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.
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.
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.
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.