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 gé
The first of the chapter's two obstructions: qi is held above the diaphragm, so food and drink enter and return at once. Against it stands 下膈, the worm obstruction below the diaphragm, where food stays a full day before coming back. The pair is the chapter's whole frame, and the difference between them is both speed and seat. The treatment that follows — pressing the abscess, shallow needling around it, warming with a hot compress, then bringing the grain down with salt and bitter — is one of the few complete procedures in the book.
gēng xū gēng mǎn
The alternation by which a healthy person digests. The chapter has just added up the gut's capacity — nine dou two sheng and a ge — and now says the balanced person is not a store: when the stomach is full the intestine is empty, when the intestine is full the stomach is empty, and the two take turns. That is why qi can pass up and down, why the five depots stay settled, why blood and vessels run harmoniously, and why the spirit has somewhere to lodge. The phrase is also the answer to the chapter's opening question: seven days without food kills because the reserve that the alternation keeps in play is at last spent.
zōng qì
Chapter 18 gives the ancestral qi a place. It is at 虚里, the great network vessel of the stomach, which comes out below the left breast and beats strongly enough to stir the clothing; the chapter says plainly that this is 脉宗氣也, the qi the pulse descends from. Two things are read from it. Its quality tells where the disease is: full, panting, rapid and interrupted means the disease is in the centre; knotted and transverse means an accumulation; a beat that does not come at all is death. And when the beat is so large it moves the clothes, the ancestral qi itself is leaking out.
zōng jīn
The great sinew at the gathering of the yin and yang vessels, bound to the bones and working the joints. The chapter makes it the hinge of its last argument: the thoroughfare vessel joins yang brightness there, all the vessels meet at the qi street, and when yang brightness fails the ancestral sinews go slack and the legs stop working.
shēng jiàng chū rù
The four movements without which nothing lives, and the standard the chapter ends on: 是以升降出入，無器不有 — there is no vessel without them. Rising and falling belong to heaven and earth taking turns, exit and entry to the thing itself. Remove the second and the spirit mechanism perishes in transformation; remove the first and the qi that stands is isolated and in peril. Vessels differ in size and their terms are near or far, but what matters in all of them is to hold to the constant: 反常則災害至矣. The sentence that closes it — 無形無患, without form there is no affliction — is the same thought from the other end.
shèng dú
The capacity to withstand potent drugs, read off the body rather than the prescription. The chapter's rule is entirely physical: a thick stomach, a black complexion, large bones and fat all bear poison; a man whose bones are thin and whose stomach is slight does not. The word 勝 is doing the work — it is the same verb used of bearing a burden or being equal to a task, not of defeating an enemy — and the chapter has already used the same measure for pain, so that the two questions form a pair: what the body can bear from without, needle and fire, and what it can bear from within, the drugs. The practical consequence is a rule of dosage before dosage was numerical: the same decoction is a different dose in a different body.
xià gé
The worm obstruction below the diaphragm: food goes down and comes back only after a full day — 晬時, the turn of a day. The delay is the diagnostic: in the upper obstruction the return is immediate, here it is late, because a mass has formed below and the road is narrowed. The chapter then explains it: when the man eats, the worms come up to eat; as they come up the lower stomach empties; emptied, it is overcome by evil qi, and accumulation, abscess and constriction follow in order.
fǔ yǎng
Bending and lifting — in the chapter, what has to be rescued in wind from overexertion. The whole treatment of that disease is summed up in 以救俛仰, and the days to recovery are then counted by how well the great yang can draw the essence up. Whether it means the bending of the body or the rise and fall of breathing, the commentators have kept both.
xuè
What this chapter says about blood is all motion. It returns to the liver in sleep, and whatever it reaches can then do its work: the eye sees, the foot walks, the palm grips, the fingers take hold. Wind striking a body just woken congeals it, and where it congeals determines what follows — obstruction in the skin, stagnation in the vessels, reversal cold in the feet. All of blood belongs to the heart; all of qi belongs to the lung.
tǐ duò
The disease named in this chapter after injury: blood lost in quantity, wind-cold entering, or a fall, and afterwards the four limbs go slack and will not gather. It is not a withered limb and not a painful one — the frame is intact, the strength is simply not delivered. The chapter treats it at the threefold meeting below the navel, which it then identifies as yang brightness and greater yin meeting three inches below the navel, at guan yuan. The name matters because it fixes the picture: what fails is not the limb but the body's hold on it.
gǔ jū
Bone abscess is the fourth of the six lesions. 有所結，深中骨，氣因於骨，骨與氣并，日以益大，則爲骨疽 — a knot forms, it strikes deep into the bone, the qi attaches to the bone, bone and qi merge, and it grows greater by the day. The chapter contrasts it with the next: the same knot that settles in flesh and finds heat turns to pus, and finding no heat becomes a flesh abscess; the one that settles on bone needs no heat, because bone and qi together are already a mass. 疽 is the flat deep sore of the Lingshu, as against the raised hot 癰, and 骨疽 is where that distinction reaches its limit.
gǔ suǐ
The deepest lodging of disease, and the phrase chapter 25 opens with. The complaint is that the sickness is invisible while it travels and obvious only when it has arrived somewhere nothing can reach; 留淫日深 describes the travelling and 著於骨髓 the arrival. Everything in the chapter — the three images of a vessel failing, the ruined depot that drugs and needles cannot touch, the insistence on seeing the autumn down — follows from the wish to catch a disease before it gets this far.