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.
xū shí
The pair chapter 53 takes as its subject: 虚實之要, the essential point of vacuity and repletion. Three pairings are given as the constant — qi and body, grain and qi, vessel and blood, each replete with replete and vacuous with vacuous — and to be the reverse of any of them is illness. Five reversals follow, each with its cause, and the chapter ends by saying what the two are at the needle: repletion is qi entering and is heat, vacuity is qi going out and is cold. The site leaves the pair as vacuity and repletion, the rendering chapter 28 already uses.
tài bái
The planet Venus, the star of metal and of the west, and the most frequently named of the five in this chapter. The name is the colour: white is the west's colour and metal's, and the great white is the brightest of the wandering stars. Metal in surplus answers to it (歲金太過…上應太白星), and wood falling short answers to it twice in the same answer, because what rises against short wood is dryness (歲木不及，燥乃大行…上應太白星). It closes the wood passage a third time, when the shrivelling is complete.
mài zhàng
Distension of the vessels themselves, and the first of the two forms from which the chapter derives all the rest. The distinction is made by where the defensive qi has gone: when the nutrient qi keeps to the vessels and the defensive runs counter to them, the vessels distend; when the defensive runs alongside the vessels in the spaces between, the skin distends. The pair is given before any organ distension is listed, the argument being that every named form is an instance of one of the two. Both are treated at Sanli and drained quickly, whether the case looks vacuous or replete.
mài wěi
The flaccidity that follows heat in the heart: the lower vessels are emptied by the surge upward and the legs lose their power. The chapter adds the mechanism in the second half — when the great conduits are empty, flesh obstruction develops and passes on into vessel flaccidity — so the same tissue that carries blood is the one that fails.
mài bì
The obstruction that comes of meeting the three qi in summer. Summer is the season of the vessels and the vessel is matched with the heart, so a vessel obstruction that will not clear and meets evil again goes inward to the heart — and the sign the chapter gives for obstruction lodged in the vessel is that the blood congeals and does not flow.
bāo mài
The vessel that belongs to the heart and nets into the womb. Its closing is the chapter's explanation for absent menses in wind water: the qi presses upward on the lung, the heart qi cannot pass down, and so the menses do not come. The chapter's point is that the womb is not itself diseased — the passage of qi to it has been cut off from above.
kè qì
Visiting qi — 客 kè, a guest; 氣 qì, qi — the qi that comes from outside and lodges where it does not belong. 《說文》 has 客，寄也, to lodge, which is exactly how 素問 uses the graph for evil: not owned, not native, staying anyway. This chapter gives it once, paired with its opposite: 人有客氣，有同氣. The two readings of that pair have never been reconciled. 馬蒔 takes 客氣 as the evil arriving from without and 同氣 as the qi one is born with. 張介賓 reads both through the doctrine of the circuit qi — 客氣 the qi that moves and never repeats, 同氣 the seasonal qi that is the same year after year. The sentence that follows is about the passages, not about either word, so the chapter gives no help; both are recorded. The word is not otherwise used in the chapter, and it does not appear in any chapter transcribed on this site before this one.
ǒu xuè
Blood vomited up. It is one of the few signs this chapter repeats across two entries, and in both it stands next to blood lost elsewhere — nosebleed in one, nosebleed again in the other — so that the pair reads as bleeding rather than as two symptoms.