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.
chì hòu
The watchposts from which the year is watched. The chapter quotes 《大要》 for it: 彼春之暖，爲夏之暑；彼秋之忿，爲冬之怒。謹按四維，斥候皆歸，其終可見，其始可知 — the warmth of spring becomes the heat of summer, the anger of autumn becomes the rage of winter; keep to the four corners and the posts all come home, so that the end can be seen and the beginning known. The word is the chapter's one military image for the physician's work: what is watched is not a season but the turning of one season into the next, at the corner where it happens and before it has happened. It belongs with 四維 in the same sentence, and it is why the passage can go on at once to a counted lag of thirty days and to the seasonal pulses of 《脈要》.
dì dào
The way of the earth — the passage that closes at forty-nine, when the heavenly water is exhausted. The chapter names it once, at the end of the woman's count, and it is the only place in Suwen 1 where the body is spoken of as a way that can be blocked rather than a store that can be drained: 天癸 is what is spent, 地道 is what closes, and between them the count ends and the body can bear no more.
ruò
The weak quality: a pulse without force, sinking under light pressure. It belongs to the yin family and most often marks a lack at the cubit (尺脉弱，名曰陰不足) or on the yin side (陰脉弱者，榮血弱也). It pairs with slow, with astringent and with relaxed, and each pairing names a different shortage. The one surprise is 諸弱發熱: weakness at the inch can also produce fever, because the yin that should hold the yang is insufficient.
chuāng lóng
Where the shaoyang is knotted, and the chapter defines it at once: 窗籠者，耳中也 — the window cage is the middle of the ear. The image is exact: a hollow that admits sound and holds it, open and enclosed at the same time. As with the life gate, the interest is topographical. The three yang of the foot are knotted at the eye, the cheek and the ear, which is to say that all three end at the head, and the chapter's list of their roots and knots is in effect a map of how the leg channels reach the face. Later needling identified 窗籠 with Tinggong, in front of the ear; the chapter itself only says the middle of the ear.
jiǔ bèi
The chapter's last word, and its sharpest. Wine is the essence of water and grain, the liquid of cooked grain; its qi is fierce and swift; it distends the stomach, drives qi upward, floats the liver and sets the gallbladder athwart. For that moment the coward is the equal of the brave man — and when the qi fails he repents. The name says what the chapter has argued throughout: courage is a state of the viscera, and wine counterfeits it by producing the same state for an hour. 悖 is the word for running against order, so the phrase is not a description of drink but a verdict on borrowed courage: courage out of its proper place, which cannot be held and leaves the man worse than it found him.
zhēn yá
The wisdom teeth, the last teeth to come and the sign that growth has reached its extreme. Suwen 1 names them twice, at twenty-one in the woman's count and at twenty-four in the man's, and both times with the same clause: the wisdom teeth come and growth reaches its extreme. They are the only sign in either count that is the same for both sexes — the counts differ by seven and eight, but the teeth that close growth come to both.
nǚ zǐ bāo
The last of the six extraordinary constant palaces, and the one whose case is hardest, because it plainly takes things in and puts things out and yet is not a palace of transmission. Wang Bing's answer: what it takes in is essential qi, what it gives out is a formed body — and giving out a formed body is not the same act as passing dregs along. So it stores, in the sense this chapter cares about.
wǎn
The inward distress that chapter 30 puts between the panting of Yangming counterflow and the patient's inability to bear people. It is not grief and not fear: it is the oppression of a chest that cannot get its breath, and the chapter treats it as sufficient explanation for a social symptom — a man distressed within cannot bear company. The graph appears twice in the chapter, in immediate succession, and the two occurrences form the whole argument.
wēn bìng
A febrile disease of heat type appearing in spring after cold contracted in winter has been held latent. This sentence is the seed from which the later Warm Disease school grew.
wēn nüè
Malaria whose fit begins with heat and goes on to cold. The late passage gives it a home: wind struck in winter, cold stored in the bone and marrow, held there through spring's rising yang, released only when summerheat scorches the marrow and a strain opens the interstices. It lodges in the kidney, and its qi travels from within outward — which is why heat comes first and cold follows when it turns back in.
xiāo dān
The wasting disease — what later ages called 消渴, in which the patient drinks constantly and still loses flesh. Chapter 28's answer is the only one in the chapter that weighs the length of the illness against the pulse: if the pulse is replete and large, even a long illness can still be treated; if it is hanging, small and hard, then a long illness cannot. The same pulse that would be encouraging in another disease is here read against time, because a body that has been burning through itself for years has less to draw on.
xiāo zhōng
What heat becomes when it settles, in chapter 17's list of how an illness changes once formed: 癉成爲消中 — heat (癉, dān) becomes wasting in the centre. The word 消 is the same one the book uses for melt and for consume, and the classical picture is of a man who eats and is not nourished: the centre burns it away faster than it can be used. The chapter places it in a chain — wind becomes cold and heat, heat becomes wasting in the centre, counterflow becomes disease of the crown, standing wind becomes food-diarrhoea, wind in the vessels becomes pestilent sores — and then says the transformations cannot be counted.