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.
shú mǐ
One sheng of glutinous millet, added to the boiling water in the pinellia decoction. Its function in the formula is twofold and the chapter says neither: the starch gives the decoction a body that holds the pinellia's sharpness off the stomach, and a sticky grain settles what the chapter calls the qi that will not stay down. It is also the reason the decoction is strained and drunk as a clear liquid — 去其滓，飲汁一小杯 — the grain is cooked to exhaustion and thrown away. In the pharmacology of the period 秫 belongs with 黍 under 稷, the glutinous millet of the north, as against 稻 and 粱.
shén zhì
Spirit and will taken as one pair. The argument runs: 夫水之精爲志，火之精爲神，水火相感，神志俱悲，是以目之水生也 — water's essence is the will, fire's essence is the spirit; water and fire stir each other, and when spirit and will grieve together, the water is born in the eye. The pair is not decorative: 神 and 志 belong to different viscera, heart and kidney, and to different elements, fire and water, and the tear comes only when both are moved. Later the pair comes apart: 神不慈則志不悲 — if the spirit is not kind, the will does not grieve, and no tears come.
pí wèi
The depot and the palace that together turn food and drink into the qi the body runs on. Chapter 29 gives the pair its classic formulation: the stomach is the sea of the five depots and six palaces, and the spleen is what moves the stomach's fluids onward. Because they are exterior and interior to one another — Yangming outside, Taiyin inside — the same body can be struck in two different ways: evils that arrive from without are taken by the yang side and settle in the palaces, while damage done by eating and drinking out of measure is taken by the yin side and settles in the depots.
chóng yán
Speech that doubles on itself. The chapter's cause is mechanical: the epiglottis is large and thick, so it opens and closes with difficulty and the air comes out late, and therefore the words repeat. The contrary case is given first — a small and thin epiglottis lets the air out fast and the opening is smooth — so that the two together make the point: fluency is a matter of the valve, not of the tongue. Later practice took 重言 as the word for stammering, and its account of the cause is this passage.
mèn xīn
What too much sweet food does: sweet qi is weak and cannot rise to the upper burner, so it stays in the stomach with the grain; the stomach slackens, the worms stir, and the region below the heart feels stopped up. 悗 is the exact opposite of 洞 — not a hollow but a blockage. As with 洞心, the 心 here is the epigastrium rather than the organ: the chapter's symptoms are all located below the heart, and none of them is a disease of the heart itself.
wèi qì
The seventh chapter calls it 胃脘之陽, the yang of the stomach, and it is the whole difference between a pulse that kills and one that does not: yang, in that chapter, is not a channel but this — the stomach's contribution, the faint evenness still left in a pulse. A pulse without it is the true storing pulse, and that one is fatal. Nothing in the chapter's prognosis works without the distinction.
zhuàng huǒ
Fire grown past its measure — the fire that eats and scatters the qi rather than feeding it. Suwen 5 puts it in a single breath with 少火, and the contrast is the whole doctrine: 壯火食氣，少火生氣 — the strong fire eats the qi, the lesser fire gives it birth. The chapter's other two clauses say the same thing from either end: the qi of the strong fire wanes, and the strong fire scatters the qi. The pair stands at the head of the chapter's long argument about qi and flavour, and later medicine took the two graphs as the names of the pathological and the physiological fire respectively.
hàn
Chapter 21 hands out five sweats and gives each a different viscus to come from: eating to repletion sweats the stomach, fright that seizes the essence sweats the heart, carrying weight on a long road sweats the kidney, running in fear sweats the liver, labour sweats the spleen. The move is diagnostic rather than decorative — each sweat reports which store has been drawn on. Later chapters take sweat as an ending rather than a message: the final sweat that precedes death in the channel endings, and the drenching sweat that accompanies a lung pulse so dissipated that its colour stays bright.
wěi dǐ
The lower end of the spine, given as the terminus of a count rather than a shape. From the spinal bone down to it there are twenty-one vertebrae and three chi. The chapter then divides that length: the upper vertebra is one cun and a fraction of four, the odd fraction falls to the lower ones, and the upper seven come to nine cun and seven eighths. It is the only place in the book where the spine is both counted and measured.
qióng gǔ
The bone at the lower end of the spine, which the chapter itself glosses as the sacral bone. It comes at the close of the treatment for the falling disease: the physician keeps company with the patient, watches where the seizure will take hold, bleeds the full place and keeps the blood in a gourd; when the fit comes the blood stirs, and if it does not stir the sacrum is cauterised twenty壮. The gloss is the earliest plain equation of 窮骨 with 骶骨, and it is why the entry matters: the book stops to define its own anatomical word.
liù fǔ
The chapter names five of them — stomach, large intestine, small intestine, triple burner, bladder — and then speaks of six. The sixth has to be the gallbladder, which is the reason the gallbladder is also listed among the six extraordinary constant palaces: it is counted twice, once by shape and once by behaviour. Their rule is the opposite of the organs' — they can be filled but never full.
chǐ fū
The skin of the cubit is chapter 74's diagnostic surface. Huang Di asks whether one may do without looking at the colour and feeling the pulse, and read the disease from the cubit alone — 獨調其尺，以言其病，從外知内. The answer is a table of textures: 尺之緩急、小大、滑濇 and 肉之堅脆 give the form of the disease; skin slippery and oily means wind; rough as the scales of a dried fish means water overflowing into the drinks; hot with a racing pulse means warmth-disease; cold with a small pulse means drainage and lack of qi; hot first and cold after means cold-heat. The chapter then reads heat and cold by location along the arm — elbow, forearm, palm — and maps them onto the body above and below the waist. It is the Lingshu's most systematic piece of surface diagnosis, and the word 尺膚 keeps it apart from the pulse that is taken at the same inch.