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.
tiān nián
The span allotted at birth: a hundred, in this chapter. It functions as a measure rather than a promise — the chapter's question is why people fall short of it, and the answer it gives is conduct.
shù shù
Regimen governed by number — measured breathing, diet and practice rather than indulgence. The phrase is deliberately technical: what is recommended is a discipline that can be kept or broken, not an attitude.
dào
Both a road and a method, and the texts lean on both senses at once. 'Knowing the Way' (知道) is not assent to a doctrine but knowing how to conduct a life; the second chapter's line about the sage practising it and the fool merely wearing it depends on that.
shí yǐn yǒu jié
The first of Suwen 1's three ordinaries. 節 is a joint in bamboo, hence a measure and a limit: not abstinence but a bounded practice.
jīng shén
The pair the texts treat as the inner treasury: essence is what is stored, spirit is what is alert. 'Keeping them within' (內守) is this chapter's plainest statement of what health consists in — and the modern sense of the word as 'mind' is a narrowing to only one half.
zhāi jiè
The fasting and abstaining by which a person is made fit to approach what is holy, and the condition this chapter attaches to its own discourse: 非齊戒不敢發 — without it, he does not dare bring the text out. The chapter writes 齊, and the received text writes 齋; the site follows the base for the graph and the received text for the reading, which is what it does elsewhere with a base graph whose meaning is settled. What is being guarded is not the paper. It is the reader: the discourse has been laid in the chamber of the spirit and is to be handed on with care, and the fasting is what makes a person able to receive it.
xíng yǔ shén jù
Suwen 1's ideal ending: not that the body lasts, but that the body and the person's alertness last together and finish together. The opposite is a body outliving its own presence.
dǎo yǐn
Guiding the qi and drawing out the body — the exercise therapy the Suwen names where the needle is forbidden. Chapter 47 gives it as the treatment of the breath accumulation, and pairs it with medicine in a way that makes the division plain: the exercises move what drugs cannot, and drugs alone will not do.
dǎo yǐn àn qiāo
The therapy of the centre, and the only one of the five that the text says came out rather than came from. The land is flat and damp, the food is plentiful and the work is light, and the illnesses are weakness, reversal, cold and heat. Wang Bing glosses all four syllables: guiding and pulling means shaking the sinews and bones and moving the joints; pressing means pressing down on the flesh; lifting means raising the hands and feet briskly. He adds that people of the centre use it as the proper way of nourishing the spirit and regulating the qi.
chūn xià yǎng yáng, qiū dōng yǎng yīn
The line that set the pattern for seasonal therapy, and one of the most argued-over sentences in the corpus. Read simply, it says: work with the season's own movement instead of against it.
àn qiāo
Pressing and treading — the hands' art and the feet's art in a single word, what later ages separate into 按摩 and 導引. Suwen 4 names it once and makes the name a rule: 故冬不按蹻，春不鼽衄. The point is the season, not the technique. Winter stores, and this chapter's whole argument is that what is stored must not be scattered; 按蹻 is named because it scatters. Kept, the winter hands on a spring with no snivelling nosebleed and no disease of the nape — which is the same promise the chapter makes about 精 two paragraphs later, when it says that the one who stores the essence does not fall ill of warmth in spring.
pǔ
The chapter's word for people who have not been worked on: their food seems fine, their clothes sufficient, and high and low do not envy one another. It is a description of a social condition, not a mystical state.