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.
guān yuán
A point on the lower abdomen, named because the surge vessel rises from it. Chapter 39 names it to explain one pain — the throbbing under the hand that answers to pressure — and says nothing else about it.
shǒu shén
The superior needler holds to the spirit; the coarse one holds to the form. The gloss is exact: 上守神者，守人之血氣有餘不足，可補寫也 — he keeps watch on the excess and deficiency of the patient's blood and qi, and because he knows which it is, he can supplement and reduce. 麤守形者，守刺法也 — the other guards the method of needling, which is to say the hand, the depth, the speed, everything that can be taught without seeing the patient. The pair is the oldest statement in the book of what separates craft from medicine, and Chapter One had already used it before this chapter explained it.
kè zhǔ
The guest qi and the host qi, and the one contest in the chapter that admits no revenge: 帝曰：客主之勝復柰何？歧伯曰：客主之氣，勝而無復也. Everywhere else in the discourse a victory invites a return — 有勝之氣，其必來復也 — and the whole earlier passage on 勝復之動 turns on that. The guest and the host are the exception, because the year's qi and the place's qi meet only once and part: what wins, wins. The chapter then draws the rule of conduct from it — 帝曰：其逆從何如？歧伯曰：主勝逆，客勝從，天之道也 — the host's victory runs against the order and the guest's runs with it, which is why the passage on treatment that follows says 必安其主客.
dǎo yǐn
Guiding the qi and drawing out the body — the exercise therapy the Suwen names where the needle is forbidden. Chapter 47 gives it as the treatment of the breath accumulation, and pairs it with medicine in a way that makes the division plain: the exercises move what drugs cannot, and drugs alone will not do.
dǎo qì
The name for what the needle does when there is nothing to supplement and nothing to drain. In the five disorders the qi is not in excess or deficit but out of order, so the technique is neither: enter slowly and withdraw slowly, and the qi is led back to its course. The chapter sets the three names in one sentence — guiding the qi, the formless supplementing and draining, and making the essence the same — and the distinction is its quiet conclusion: where the disease is disorder rather than quantity, the instrument is direction, not force.
dǎo yǐn àn qiāo
The therapy of the centre, and the only one of the five that the text says came out rather than came from. The land is flat and damp, the food is plentiful and the work is light, and the illnesses are weakness, reversal, cold and heat. Wang Bing glosses all four syllables: guiding and pulling means shaking the sinews and bones and moving the joints; pressing means pressing down on the flesh; lifting means raising the hands and feet briskly. He adds that people of the centre use it as the proper way of nourishing the spirit and regulating the qi.
yǒng shuǐ
An illness of water: the belly is soft to the touch, water qi has lodged in the large intestine, and walking fast makes it slosh audibly. The fifth and last of the cold transmissions, from lung into kidney.
bàn cì
The first of the five needlings that answer to the five zang. 半刺者，淺内而疾發鍼，無鍼傷肉，如拔毛狀，以取皮氣，此肺之應也 — insert shallowly and withdraw quickly, so that the needle does not injure the flesh, as though plucking a hair, to take the qi of the skin; this is the response of the lung. The name is exact: half a needle, because the other half would be in the flesh.
shǒu dú
Hand poison is the chapter's test for the man who should be set to pressing accumulations. After listing who is fit for what — the clear-eyed for colour, the sharp-eared for sound, the quick-tongued for disputation, the steady hand for needles and moxa, the gentle for stretching and guiding — Huang Di adds the last office: 爪苦手毒，爲事善傷者，可使按積抑痺. The hard-nailed and hand-poisoned man, the one who breaks what he handles, is the man for pressing masses and suppressing obstructions. The test is a tortoise: put it under a vessel, press the vessel for fifty days, and 手毒者 the tortoise dies; 手甘者 it comes back as it was. The passage is the Lingshu's one experiment, and its point is that the capacity is in the hand and not in the intention — which is why the chapter can assign offices at all.
jiān chéng
Metal going to excess. 金曰堅成 — metal is called hard completion — and its 紀 is 收引: 堅成之紀，是謂收引。天氣潔，地氣明，陽氣隨陰治化，燥行其政，物以司成，收氣繁布，化洽不終. The qi of heaven is clean and the qi of earth clear, the yang follows the yin in governing, the dry carries out its governance, things are brought to their completion by it, the reaping qi spreads thickly, and the transforming reaches everywhere and does not finish — the last clause is the excess showing: autumn does the whole year's work and leaves nothing for winter. Its attributes: 其化成，其氣削，其政肅，其令鋭切，其動暴折瘍疰，其德霧露蕭飋，其變肅殺凋零…其象秋，其經手太陰陽明，其藏肺肝…其病喘喝，胸憑仰息. Its viscera are the lung and the liver — the metal and the wood it withholds from — and its illness is the breath that cannot be let out: 喘喝, gasping and hoarse.
shǒu fēng
Head wind is wind caught after washing the hair; Wang Bing says the wind lodges in the head, which is why it is called head wind. Chapter 42 is the source of the clinical detail: the headache comes ahead of the wind, keeps the patient from going out, and abates on the windy day itself.
xīn bì
The first of the chapter's worked examples. The face is red, the pulse arrives racing and hard; the reading is accumulated qi in the centre, which hinders eating from time to time. Its cause is given as an outside illness taking hold of an emptied heart: brooding has weakened it, and so the evil follows in. Note that the colour, the pulse and the cause all belong to one reading — the chapter is showing what it meant by 能合脉色，可以萬全.