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.
bù
The unit of sky this chapter walks out the year in: sixty degrees and a remainder, twenty-four of which make a day by heaping a surplus of a hundred ke. Six steps take you from the position of sovereign fire round through minister fire, earth, metal, water and wood and back again — which is why the chapter can say that the six qi answer to the changes of the five phases. The step is the largest of the three units the chapter measures with: the step of sixty degrees, the initial of thirty, and the ke of the water clock.
tiān jì
The prohibitions laid on treatment by the calendar: no needling in cold weather, no draining as the moon waxes, no supplementing when it is full, no treatment at all when the rim is empty. Chapter 26 does not present these as rules of thumb but as the point at which a physician who ignores them injures the patient — hence the flat sentence that the taboos of heaven must not be unknown. The term is the chapter's own name for its subject, and it appears once, at the close of the opening movement.
shí èr biàn
The name the chapter gives to its own closing list. Thirteen paragraphs run from 厥陰所至爲和平 to 太陽所至爲流泄禁止，病之常也; each begins 某氣所至 and most end with a phrase that names the category of what it has described — 時化之常、司化之常、氣化之常、德化之常、布政之常、氣變之常、令行之常、病之常. Then comes the sentence that gathers them: 凡此十二變者，報德以德，報化以化，報政以政，報令以令，氣高則高，氣下則下，氣後則後，氣前則前，氣中則中，氣外則外，位之常也. The rule is one of answering in kind: a year that was generous gets generosity, a year that was harsh gets harshness. This is what the opening question about 六化六變 has been waiting for.
èr shí bā xiù
The twenty-eight divisions of the sky through which the moon passes, each reckoned at thirty-six fen, so that the whole circuit is one thousand and eight fen. The chapter sets the body against them exactly: twenty-eight vessels, sixteen zhang and two chi around, answering to the twenty-eight mansions; and the qi's fifty circuits in a day and night answer to the clepsydra's hundred marks. The correspondence is numerical, not symbolic, and it is what allows the pulse to be read as a clock.
zhì shù
What the chapter says it is about, in the phrase 請言道之至數 — allow me to speak of the ultimate numbers of the Way. In this chapter the numbers are not arithmetic for its own sake; they are prognostic. Ten days for shallow colour, twenty-one for deep, a hundred for very deep, a hundred for the untreatable. And at the end the chapter says the terrifying thing about them: once the counter-movement has passed, 不復可數 — the count cannot be taken up again. The same word 數 carries both the prognostic numbers and the counting that stops.
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》.
yǒu gù wú yǔn
The chapter's answer to its own hardest question. 黄帝問曰：婦人重身，毒之何如？歧伯曰：有故無殞，亦無殞也 — a pregnant woman with a disease must be treated; if the disease is really there, the strong drug does not kill. The licence is immediately bounded: 大積大聚，其可犯也，衰其太半而止，過者死. The rule is therefore not permission to be bold but a rule about proportion: treat the cause, and stop when the disease is mostly gone. It is the last clinical sentence of the chapter, coming after the sixty years of the table and the five treatments for pent-up qi, and it is placed there deliberately — everything before it describes what the year does; this one says what may be done in return.
sān yīn sān yáng
The six channels, and the number that bothers the sixth chapter: if heaven and earth have only yin and yang, why does the body have three of each? The answer given there is that the six are what a pair becomes when it is divided — separated they are three and three, joined they are one yin and one yang.
sān hé
The third and fullest of the chapter's three agreements, and the only one with a consequence attached: 三合爲治, when three things fit, there is governance. The three are the two already named plus their coincidence — a year that is both 應天 and 承歲 at once. Later writing on the doctrine gives that year its own name, 太乙天符, and sets out what follows from it; here it is the climax of a sentence whose whole purpose is 氣可與期 — that the qi of a year can be met on time, because the agreements that govern it can be counted.
huà
The first half of the chapter's most-quoted sentence, and a half that has to be read with the other: 物生謂之化，物極謂之變. Transformation is what generates; change is what happens at the extreme. The chapter means both to be the same process seen at two points, and the pair bears a great deal of weight in the chapters that follow, because the 運氣 literature is about a system that generates by turns and breaks at its extremes. The site keeps two English words for the two graphs so that the distinction survives.
liǎng yáng hé míng
The name of 陽明, given by the chapter as a piece of arithmetic on the two yang within it: 帝曰：陽明何謂也？歧伯曰：兩陽合明也. The answer turns the name into a description — the brightness of 陽明 is what comes of two yangs joining — and the chapter then uses the same words a second time for something larger. Asked 幽明何如？ it answers 兩陰交盡，故曰幽；兩陽合明，故曰明，幽明之配，寒暑之異也, so that 兩陽合明 becomes the name of the bright half of the year as 兩陰交盡 is the name of the dark. The pair is used as the ground of the 分至 that follow, and it is one of three places where the chapter explains a qi's name instead of merely using it.
liǎng yīn jiāo jìn
The name of 厥陰, read out of the two yin that meet and end in it: 帝曰：厥陰何也？歧伯曰：兩陰交盡也. The chapter then uses the words again, and in the second use they name something larger: 兩陰交盡，故曰幽 — the dark half of the year, set against 兩陽合明，故曰明, with 幽明之配，寒暑之異也 for the closing statement. Read with its opposite number it is a diagram of the six qi's ends: 厥陰 is where the yin comes to its last, 陽明 where the yang has gathered all its light, and the two together mark the farthest points of cold and heat, which is why the passage goes on at once to the 分至.