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.
bìng xíng
The chapter's title and its method. The question 邪之中人，其病形何如 asks not what the disease is called but what it looks like: the answer runs from the shivering of deficient evil to the almost invisible colour-change of upright evil. When the same word returns as 五藏之所生，變化之病形 it has become a programme — for each of the five zang, twelve pulse qualities and the disease each produces. 病形 is therefore the bridge between the two halves of the chapter: the first half says how evil enters, the second says what shape it makes. The method is stated before any of the shapes are given: 先定其五色五脉之應，其病乃可别也.
yù shèn chí qǐ
These are the four outcomes the whole middle of chapter 22 is built to predict, and they arrive in a fixed order because they follow the cycle of the phases. There is healing at what the viscus engenders — the child. There is aggravation at what overcomes it. There is holding on at what engenders it — the mother. And there is rising again when it comes back to its own seat. Liver disease heals in summer, worsens in autumn, holds through winter, and rises in spring; the other four viscera follow the same figure from their own positions.
dà dīng
The boil that comes of eating too well. Suwen 3 lists it among the things that happen when the yang qi is opened and then met by something: sweat that meets dampness gives pimples and prickly heat, and rich food gives a great boil — and one takes it as though holding an empty vessel, which is to say that nothing in the body resists it. 丁 is read as 疔, the sore whose root goes deep.
yǐn qū
Twice in the chapter, and both times in the same phrase, 不得隱曲 — the inability to use what is hidden and bent. It comes first in ¶11 with the second yang's disease: 二陽之病發心脾，有不得隱曲，女子不月. It comes again with the three yin and three yang knotted: 心腹滿，發盡不得隱曲，五日死. 王冰 places 隱曲 in the anterior and posterior privates; other readers place it in the bowels, which lie bent within the body. The chapter itself does not decide, and the phrase is built to leave the question open: what is hidden and bent cannot be used. Because it appears beside 女子不月 in the first case and beside 心腹滿 in the second, the two together are enough to show what kind of thing is meant.
shī jīng
The second of the two ills that have no outside cause. A man was once rich and has since grown poor; no evil has struck him, and yet it is called 失精, the loss of essence. The pairing with 脱營 is exact: 脱營 takes the camp, 失精 takes the essence, and together they cover the two things a body keeps in reserve. What follows in the text is common to both — the five qi linger and stay, the illness finds something to join, the body dwindles, the qi is deficient and without essence, the illness runs deep and there is no qi, and the man is chilled and startled. The physician who does not ask this history will look for the illness in the viscera and find nothing there, which is the first of the five errors.
fù suǐ bìng
The name the chapter gives to a shank so sore it cannot be touched: the evil has adhered to the marrow. It is the chapter's deepest and most violent case, treated not with the ordinary needle but with the chisel needle at Cut bone, letting blood — and it is one of the very few conditions in the Suwen to be given a formal name of its own.
bìng jī
The mechanism of illness: what makes a disease do what it does. The chapter introduces it twice — 無失病機 at the end of the passage on the six transformations, 審察病機，無失氣宜 when the emperor asks for it outright — and then answers with nineteen articles, each of the form 諸…，皆屬於某: 諸風掉胘，皆屬於肝；諸寒收引，皆屬於腎；諸氣膹鬱，皆屬於肺. Fifteen articles name a viscus, four name heat, and the whole is closed by 謹守病機，各司其屬，有者求之，無者求之. What the word holds is therefore not a symptom but the point where the six qi and the viscera meet: the same shaking may belong to liver or to fire, and the article that claims it is the 機, the trigger.
yù jié
The knot that grief ties. The sentence it stands in is the fourth item on the list of what a physician must know: 必知終始，有知餘緒，切脉問名，當合男女，離絶菀結，憂恐喜怒，五藏空虛，血氣離守 — know the end and the beginning and the remaining threads, feel the pulse and ask the name, fit it to man and woman, and know parting and cutting off, the pent-up knot, grief and fear, joy and rage, the five viscera empty, the blood and qi scattered and not keeping their place. 離絶 is the severance, 菀結 what the severance leaves: qi that cannot move on. The pair of graphs carries a whole diagnosis of the passions, and the chapter's verdict on the physician who does not know it is blunt — 工不能知，何術之語, if the craftsman cannot know these, what art is there to speak of?
wàng qì
The qi that is in its season and at its full. The chapter explains with it the one failure of treatment that is not the formula's fault: 帝曰：服寒而反熱，服熱而反寒，其故何也？歧伯曰：治其王氣，是以反也. To treat the season's own qi is to treat what is strongest and should be left; the medicine reaches the qi that is at its height and drives it, and the patient's cold turns to heat or his heat to cold. Pressed further — 帝曰：不治王而然者，何也？ — the chapter gives the second cause, 不治五味屬也, and the passage on the five flavours entering the stomach follows. The word therefore carries both halves of the argument: what happens when the season's qi is treated, and what happens when the flavours go to their own viscera and the qi grows with use — 久而增氣，物化之常也；氣增而久，夭之由也.
tóng zǐ gāo
The first of the two eye-signs with which the chapter closes, and the lesser of them. A raised pupil means the greater yang is insufficient; the upturned eyes — 戴眼 — mean the greater yang is finished. The chapter has already said that when the qi of foot greater yang is cut off, the feet cannot bend or straighten and death comes with the eyes turned up. Then it gives the last line of all: these are the essentials for deciding life and death, and they must not go unexamined.
huài fǔ
The point past which treatment does not reach, and the reason chapter 25 is as much about timing as about technique. The chapter gives three signs that a vessel is failing from inside — salt drawing moisture through the jar, a string whose note goes hoarse before it snaps, a tree whose leaves are spent — and then names the state they indicate. The practical claim is negative and absolute: potent drugs do not treat it and the short needle has nothing to take hold of. What is left is skin broken, flesh wounded, blood and qi contending until they blacken.
duǎn qī
The subject of the chapter's last movement, and the thing Lei Gong has to ask for three times. First he says 請問短期 and the emperor does not answer at all; then 雷公復問 and is told only 在經論中; then he asks a third time, 請聞短期, and the answer comes. 短 is opposed to 長: not the long term of a chronic course but the near term, the date within reach. What the answer gives is not a number of days but a calendar — winter's illness ending as spring goes out, spring's when the grass dries, summer's at the Lian water, autumn's rising and stopping of itself — and it closes on 期在石水 and 期在盛水. The threefold asking is part of the teaching: a term of death is not volunteered, and the silence in the middle is not refusal but the test of whether the question is meant.