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.
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.
bā xū
The eight emptinesses are the two elbows, the two armpits, the two hips and the two backs of the knees — the hollows at the great joints. Huang Di asks what they answer to and Bo Gao answers in one word: the five depots. Each pair is the road by which one depot's qi leaves when evil enters it — lung and heart to the elbows, liver to the armpits, spleen to the hips, kidney to the hollow behind the knee. The chapter then gives the reason for the name: 凡此八虚者，皆機關之室，真氣之所過，血絡之所遊 — they are the rooms of the mechanism, where true qi passes and blood vessels travel. Because they are rooms and not dead hollows, evil blood must not be allowed to stay: 住留則傷筋絡，骨節，機關，不得屈伸，故痀攣也. The eight are therefore both a map of where disease shows and a warning about what happens when it settles there.
bā dòng
The eight winds and, more importantly, their variation. Chapter 25 lists holding their changes alongside the alternation of the five conquests as one of the attainments that put a physician beyond deception and let him go out and in alone. The emphasis falls on 變, change: it is not a table of eight winds to be memorised but a set of movements to be tracked, in the same way the chapter later wants the physician to track the comings and goings of qi rather than to know its name.
bā zhèng
The eight upright are the eight nodes of the year, and they enter this chapter at its last turn, where the sage's knowledge is summed up: heaven and earth, the four seasons, the five viscera and six receptacles, female and male, outer and inner, needling and moxa and stone and drug — and then 八正九候，診必副矣, in the eight upright and the nine indicators his diagnosis must match. The eight are the two solstices, the two equinoxes and the four beginnings of the seasons; 正 is the due weather of each, and the chapter's point is that a diagnosis which does not answer to them is not a diagnosis. The nine indicators beside it are the three sectors and three depths of the pulse, which have their own entry.
bā fēng
One of the things the physicians of middle antiquity used ten days of decoction to drive out. Wang Bing quotes the Ling shu for the eight names and for what each wind does: the child wind from the east strikes the sinews and lodges in the liver, the weak wind from the south-east strikes the flesh and lodges in the stomach, the great weak wind from the south strikes the vessels and lodges in the heart, the scheming wind from the south-west strikes the flesh and lodges in the spleen, the hard wind from the west strikes the skin and lodges in the lung, the breaking wind from the north-west strikes the small intestine channel, the great hard wind from the north strikes the bone and lodges in the kidney, and the baleful wind from the north-east strikes the armpit and flank and lodges in the large intestine.
xū
The empty quality: a pulse without substance, yielding under the finger because what should fill it is not there. The book names it twice by derivation — the hollow pulse is empty (芤則爲虚), and a floating pulse at the instep is empty (浮則爲虚) — and once by the body it accompanies: 脉虚身熱，得之傷暑, an empty pulse with a hot body comes from summerheat. Emptiness here is not one shape but a conclusion drawn from shape plus circumstance.
xū lǐ
A place, not a vessel. 虚里 is the great network of the stomach as it can be felt below the left breast, where it pierces the diaphragm and networks the lung and its beat is strong enough to move the clothing. Chapter 18 is the source of the name, and what is read at it is the ancestral qi: panting and interrupted means the disease is in the centre; knotted and transverse means an accumulation; a beat that never comes is death; and a beat so large that it shakes the clothes means the ancestral qi is leaking away.
jīng zhōng
The second word of the chapter's title, and the whole of its second half: 願聞十二經脉之終奈何. What follows is the book's anatomy of dying — six passages, one for each pair of channels, naming the signs by which you will know that this channel has finished: the eyes carried upward, the sweat that comes at the end, the face black, the teeth seeming to lengthen. The chapter's last line calls them 十二經之所敗, the ruin of the twelve channels.
shǐ dào
The channel whose length is a prognosis. The chapter has just described the body that reaches a hundred years — a deep and long envoy road, high and square foundations and walls, a regulated camp and guard — and then, asking why others die before their time, gives the same features in the negative: the road is not long, the walls are low. Two readings have been offered and both are kept here: the nostrils, where breath comes and goes, and the road of the spirit in the region of the philtrum. Either way the argument is the same, and it is architectural: depth and length mean that what passes is slowed and protected, and a house whose gate is short is a house that wind enters. The word 使 matters — what travels is sent, and the road is the course it is sent along.