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.
jīng luò
The warp and the weft of the body's conducting system: the channels that run, and the networks that bind them and branch from them. Chapter 24's single use is worth attending to because it is causal rather than descriptive — repeated fright stops them passing through, and the consequence is numbness. The chapter's habit throughout is to put the treatment where the tissue is rather than where the complaint is, and here the tissue is the conducting system itself, which is why the prescription is rubbing and wine rather than a drug taken inward.
xī zhōng
A locus for letting blood, named 'the middle of the cleft'. The chapter uses it three times — at the head of the greater yang malaria, in the escalation of the 'if it does not end' sequence, and for pain that begins in the lower back and spine. Which exact point it is has been argued since the commentaries; the one thing every reading agrees on is that it is a place to bleed.
róng sè
The chapter's subject for its central passage: the colour of the face, read by position and by depth. Depth tells you the remedy and the number of days; position tells you whether the case is rebellion or compliance — and the sides are reversed for men and women. It is the second of the two things 揆度 is applied to in this chapter, after the pulse, and chapter 13 had already paired them as 色脉, colour and pulse.
chǐ
Chapter 17 ends by mapping the forearm. The inner sides of the cubit correspond to the lower ribs; its outer side assesses the kidney and its inner side the abdomen. Above it, at the middle attachment, the left outer side assesses the liver and the inner the diaphragm, the right outer the stomach and the inner the spleen; above that, the right outer the lung and the inner the chest, the left outer the heart and the inner the chest centre. Front assesses front, back assesses back; what reaches highest concerns chest and throat, what reaches lowest concerns the lower body. This is the earliest systematic statement of the regions of the wrist pulse, and the chapter's partner to 寸口.
chǐ cùn
The two regions of the pulse at the wrist — 尺 toward the elbow, 寸 toward the hand — taken together as the place a verdict is read. The chapter gives four of them in a row: 不當其位者病，迭移其位者病，失守其位者危，尺寸反者死，陰陽交者死. The sequence is deliberate — illness, illness, peril, death, death — and the pair 尺寸 belongs to the last two. Note what the chapter has just said: the changes of heaven and earth do not show in the pulse at all. What does show is whether the pulse is in its own place.