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.
liù hé
One of the frameworks that Jiu daiji fitted colour and pulse to, listed with metal, wood, water, fire and earth, the four seasons and the eight winds. Wang Bing does not gloss the word here; his commentary treats it as the space within which the eight winds blow and the seasons come and go, which fits the reading of 六合 as the four directions plus above and below. A second reading, common in Han calendrical writing, takes it as the conjunctions of the twelve branches. Both are recorded here; the chapter only requires that it be a complete frame, since the point is that nothing falls outside it.
liù yuán
The name the chapter gives, in its last sentence, to the six qi that stand above the three yin and three yang — wind, heat, damp, minister fire, dryness, cold. 所謂本也，是謂六元: what has just been called the root is called the six origins. The two words are the point of the line. Earlier in the chapter the same six were listed as 天之陰陽, the yin and yang of heaven, with the three yin and three yang serving them (三陰三陽，上奉之); here the relation is turned the other way up, and the six are what the three yin and three yang are the branches of. 《說文》 has 元，始也, which is why 本 and 元 — root and source — can be said of the same six in one sentence.
liù yuán zhèng jì
The name the chapter gives itself. 六元 are the six qi — 少陽、陽明、太陽、厥陰、少陰、太陰 — each of which is the 元, the beginning, of the years it governs; 正紀 is the regular record of what those years do, set against the irregularity that the chapter calls 邪氣化. The phrase closes the whole discourse, spoken as a thing to be sealed: 請藏之靈蘭之室，署曰六元正紀，非齋戒不敢示. It is therefore both the title and the colophon: the chapter begins by asking after 六化六變 and ends by naming the book it has written.
liù qì
The six qi that govern the six positions from above, and the reason the year is divisible by six while the phases are five: fire is counted twice, as sovereign and as minister. Each of the six has a root, a tip, and a qi seen in the middle, and the chapter's whole apparatus — the ring of the six, the six steps, the six positions with something bearing down under each — is built to place them. The six are also what the chapter measures: the beginning and end of the six qi, early and late, is the question that produces the four years of ke.
liù huà
The six transformations: what each of the six qi brings about. The chapter gives them twice and names them once. First as a verb, in six clauses — 厥陰司天，其化以風；少陰司天，其化以熱；太陰司天，其化以濕；少陽司天，其化以火；陽明司天，其化以燥；太陽司天，其化以寒 — and then as a settled product, each qi given four faces: 厥陰司天爲風化，在泉爲酸化，司氣爲蒼化，間氣爲動化. The name 六化 stands at the end of those six paragraphs, in the sentence that says what the list is for: 故治病者，必明六化分治，五味五色所生，五藏所宜，乃可以言盈虚，病生之緒也. Nothing in this chapter sets 化 against 變; the pairing of the two belongs to the discourse before it.
liù huà liù biàn
The chapter's opening question, and its subject. 六化 are the six transformations proper to the six qi — 厥陰風化、少陰熱化、太陰濕化、少陽火化、陽明燥化、太陽寒化 — which the closing passage states as a flat list: 故太陰雨化，施於太陽；太陽寒化，施於少陰. 六變 are the six changes, the same qi turning violent when the season it enters is not its own, which the chapter gives as thirteen paragraphs of 所至 and closes with 凡此十二變者，報德以德，報化以化. The question is answered by the whole discourse, not by any one sentence: 化 in the sixty-year table, 變 in the passage on 鬱發, and the two together in the closing 六氣正紀.
liù huà fēn zhì
The chapter's one instruction about the six transformations: hold them apart, each in its own charge. It is the sentence that turns the preceding six paragraphs from a table into a rule — 故治病者，必明六化分治，五味五色所生，五藏所宜，乃可以言盈虚，病生之緒也 — and it is why the six paragraphs are built in parallel at all: 蒼化 belongs to 厥陰 the way 酸化 belongs to its 在泉, and a physician who lets the two run together cannot say whether the year is in excess or in want. 分治 is therefore the method the rest of the discourse assumes.
liù liù zhī jié
Heaven's unit in this chapter: six rounds of sixty days make the year of three hundred and sixty days, and the days left over are swept into an intercalary month. Earth answers with nines of nine. The claim the chapter builds on this is that the body is counted the same way — three hundred and sixty-five nodes, nine stores. Note that 節 in the next breath means a node of the body, not a division of the year: the chapter is making the pun deliberately.
tiān zǐ
Chapter 25's redefinition of the imperial title as an epistemic one: not the man who rules the myriad things but the man who knows them. The definition is sandwiched between two other claims about knowing — that heaven and earth become father and mother to whoever answers the four seasons, and that the black-haired people share their food and know none of it. Read together, the three clauses describe a hierarchy of knowledge rather than of rank, which is unusual and worth noticing.
huà yuán
What to give before anything else. Each of the six 司天之政 closes with a set of orders, and in each the same phrase appears: 必折其鬱氣，先資其化源. The source is the mother of the qi the year has too little of — supply it, and the failing season recovers from below rather than being forced from above. The idea belongs to the 五運 method: every phase is generated by another, and a year whose qi is short is a year in which the generator must be reinforced. It stands in the chapter just before the diet and the prohibitions, as the first of the three things the 治則 asks for.
nán zhèng
One of the two ways a year may stand, to which the chapter sends the reader when asked where the yin is on the wrist: 陰之所在，寸口何如？歧伯曰：視歲南北，可知之矣. 南政 is the year that faces south and issues its commands, and the pulse it gives is stated in one line: 南政之歲，少陰司天，則寸口不應；厥陰司天，則右不應；太陰司天，則左不應，諸不應者，反其診則見矣 — the three yin, when they stand above in such a year, are not answered at the wrist, and a reversed reading finds them. A second line gives the rule by position rather than by name: 南政之歲，三陰在天，則寸不應；三陰在泉，則尺不應，左右同. The base text leaves it to the reckoning of the year to say which years these are, and the commentators divide: 王冰、張介賓、馬蒔 make the years of 甲己 earth the southern ones on the ground that earth is honoured among the five, 張志聰 makes 戊癸 fire the southern ones, and a third view reckons by the southern declination of the ecliptic.
pí bù zhǔ shí
The doctrine that the spleen, unlike the other four depots, presides over no single season. Chapter 29 asks the question directly and answers it in two steps. First, the spleen is earth and rules the centre. Second, because earth grows the ten thousand things, the spleen is present throughout the year rather than in one quarter of it — governing by delegation for eighteen days at the turn of each season, seventy-two days in all. The doctrine became standard: the spleen is present at the hinges of the year, and that is why it has no season of its own.