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.
yí niào
Losing urine involuntarily while coughing — the sign of bladder cough, which arises when a kidney cough has gone on long enough to pass into the palace paired with the kidney.
shēng tiě luò
The scale that falls from iron in the forge, given as a drink. Chapter 46 prescribes it for yang inversion — the rage and mania born of yang qi that has been abruptly checked — and the reason it gives is the property later books repeat: iron is heavy, and it carries qi downward fast. It belongs to the mineral drugs, a class the site has met before in 石藥.
fā chén
The name Suwen 2 gives to the three months of spring, and the first of the four season names that structure the chapter. What the winter stored, the spring sends out. The rule the chapter draws from it is the rule for spring: sleep at night and rise early, walk in the courtyard, let the hair down and slacken the body, let things live and do not kill them — and if you do not, the liver is harmed and summer brings a cold change.
xià gōng
The physician who treats what has already formed and what is already ruined. Chapter 26 is unusually explicit about why this happens: he does not know how the three regions and nine indicators lose their correspondence, and so the disease does the ruining. The chapter closes the comparison with a sentence that is easy to read past — they do not know what is happening and only see the evil once it has a form — which is the exact difference: not worse hands, but a later hour.
chū zhōng
The two halves of a single position of the qi: an initial thirty degrees and a remainder, and a middle that follows the same rule. They exist to divide heaven from earth — the initial is the qi of earth, the middle the qi of heaven — and they are why above and below are sought differently: 上下不同，求之亦異也. The chapter raises them in the middle of its measuring, between the step of sixty degrees and the standing of the year, and they are the smallest of the units it builds with.
còu lǐ
The seams and grain of the body's surface. Chapter 39 gives the pair its standard behaviour in two lines: cold closes it and the qi is drawn in, heat opens it and sweat lets the qi out.
jiàn qì
The qi that stands between — the one to the left and the right of the qi that governs, rather than the governing qi itself. The chapter gives it two lines and then a rule: 隨氣所在，期於左右, follow where the qi resides and look for it on the left and the right; and then 從其氣則和，違其氣則病, to follow its qi is harmony and to go against it is illness. What follows is the chapter's fullest statement of prognosis: not in one's place, shifting from place to place, losing the place one guards.