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.
qū yín
The faintest clinical signs — the open mouth, the moan — used in chapter 25 as the test of a physician's perception. The chapter pairs them twice: first as something so small it takes a mastered eye to see at all, then as the thing the Emperor explicitly asks to be taught a method for. The pairing with 秋毫 is what makes the term more than a synonym for groaning: these are signs at the limit of visibility, and the whole argument of the chapter is that the difference between the common workman and the one who goes out and in alone is what each can see at that limit.
suì lù
The year's exposure is the name for a whole population falling ill at once, and the chapter's answer to why. Wind and rain on the solstice are the year's first sign; a wind from the south then is 虚風 and enters those who are out in the day; it lodges in the bone and does not come out until spring opens the seams of the skin, and then a second wind from the west meets it, 此兩邪相搏，經氣結代者矣. 故諸逢其風而遇其雨者，命曰遇歲露焉 — whoever meets that wind and that rain has met the year's exposure. The rest of the chapter is the calendar of such years: the wind on the first day of the first month read by direction, the signs of particular months, and the difference between a year that is in harmony and one that is not.
nián jì
The age taboo of the twenty-five types: from seven, every ninth year — sixteen, twenty-five, thirty-four, forty-three, fifty-two, sixty-one — is a great taboo for those whose form and colour overcome one another, and they should take care of themselves. The interval is nine because the reckoning is by the phases, and the reason is stated in the previous paragraph: at the year when the overcoming phase is added, feeling the outside world brings illness on. It is not divination; it is the five phases turned into a scale of age.
yīn chǐ
The moving vessel of the yin at the cubit — that is, the pulse of the hand taiyin at the forearm — said here to lie at Wuli, and called 五腧之禁, the place where the five transporting points must not be needled. The sentence is short and its reference is not settled: Zhang Jiebin takes 陰尺 as Chize, the sea point of the lung, and 五里 as the point of that name on the large intestine channel; Ma Shi takes the whole phrase as the moving vessel at Wuli of the hand yangming. Both agree on the practical point, which is that a deep-lying vessel there is not to be pierced carelessly.
yáng jué
Rage and mania named as a disorder of yang. Yang qi suffers a sudden check and cannot discharge, and the person becomes prone to anger; the chapter's sign is at the neck, where a pulse that should be quiet is beating hard and fast. The treatment is counter-intuitive and famous: 奪其食即已 — take the patient's food away, because food enters yin and feeds yang. Iron filings are given to bear the qi back down.
yáng wéi
The yang link vessel: the vessel that binds the yang channels together. Chapter 41 gives it one entry — a swelling at the painful spot, needled where it joins greater yang below the calf — and names the yin link vessel alongside it, where the feiyang vessel meets it.
yáng luò
The network vessels as they ride near the surface, and the whole point of Chapter 57 hangs on them: because they are shallow they keep no colour of their own, and instead they run with the four seasons. Cold predominating makes the blood congealed and sluggish, and that reads blue-green and black; heat predominating makes it wet and smooth, and that reads yellow and red. Both are normal, both are called no illness, and illness is named only when all five colours appear together. This is the earliest statement of the rule every later book assumes — read the yang networks against the season, not against the viscus — and the ch56 floating network vessel is the same vessel seen from the other end, inside its skin region rather than inside the colour chart. 陽絡 occurs once in the book, in this sentence.
yáng míng
The second of the three yang: it lies before greater yin, roots at Lidui on the second toe, and holds the office of the closed. Yang brightness is yang at its fullest, the point at which it turns back inward. The first chapter uses the same name as 陽明脈, the vessel whose decline at five sevens withers the face.
suì zhí
The second of the three agreements in 應天爲天符，承歲爲歲直，三合爲治. Where 天符 is a year whose circuit matches the qi presiding above it, 歲直 is a year whose circuit matches the year's own branch — 承歲, bearing on the year. Later writing on the doctrine calls the same thing 歲會, a year that meets, and the fuller account is given in the book's later chapters on the circuit qi. This chapter names it and passes on; what it does say is that all three are for the same purpose, which is 氣可與期 — knowing how to meet the qi in advance.
suì huì
The year in which the circuit of the year and the branch of the year come to the same thing — the wood circuit meeting mao, fire meeting wu, earth meeting the end of the four seasons, metal meeting you, water meeting zi. The chapter calls such a year 氣之平, a year of level qi, and contrasts it with the year that does not meet: 歲不與會也. It is the weakest of the three agreements. Graded like offices — the heaven tally holds the law, the year's position issues commands, the great unity is the honoured one — the year meeting is the middle one, and the illness it gives when evil strikes is slow and lingering rather than swift and perilous or sudden and fatal.
wěi hé
Wood falling short. 木曰委和 — wood is called yielding harmony — and the chapter names its 紀 勝生: 委和之紀，是謂勝生。生氣不政，化氣乃揚，長氣自平，收令乃早. The four clauses give the disorder exactly: the qi that gives birth no longer governs, the qi that transforms is the one that spreads, the growing levels off of itself, and the command of the harvest comes early. Then what is seen: 涼雨時降，風雲並興，草木晚榮，蒼乾凋落 — cool rain falls out of season, wind and cloud rise together, the plants flower late, and the green dries and drops. Its 從 is the rule of the whole group: 從金化也, it turns into the working of metal, the phase that overcomes it. Its 邪 falls on the liver, wood's own viscus, and its 眚 comes upon the east. Where its neighbour 敷和 spreads and levels, 委和 spreads too late and does not fill.