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.
tiān guǐ
The reproductive endowment: it arrives at fourteen (二七) and is exhausted at forty-nine (七七). The chapter treats fertility as a measurable substance on a fixed schedule, not as a matter of temperament or conduct.
shēn zhòng
The body felt as heavy. The book gives it two causes that pull in opposite directions: in heatstroke it is damp-heat injuring the form, and comes with aching and a faint weak pulse; in wind warmth it is heat at its height clouding the spirit, and comes with drowsiness, snoring and difficulty speaking. The same word, and the treatment could hardly be more different — which is why the book never treats a sign alone.
chóng shēn
A woman great with child, and the reading is chóng shēn. Chapter 47 opens with the ninth month of such a pregnancy, in which the woman loses her voice because the network vessels of the womb are cut off; the chapter's instruction is to leave her alone, since the tenth month restores her.
héng
The shank — the upper part of the lower leg. Chapter 32's rare graph for it, 䯒, appears twice, both in the kidney heat disease: first as the site of the opening soreness, then, once the heat contends, as a place that is cold and sore while the soles of the feet are hot. That inversion is the clinical point of the word here, and it is why the chapter names the shank rather than simply saying the leg.
fú liáng
A mass lying hidden across the belly. Chapter 40 gives the name to two different swellings and is chiefly concerned with what may not be done to either: do not press them, do not move them, do not seize at them in haste.
fú míng
Fire falling short. 火曰伏明 — fire is called hidden brightness — and its 紀 is 勝長: 伏明之紀，是謂勝長。長氣不宣，藏氣反布，收氣自政，化令乃衡. The growing qi is not spread, the storing qi is out of its time, the harvesting qi governs of itself, and the command of transformation comes out level — four clauses that each say the same thing from a different quarter, that fire is not doing fire's work. Then what is seen: 寒清數舉，暑令乃薄，承化物生，生而不長，成實而稚，遇化已老，陽氣屈伏，蟄蟲早藏 — cold and clear weather comes up again and again, the summer's command is thin, things are born but do not grow, they come to fruit while still young and are old the moment the transformation touches them, the yang qi bends and lies down, and the hibernating creatures go into hiding early. Its 從 is water, 從水化也; its harm falls on the heart, and its 眚 on the south. 升明 is fire rising; 伏明 is the same fire with nothing to rise on.
fú jiǎ
A concealed, shifting abdominal mass, named with 沈 as what the small intestine produces when it passes heat to the large intestine. 虙 is the base-text graph, glossed as 伏.
fú lǚ
The vessel that runs hidden along the spine. The chapter's account of why fits come later and then earlier depends on a path, and this is the bottom of it: from the wind palace the evil descends a joint a day, reaches the sacrum on the twenty-fifth day, enters the spine on the twenty-sixth and pours into this vessel, then turns and climbs, emerging at the supraclavicular fossa on the ninth day.
shàng gǔ
High antiquity: the age the whole of Suwen 1 measures the present against, and the first word of its title. The chapter uses it four times — the people of high antiquity who knew the way; the sages of high antiquity who taught those below them; the true persons of high antiquity who took hold of heaven and earth; and, at the very end, the worthy who follow the high antiquity that went before. It is not a date but a direction: what the chapter asks is what has been lost, and the answer is that nothing has been taken away.
chí mài
Chapter 17's word for what the physician does with his hand, and it is a heavier word than feel. The chapter gives it a precondition — 虚靜爲保, emptiness and stillness are its safeguard — a body of seasonal pictures for it (spring like a fish in the ripples, winter like the gentleman who stays inside), and then two rules: to know what is within, press and take its rule; to know what is without, follow it from end to beginning. These are called 持脉之大法, the great standards of holding the pulse.
yùn yǐn
Heat laid on the body and traction applied to it — the pair the chapter prescribes for disease of the sinews, in the case of a body that labours while the mind is at ease. It belongs to the chapter's sequence of matched treatments, and it sits in the middle of that sequence: the vessel is dealt with by cautery and puncture, the flesh by needle and stone, the sinews by this, the throat by drugs, and numbness by rubbing and wine. The old commentators are right that the logic is depth — each tissue is reached by the method that can reach it — and the sinews, which are neither surface nor interior, get the method that works by heat and by pulling.
hòu
The smallest unit in the chapter's calendar, and the one that shows why the calendar is medical at all. Five days make a 候, three 候 make a 氣, six 氣 make a season, four seasons make a year — and the clause that matters is the last: 而各從其主治焉, each period has a qi that governs it. The same word is then used for the physician's watching: 謹候其時, watch carefully for its season.