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.
zhì shù
What the chapter says it is about, in the phrase 請言道之至數 — allow me to speak of the ultimate numbers of the Way. In this chapter the numbers are not arithmetic for its own sake; they are prognostic. Ten days for shallow colour, twenty-one for deep, a hundred for very deep, a hundred for the untreatable. And at the end the chapter says the terrifying thing about them: once the counter-movement has passed, 不復可數 — the count cannot be taken up again. The same word 數 carries both the prognostic numbers and the counting that stops.
shàng jiāo
The upper of the three burners, opening at the upper mouth of the stomach. It runs up beside the throat, pierces the diaphragm, spreads in the chest, goes out to the axilla and follows the tai yin, returning to the yang ming; it ascends to the tongue and descends to the foot yang ming. It travels with the camp qi twenty-five degrees in the yang and twenty-five in the yin, and after fifty degrees meets in great assembly at the hand tai yin. Its image is mist: what rises and spreads, moistening the upper body without being seen to do it.
shàng jīng
A medical book that no longer exists, named here only to say what it was about. Chapter 46 closes by glossing the five books it has drawn on — 上經, 下經, 金匱, 揆度, 奇恒 — and gives each one clause: the Upper Classic speaks of qi communicating with heaven, and so sets the frame within which the Lower Classic speaks of how diseases change.
dài yǎn
The first sign of the greater yang's ending. It is a small phrase for a very specific thing — the eyes fixed upward and not coming back — and the chapter puts it first of three, before the arched back and the spasm. Later medicine kept the word for this sign, and the commentary glosses it as the eyes no longer turning. It is characteristic of the chapter's way of writing about dying: not a state, but a thing you can see.
zhì dào
The word closes the chapter, and it closes it three times: 請起受解，以爲至道 — let me rise and receive the explanation, and take it as the utmost Way; 不知合至道，以惑師教 — to receive the transmission without being able to join it to the utmost Way is to be confused about the master's teaching; 語子至道之要 — I will tell you the gist of the utmost Way. The three uses map the chapter's ending: the disciple asks for it, the master says that having it is not the same as being able to join it, and then he states its gist in two lines — 病傷五藏，筋骨以消. What makes the term worth an entry is that 至道 is never defined in the abstract. It is identified with a concrete claim about what happens when the illness reaches the five stores, and with the warning that a teaching received and not joined becomes the very thing that misleads.
jiě huò
Untying confusion is the last of the five joints. The case is not weakness but wind throughout the body with the blood vessels empty on one side: 血脉偏虚，虚者不足，實者有餘 — one side deficient, the other in excess — so that the body cannot keep its level, 傾側宛伏, and the man does not know east from west or south from north, is now up and now down, now face up and now face down, 顛倒無常，甚於迷惑. The method is the plainest of the five and the hardest: 寫其有餘，補其不足，陰陽平復 — drain the excess, fill the deficiency, and let yin and yang come back level. Do that and the cure is quicker than the confusion: 疾於解惑. Its interest is that the chapter names no point and no needle, only a principle, as if to say that the fifth joint is the first one understood.
zhèng xié
The mild evil that enters when the body is exerting itself: sweat comes out, the interstices open, an empty wind is met, and the strike is so slight that neither the patient nor anyone else notices. Chapter 26 sets it beside 虚邪 and uses the contrast to say why the good physician is rare — the empty evil announces itself by season and direction, while this one gives no sign at all and can only be caught by someone who reads the three regions and nine indicators before anything has formed.
zhèng qì
A person's own proper qi. Chapter 39 names it once, at the very end: in thought the mind holds and the spirit returns to it, and the upright qi stays put instead of moving — the only one of the nine qi with no cause from outside.
zhèng zhì
Treatment that opposes the disease. The chapter gives the name twice and defines it the second time by its counterpart: 帝曰：何謂逆從？歧伯曰：逆者，正治，從者，反治，從少從多，觀其事也 — what runs against the disease is 正治, what runs with it is 反治, and how much of either is a matter of proportion. The first mention adds the condition under which each is used: 謹察陰陽所在而調之，以平爲期，正者正治，反者反治, where 王冰 explains 正者 as the case in which the disease is where it should be — 陰病陽不病，陽病陰不病 — and therefore is met head on. 正治 is thus the ordinary rule which the whole earlier passage of the discourse has been stating — 寒者熱之，熱者寒之，堅者削之，勞者温之 — and 反治 is the exception that the next paragraph expounds.
zhì yīn
Where yin reaches its extreme — in this chapter, the belly. It is the third term in a chain of likenesses: water is yin, the region below the eyes is yin, and the belly is where the utmost yin dwells, so water in the belly must show as swelling below the eyes. The chapter argues by category, and says that it is arguing by category.