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.
cóng nì
The chapter's two verdicts, and in the end its only two. Following means the case is going with the grain of things — the pulse agrees with the season, the qi still reaches the hands and feet. Counterflow means it is going against: the pulse opposes the year, the extremities have gone cold. Chapter 28 is explicit about the physical test, and it uses it again and again — for the swollen body, for the nursing infant with fever — because it is the one thing that can be checked without argument.
cóng gé
Metal falling short. 金曰從革 — metal is called following change — and its 紀 is 折收: 從革之紀，是謂折收。收氣乃後，生氣乃揚，長化合德，火政乃宣，庶類以蕃. The gathering comes late; the qi that gives birth is the one that spreads; growing and transforming join their work; fire's governance is the one that is proclaimed; and every kind comes up thick. It reads like a good year, and the chapter lets it read so — a metal that has given up its own work lets fire's work through. Then the attributes: 其氣揚，其用躁切，其動鏗禁瞀厥，其發欬喘…其病嚏、欬、鼽、衄. Its 從 is fire, 從火化也; its harm falls on the lung, and its 眚 on the west. 審平 is metal weighing and reaping; 從革 is metal that has handed the reaping over.
shí qì
What food becomes on its way through the body — the most reprinted passage in the chapter. Food qi enters the stomach and disperses essence to the liver, which in turn soaks the sinews. Its thick part returns to the heart, which steeps the vessels with essence; vessel qi flows through the channels, channel qi returns to the lung, the lung is courted by the hundred vessels, and essence is conveyed out to skin and hair. The next quotation runs the parallel itinerary for drink. What makes the passage worth watching is that nothing here is decorative: it is the account given for why the pulse at the wrist can speak for the whole frame.
sūn xiè
What long-standing wind becomes, in chapter 17's chain of transformations: 久風爲飱泄. The name is plain about the symptom — the food comes out as it went in, because the centre no longer transforms it — and the chapter attributes it to wind that has stayed rather than to a disorder of the stomach itself. It belongs with the book's other diarrhoeas: 洞泄, pouring diarrhoea, from chapter 3, is named for its manner; 飱泄 is named for what is seen in the stool.
xíng qì
Form and qi taken together, and weighed against the pulse in the chapter's three sentences on life and death: 形弱氣虛，死；形氣有餘，脈氣不足，死；脈氣有餘，形氣不足，生. A weak form with deficient qi dies; form and qi in excess with insufficient pulse qi dies; pulse qi in excess with insufficient form and qi lives. The three are not a scale of strength but a test of agreement: the outside and the inside must match. Where form and qi are full and the pulse is empty, the fullness is hollow and the patient dies; where the pulse is full and the outside is empty, the root still holds and the patient lives. This is the chapter's last word on prognosis before it turns to the manner of the physician.
xíng qì xiāng dé
The first and simplest of the chapter's prognostic pairs. A large frame with a thin pulse and too little breath to finish a breath is in danger; a wasted frame with a large pulse and a chest full of qi is already dying. Form and qi in accord means life; the nine probes failing to cross-check means disease; all three sectors and nine probes losing one another means death. The judgement is relational and not arithmetic: nothing here says how big the pulse should be, only whether it belongs to the body it is beating in.
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.
xíng shèng sè
The second diagnostic step of the chapter. A man's form belongs to one phase and his complexion to another; when the form's phase overcomes the colour's, or the colour's the form's, the two are out of step. Such a man falls ill when the overcoming phase has its year and the year-taboo is added, and if he then meets an outside evil the illness moves. Where form and colour match, the chapter says, the man is rich and happy — the prognosis is stated in the same breath as the anatomy.
sì zhī
The arms and legs, understood as the branches of the body. Chapter 29 makes them the test case for how the spleen works: the limbs take their qi from the stomach, but the qi cannot reach the channels on its own — the spleen carries it. When the spleen is diseased and cannot move the stomach's fluids, the limbs receive nothing, their qi weakens day by day, and sinew, bone, muscle and flesh have nothing to grow on, so the limbs simply stop being usable. The chapter states this twice, once in the middle and once at the end, and the two statements differ only in whether they blame the vessel ways or the yin ways.
hú shàn
Fox hernia — 狐 hú, a fox; 疝 shàn, a rupture — the swelling that comes and goes like the animal it is named after. 張介賓: 狐疝者，陰囊腫大，或上或下，時時變易，如狐之出沒不常，故名. This chapter names it once, in the first line of the six-line scheme it opens with: 厥陰有餘，病陰痺；不足，病生熱痺；滑則病狐疝風，濇則病少腹積氣 — a surplus in the ceasing yin gives yin impediment, a deficiency gives heat impediment, a slippery pulse gives fox hernia wind, and a rough one gives accumulated qi in the lower abdomen. The fox is what a slippery pulse means here, and the chapter leaves it at that; it does not treat it and does not name it again. The graph 疝 itself is older than the fox: 《說文》 has 疝，腹痛也, belly pain, and 《釋名》 glosses the sound rather than the sense — 疝，詵也，氣詵詵然上入而痛也, the qi crowding upward and hurting as it goes. The word has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
xíng bì xuè jìn
The clinical picture with which the chapter poses its hardest question: a body worn out, a blood supply spent, and still no result from treatment. The point is that the phrase is not offered as an explanation — it is the situation, and 神不使也 is the explanation. Late in the chapter the frame appears again from the other side, in 形不可與衣相保, the body can no longer keep company with its clothes, which is oedema — and there a treatment is given.
mǎn yǔ shí
The chapter's most quoted formula, and its cleanest piece of reasoning. Storing organs are full but cannot be filled, because what they hold is essence, which is not delivered in loads. Palaces are filled but cannot be full, because what they hold is food in transit, and it is always moving somewhere else — stomach full and bowels empty, then bowels full and stomach empty. Keeping the two English words apart is the only way to keep the formula.