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.
liǎng shén
The pair whose engagement produces the body. The chapter has just asked how what is one qi comes to be distinguished into six names, and the first answer is this: the two spirits engage, join and form the shape, and it is always born before the body — this is called essence. The sentence is the book's shortest account of conception, and its difficulty is the word 神. It is not the alertness of a living person, which the same graph names elsewhere; it is the potency of the two parents before there is a person at all. Later readings take the two as yin and yang, or as the father's and mother's essence, and the ambiguity is kept here rather than resolved.
zéi fēng
The chapter's subject, and the word it sets out to qualify. A thief is not stronger than other men; he enters where no one is watching, and the whole discourse turns on that image. The question is why a man who never leaves his screens or his chamber should fall ill at all, and the answer is not that the thief was absent but that something was already inside: dampness lodged from an old injury, blood in the flesh, a fall, a sudden fit of anger, a meal out of season. When the pores open and wind and cold arrive, they join the old evil and the illness is made. So 賊風 is real but not sufficient; the chapter's interest is in the interior that makes a thief of an ordinary wind, which is why the same chapter can end by explaining illnesses that look like the work of ghosts.
nào zé
Thinned and made glossy by heat. Chapter 27 uses the word once, in the sentence that explains how an evil actually gets in: cold makes the blood congeal and drag, heat makes the qi thin and glossy, and the empty evil enters and lodges on the strength of that loosening. The term belongs with 淖液 of chapter 26, where the same 淖 describes blood thinned by warm bright weather; here it is the qi, and it is not an advantage but an opening.
nào yè
Blood in warm, bright weather: loose, moist, thin. The term is one half of the pair on which chapter 26's argument rests — the other half is 凝泣, blood congealed and sluggish under a cold overcast sky. Because the blood is thin, the defence qi floats, the blood is easily drained and the qi moves easily; and that is why the chapter says to needle without hesitating in warm weather but not at all in cold. The word is descriptive, not pathological: 淖液 is the state that makes treatment work.
chū sān rù yī
The arithmetic of breath, and the reason the chapter turns from flavours to food. Heaven and earth nourish a man with essence qi, and the great tally of that exchange is three out to one in: what is spent exceeds what is taken, and the excess is the cost of living. The sentence sits directly after the lungs are said to let breath out and take it in, so that the count is at once respiratory and dietary; and it is followed at once by the practical consequence — half a day without grain and the qi weakens, a full day and it is scant. The number is not a measurement but a warning: because the account runs at a deficit, food cannot be missed, and the five flavours that follow are the means of paying it.
sān bù sān lǐ
One of the four signs of a life that reaches its term, and the only one that is felt rather than seen. The three sectors are the three divisions of the pulse — above, below and the middle — and the three miles are the points of that name on hand and foot; 起 means that they rise under the finger, full and close to the surface, not that the bone stands high. Set beside 骨高肉滿 the clause makes a pair: one speaks of the pulse, the other of the frame, and the chapter needs both because a long life is not a single tissue. The difficulty is that 三里 can mean a distance as easily as a point, and the commentators divide; the reading adopted here is the points, because the verb 起 belongs to what answers the hand.
sān yīn sān yáng
The six channels, and the number that bothers the sixth chapter: if heaven and earth have only yin and yang, why does the body have three of each? The answer given there is that the six are what a pair becomes when it is divided — separated they are three and three, joined they are one yin and one yang.
biàn ǒu
What too much bitter food does. Bitter enters the lower stomach, the five grains' qi cannot overcome it, the three burners' roads all close and do not pass, so the qi turns upward and the man vomits. 變 is the precise word: what is brought up has changed, and the change is the evidence. The chapter adds that bitter goes to bone, that the teeth are where bone ends, and that it goes in and comes out again — which is how one knows it travelled to the bone.
zhēn tóu tòng
The headache that is not a branch of anything else. The chapter gives six 厥頭痛, each with its own pulse and its own channel, and then this one: the pain is severe, the whole brain aches, and the hands and feet go cold to the joints — death, not to be treated. The distinction is the chapter's whole method. A 厥頭痛 is reversed qi that can be chased to its channel; the true headache is the disease at the centre, with the extremities already cold, and no channel left to needle. Later commentators read the cold limbs as yang failing at the root while the evil holds the head.
zhēn xīn tòng
The heart pain that belongs to the heart itself. The chapter gives five 厥心痛 — kidney, stomach, spleen, liver, lung — each diagnosed by what the pain draws on and what the colour does, and each treatable at named points. Then the true one: hands and feet cold to the joints, the pain severe, onset at dawn and death by evening, or onset at evening and death by dawn. The structure is the argument. Where the pain is a branch of another organ the channel can be reached; where it is the heart's own, the extremities are already cold and there is no time.
zhēn qì
Not a second kind of qi, but the same qi unobstructed. 真 is doing the work of 'genuine': when craving and agitation subside, what follows of itself is the real thing rather than something manufactured.
zhuó qì
The organs keep the pure part of what comes in; what they are finished with is handed to the palaces of transmission as turbid qi, and the palaces exist precisely in order not to keep it. Wang Bing is emphatic on the timing: once transformed, it is to be transmitted and discharged, not held. The turbidity is not an enemy to be driven out but a remainder to be moved on.