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.
shí ròu zé fù
The dietary prohibition with which chapter 31 closes its discussion of convalescence: when the heat disease is a little better, eating meat brings relapse and eating much leaves residue. The two halves forbid different things — one a kind of food, one a quantity — and together they complete the chapter's account of why heat diseases linger. The mechanism has already been given: while heat is stored, grain qi and it press against each other and two heats join. Meat is hard to transform and feeding is easy to overdo, so both reignite what was settling.
quē pén
The hollow above the collar bone, named for what it looks like — a basin with a piece out of it. Chapter 59 counts it twice, once in each of two lists: 缺盆各一 under the foot lesser yang, where it stands in a run that goes from behind the jaw carriage down to the ribs and out to the hip, and 缺盆外骨空各一 under the foot yang brilliance, given as the bone opening just outside the basin. Later practice knows it as Quepen, the twelfth point of the stomach channel, and the site has already met its neighbours in this book — 人迎 (id 382), 三里 (id 1408). What this entry adds is the arithmetic: the chapter is not naming localities so much as keeping two ledgers, and a place belonging to two vessels is entered in both. From Wang Bing onward that has been the standing explanation for why the separate totals overshoot the three hundred and sixty-five the chapter announces, and 缺盆 is the plainest case of it. 缺盆 occurs twice in this chapter and nowhere else among the chapters transcribed on the site so far.
xū xié
Evil that enters through an emptiness — the seasonal wind that arrives from its own quarter at its own time and finds the body undefended. Chapter 26 distinguishes it from 正邪, the mild evil that slips in through open pores when the body is exerted, and the distinction is clinical rather than moral: the empty evil is deep and must be avoided altogether, the upright evil is slight and no one notices it. The chapter's severity comes from the sentence about two emptinesses meeting — the body's and heaven's — which is where the evil reaches the bone.
diān jí
The falling disease — fits, seizures, and the derangements that go with them. Chapter 28 judges it entirely by the pulse: a pulse that beats large and slippery will settle of itself in time, while one that is small, hard and racing means death and no cure. Pressed on whether the disease is vacuous or replete, Qibo gives the answer that inverts the usual rule — vacuous, it can be treated; replete, the patient dies — because here repletion means the evil has taken hold and vacuity means it is loosening.
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.
jīng qì
The qi of the essence: what the viscera store and what is spent in begetting. Suwen 1 uses it at three points on the same road — at sixteen it overflows and is spent, and yin and yang harmonise, so a man can beget children; at fifty-six it is scant, because the heavenly water is exhausted; and by the end of the counts the essence qi of heaven and earth itself is spent, so that even those whose span exceeds its measure cannot pass the bound. Those who have the way breathe it instead of spending it, which is why they can beget children at a hundred.
zhěn yào
The chapter's title word, and the question the Emperor opens with: 診要何如. What the chapter gives as the answer is unexpected — before any symptom it gives a calendar of where the human qi sits in each month of the year, and then the season's needling rule that follows from it. Diagnosis here is not a technique applied to a patient; it is knowing where you are in the year and what depth that calls for. The second half of the chapter then takes 診 as far as it can go: the recognition of how the channels end.
shěn píng
Metal in its even state, and the one of the five named for a judgement. 金曰審平 — metal is called even judgement — and its 紀 runs: 審平之紀，收而不爭，殺而無犯，五化宣明，其氣潔，其性剛，其用散落，其化堅斂，其類金，其政勁肅，其候清切，其令燥，其藏肺，肺其畏熱，其主鼻，其榖稻，其果桃，其實殻，其應秋，其蟲介，其畜雞，其色白，其養皮毛，其病欬，其味辛，其音商，其物外堅，其數九. Metal's work is the autumn's: it gathers in and it cuts down. The chapter says what makes that even — 收而不爭，殺而無犯 — and the two words are the whole ethic of the autumn: the reaping takes what is due and does not strive for more, the killing falls where it must and nothing is injured beyond it. Its five transformations come out 宣明, spread and clear, and its qi is 潔, clean. Its viscus is the lung, its creature the shelled, its number nine; when it fails it is 從革, following change, and when it goes too far 堅成, hard completion.
tài guò bù jí
The chapter's two ways of being wrong, and both of them are about timing rather than amount. Qi that comes before its season is 太過: it presses on the quarter it cannot overcome and rides over the quarter it can, and that is 氣淫. Qi that fails to come when its season comes is 不及: what it would have overcome runs wild, what it would have generated falls ill. Between them stands 平氣 — 無過者也, that which does not go past.
biǎo lǐ
The pairing by which the six channels are organised into three couples: greater yang with lesser yin, lesser yang with ceasing yin, yang brightness with greater yin. Chapter 24 gives the pairing for the foot and then for the hand, and the hand list is the interesting one — where the foot says ceasing yin, the hand says the heart master, which is how the text names the pericardium when it needs to keep it distinct from the foot channel of the same name. Note that exterior and interior here are a relation between channels, not the depth of a disease; the chapter's own use is anatomy, not diagnosis.
mù fēng
Eye wind is the second head wind of chapter 42. Wang Bing explains the anatomy: the greater yang vessel rises from the inner canthus over the forehead and enters the network of the brain, so wind that enters and binds the head shows in the eyes, and the eyes are cold.
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.