say all three act together is not within the rule.
yān mén
The first measured gate of the digestive tract. The chapter weighs and measures the gut from the lip to the anus, and this is the segment between the throat and the stomach: ten liang in weight, an inch and a half across, and a foot and six inches long to the stomach. Only the tongue is given a weight besides it, and that is the point — the chapter is measuring a container, not tracing a channel. Later commentators place the gate at the top of the oesophagus and read the weight as the organ's own; the text itself says only where it begins and how far it runs.
sān jiāo
Named twice in the Suwen and described the same way both times: it belongs to whatever passes through. In chapter 8 it is the office that opens the channels and from which the waterways emerge; in chapter 11 it is one of the five born of heaven, discharging and not storing. Later writers argued for centuries about whether it has a shape. This chapter takes no position, because it sorts by behaviour and needs only that verdict.
shí èr jié
The body's twelve divisions, whatever exactly they are, set against heaven's yin and yang and heaven's cold and heat. The commentaries read them as the twelve great joints, as the twelve channels, or as the twelve months; the text itself does not choose, and this site does not choose for it. What matters for reading is the pairing: heaven is divisible and so is the person, and the second half of the sentence is the claim — the one who knows the principle of the twelve cannot be deceived even by sagely wisdom, because there is nothing left in the body he has not counted.
shí èr guān
The eighth chapter's answer to the question of rank. Asked which of the body's parts is honourable and which humble, Qibo answers with an administration: twelve offices, each defined not by what it is made of but by what issues from it. Naming them 官 rather than 藏 is the point — they are posts, and the chapter's closing argument is about whether the ruler among them is clear. Note that 脾胃 are named together as one office while counted as two organs: eleven designations, twelve offices.
shí èr shèng
The chapter's first tally, and the one that turns dream imagery into a table. Seven of the twelve come from the general pairings: yin in excess dreams of crossing great water and is afraid, yang of great fire and burning, both together of killing; excess above dreams of flying, below of falling, great hunger of taking, great repletion of giving. Five more come from the viscera in excess — anger, terror and weeping, laughing and dread, song with a heavy body, a spine coming apart — and with them the list is closed. The rule that ends it is therapeutic: when the excess arrives, drain it and the dream stops at once. The dream is therefore not a message about the future but a report of which part is overfull, to be read with the pulse rather than instead of it.
èr shí bā huì
The number the chapter gives to the body's junctions, and the last of the correspondences it lists. The Emperor has just said that the needle matches heaven above, earth below and man in the middle, that it counts the patterns of heaven, measures the order of earth, separates the five viscera within and orders the six palaces without — and then adds that the channels have twenty-eight meetings, all with a complete circuit. The number is a correspondence, not an anatomy: twenty-eight is the count of the lunar mansions, and the meetings of the channels are offered as the body's answer to the sky. What the chapter does with it is characteristically sober: having claimed the whole cosmos for the needle, it concludes that the needle can kill a man and cannot raise the dead, and that this too is the way of things.