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.
shèng wáng
Not a grade of person in this chapter but a name given for a result: he who can read colour and pulse keeps far from death and near to life, the way of living is lengthened, and he is called a sage king. Wang Bing's note is dry about who qualifies: the emperors of high antiquity heard the way and practised it diligently, and only a sage king manages to use it constantly. The word is distinct from 聖人 — the sage of Suwen 1 is a private attainment; the sage king of this chapter is a public one, and the chapter's last movement makes the connection explicit by comparing bad medicine to bad government.
shén bù shǐ
Qibo's two-word answer to the hardest question in the chapter, and perhaps in the book: why does a patient with the best physician, the correct methods, and every advantage of nearness and attention still not recover? Because the needle and the stone are only a method; what they work on is the patient's spirit, and once the spirit will not answer them, no method reaches him. The chapter gives the mechanism at once — appetites without end, cares without stop, and the construction stagnates and the defence is dispelled. It is the same doctrine as chapter 13's 得神者昌，失神者亡, stated from the physician's side instead of the patient's.
shén zhuǎn bù huí
Four lines that later commentators never stopped quoting, and the doctrine the chapter is written to deliver: the spirit's motion is one-directional. If it reverses, it is no longer turning, and the mechanism is lost. Everything in the chapter — the colour that climbs and is called rebellion, the pulse that travels into what conquers it, the season that runs backwards — is an instance of this one rule. It is also the nearest the book comes to saying what life is: a turning that goes one way.
méng yá
What the superior physician rescues: the disease while it is still a shoot. Chapter 26 attaches three conditions to it — the physician must first see the qi of the three regions and nine indicators, must rescue while the qi can still be fully regulated, and must act before anything has been ruined. The image explains the chapter's whole theory of diagnosis: since the sprout has no form and cannot be seen or tasted, the only way to catch it is to read the indicators rather than wait for signs.
biān shí
The therapy of the east. Its people eat fish and crave salt; fish heats the inside and salt gets the better of the blood, so the texture of the skin is loose and they break out in abscesses. For that, the stone is the thing to open them with. Wang Bing: the stone needle is a needle made of stone, and the Classic of Mountains and Seas speaks of a mountain whose stone is like jade and can be used as a needle. Wang Bing adds a sentence that matters: people of the east still use it. This chapter's claim is that the method came out of a place, not out of a sage's head.
shàng gōng
The physician who acts before the disease has a form. Chapter 26 gives the definition in one sentence: he rescues the sprout, he must see the qi of the three regions and nine indicators first, and he rescues while the qi can still be fully regulated and nothing has yet been ruined. The contrast with 下工 is not about skill with the needle but about when the work begins — and the chapter has just spent a long passage explaining that what the superior physician sees does not appear outwardly at all, which is why everyone else fails to see it.