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.
xīn tòng
Pain in the heart region. Chapter 45 uses it as one of its plainest clinical signs, and grades it: with fullness in lesser yin inversion, drawn into the belly in the counterflow form, and drawn into the throat in the hand heart master entry, which the chapter declares fatal.
xīn qì
The qi of the heart. In Suwen 2 it appears once, in the four reversals: against the qi of summer, Taiyang · greater yang does not grow and the heart qi is hollow within. Reading it with the penalty named earlier in the chapter — going against summer harms the heart, and autumn brings jie malaria — the two sentences say the same thing from the two ends.
xīn shàn
The chapter's worked example of reading a pulse into a named illness. 診得心脉而急 — a tight heart pulse — is 心疝, and the lower abdomen should show a form. The Emperor asks how that can be, since the heart is nowhere near the lower abdomen, and Qibo answers with the logic of the interior-exterior pairing: the heart is a male depot, the small intestine is its envoy, and the small intestine is down there. The passage is worth its place because it shows the reasoning the book expects — not a symptom list, but a chain from pulse to depot to paired bowel to place.
xīn fēng
Heart wind is the second store wind. Where the others show a colour, this one shows a temper: Wang Bing's gloss on 焦絶 makes the lips scorched and their lines broken, and 善怒嚇 makes the patient quick to anger and to shout. It is diagnosed at the mouth, because the heart governs the tongue.
xīn chè
What the first yang's disease transmits into: 一陽發病，少氣、善欬、善泄，其傳爲心掣，其傳爲隔. The first yang is the lesser yang; the disease begins with breath that is short and a readiness to cough and to purge, and what it transmits into is this — the heart pulled, and then a blockage at which food will not go down. 掣 is a drawing, the motion of something tugged rather than of something beating, and the commentaries keep the distinction: 王冰 reads the heart as pulling itself, and later writers class the sign with the palpitations that have that dragged quality. The chapter itself names it and moves on to 隔.
rè zhēng
The stage at which the heat stops sitting in the body and begins to fight the upright qi. Chapter 32 uses the word as a hinge: every one of the five depot heat diseases is written in two halves, the quiet opening signs and then the violent signs of 熱爭. What changes is not the amount of heat but whether a struggle has begun, and the struggle is what makes the patient rave, startle, fret, or double up with pain.
rè bìng
The general name for any disease in which the body is hot. Chapter 31 opens by declaring that every heat disease belongs to the class of cold damage: the heat is the visible state, the cold that was taken in earlier is the cause. The chapter then explains why some heat diseases kill and some do not — not by the degree of heat, since heat however extreme does not kill, but by whether the disease has been taken up by two paired channels at once. Heat disease is also the term the chapter uses when it turns from the acute stage to convalescence: what is left behind after a heat disease, and what must be forbidden while it is settling.
rè jué
Inversion of the hot kind: yin fails below, yang qi prevails alone, and the heat begins beneath the foot. The chapter's account of the cause is one of its best-known passages — repeated drunkenness, or entering the chamber on a full belly, so that the qi of the wine and the qi of the grain press together in the spleen and heat flourishes within, with hot urine as the outward sign.
rè zhōng
Fish makes a person hot within. Wang Bing's evidence is clinical: fish brings out sores, and that is the proof of heat within. Zhang Zhicong puts it as the nature of fish being fire. A warning for readers: Wang Bing elsewhere glosses 熱中 as drinking much and urinating often, which is a different complaint — the wasting and thirsting kind. The two must not be confused.
yē
Being overcome by summer heat, and the disease that follows. The book names it in four characters — the sun striking a person with heat — and describes it as fever with aching heaviness and a faint, weak pulse, brought on by summer heat or by cold water drunk in summer so that water moves through the skin. It is set beside spasm and dampness at the head of chapter four because all three resemble cold damage and are not it.
tiān fú
The first of the three agreements in 應天爲天符，承歲爲歲直，三合爲治. 應天 — answering to heaven — means the circuit qi of the year matches the qi that presides above it; when the two fit, the year is a 天符. The chapter gives the three in ascending order, says that 三合 is what makes a year governable, and then moves on. The full working-out belongs to the later chapters of the book, where the same three are set out with what follows from each; here the word is a name and a metaphor, 符 being the tally whose two halves have to close.
tiān shī
The form of address the Yellow Emperor uses for Qi Bo. It tells the reader how to take the dialogue: the questions are asked by a sovereign and answered by someone authorised to correct him.