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.
gān fēng
Liver wind is the third store wind, and the one whose signs are temper and mood rather than pain. Wang Bing explains the grief: the liver disease leaves the heart with nothing to feed it, and the heart qi being empty, the patient grieves. It is read below the eye, blue-green.
shēng yáng sǐ yīn
The seventh chapter's rule for reading a disease that moves from one organ to another. If it follows the order in which the five phases generate one another — liver to heart — it is living yang, and the patient has days. If it follows the order in which they overcome one another — heart to lung — it is dying yin, and the count is three. Two further cases are named: lung to kidney is doubled yin, and kidney to spleen, running back against the order, is the rejected yin, which is beyond treatment.
kè
The verb chapter 39 runs on. Cold qi does not invade in the abstract: it lodges somewhere particular — outside the vessel, inside it, between the stomach and the intestines, along the spine, in a point on the back — and each address yields a different pain with a different answer to pressure.
shòu yāo
The judgement of how long a life the constitution can carry, made not from divination but from the agreement of parts: 形與氣相任則壽，不相任則夭 — where form and qi support each other, long life; where they do not, early death. The same test is then run through skin and flesh, blood and vessels, bone and muscle, and the chapter adds the memorable image of a foundation wall lower than its own ground. Nothing here is measured in years; everything is measured in fit.
cháng chóng
The round worms brought up by severe retching in stomach cough — the first of the six palace coughs, which arises when a spleen cough has gone on long enough to pass into the stomach.
duó jīng
The depletion named at the end of the chapter's account of weeping. The heart is master of the five depots and six palaces, the eye gathers the ancestral vessels and is the upper road of liquid, the mouth and nose are the gates of qi; when sorrow moves the heart, the depots shake, the ancestral vessels respond, the liquid road opens, and tears come. The liquid is what irrigates the essence and moistens the hollow openings; let the weeping not stop and the liquid is exhausted, the essence is not poured, and the eye has nothing to see with. That is why it is called robbing the essence. The treatment is to supplement the pillar of heaven beside the neck.
bù yòng
The limbs are present and the flesh looks normal, and still they cannot be used. The chapter pairs it with numbness as the other half of the same picture: numbness is a failure of sensing and is laid to construction qi; loss of use is a failure of acting and is laid to defence qi. When both are vacuous, a person neither feels nor moves.
yīn
Loss of voice. In chapter 40 it is the result of doing the right thing at the wrong time: cauterise a counterflow whose yang is doubled above and the yin enters with the yang, and speech is lost.
yīn fèi
The illness chapter 49 names when depletion within is carried as far as inversion: the voice goes and the limbs fail. The chapter calls it depletion of the kidney, because the lesser yin vessel no longer reaches upward to the root of the tongue. The base text writes 俳 from 人; the received text writes 痱 from 疒, and the two are read alike as fèi.
yāo tòng
Pain in the lower back — the single complaint chapter 41 treats, and the symptom by which it sorts vessels. The character of the pain, and where it runs, is what tells the doctor which vessel to needle.
bēi jiān
Earth falling short. 土曰卑監 — earth is called low confinement — and its 紀 is 減化: 卑監之紀，是謂減化。化氣不令，生政獨彰，長氣整，雨乃愆，收氣平，風寒並興. The transforming qi no longer gives the command; the qi that gives birth stands out alone; the growing is trimmed even; the rain misses its time; the harvesting stays level; wind and cold rise together. Then what is seen: 草木榮美，秀而不實，成而粃也 — the plants are handsome and flower, and come to nothing; what ripens is chaff. Nothing in this paragraph is violent. Earth short does not destroy the year; it lets the year flower and then fails to fill it, which is why its 紀 is called 減化 and its harm, when it falls, is the spleen's. Its 從 is wood, 從木化也 — the phase that overcomes earth — and its 眚 comes on the four corners.
shào fù
The lower abdomen, the region below the navel. The word appears once in this chapter, in the ceasing yin entry, alongside distension and stopped passages — the picture the conduit's inversion gives when its vessel is obstructed in the pelvis.