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.
fāng cǎo
The fragrant, warming herbs. Chapter 40 forbids them in heat-within and wasting-within: their qi is swift and hard, and in a body already hot they drive the patient to madness.
dú zhì
The second half of chapter 21 is organised around it. Each of the six arrives alone at the pulse — the viscus has the field to itself — and each is then given a mechanism and a treatment: greater yang is counterflow with empty qi rising, drain both exterior and interior; yang brilliance is yang doubled upon itself, drain yang and supplement yin; lesser yang is counterflow qi, and the one yang's excess. Then the greater yin is felt beating, the one yang whistles, the one yin governs. Almost every verdict ends in the same place: treat the lower transport points.
shēng jiàng chū rù
The four movements without which nothing lives, and the standard the chapter ends on: 是以升降出入，無器不有 — there is no vessel without them. Rising and falling belong to heaven and earth taking turns, exit and entry to the thing itself. Remove the second and the spirit mechanism perishes in transformation; remove the first and the qi that stands is isolated and in peril. Vessels differ in size and their terms are near or far, but what matters in all of them is to hold to the constant: 反常則災害至矣. The sentence that closes it — 無形無患, without form there is no affliction — is the same thought from the other end.
kuí duó
One of the two arts the chapter sets side by side, and the one that answers the ordinary clinical question: how deep does this go? Qibo's definition is a single clause — 揆度者，度病之淺深也. The chapter then does something more interesting with it: it refuses to let the two arts stay separate, and says that colour, pulse, assessment and the anomalous are all one dao. 揆度 is the measuring half of that pair; 奇恒 is the half that names what cannot be measured by the rule.
wù hán
Shrinking from cold, with covers piled on and no relief. It is the constant in the exterior pattern: fever may be present or absent, but the book says 必惡寒 — there must be aversion to cold. Where it comes with fever the illness rises from yang; where it comes without fever it rises from yin, and that one distinction governs the chapter. It differs from aversion to wind in that wind is not needed to bring it on.
wù rén yǔ huǒ
The pair of aversions with which chapter 30 opens its case: a patient with disease of the foot Yangming vessel cannot bear the presence of people and cannot bear fire. The chapter gives each a separate mechanism — the loathing of fire comes from heat, since Yangming governs the flesh and its vessel is rich in blood and qi; the loathing of people comes from the distress of counterflow, since when Yangming rebels upward the patient pants and is oppressed within. Both are traced back to the same vessel, and neither is explained as anything happening in the mind.
wù fēng
Shrinking from a draught. It differs from aversion to cold in that wind must be there to bring it on, and the book uses the difference to sort the two faces of taiyang: wind strike is named with aversion to wind, cold damage with aversion to cold. The two do occur together — one line of the chapter has the patient shivering with cold and wincing at wind at once — and aversion to wind also appears with a stiff back and sweating, where the pattern is not simple wind strike.
jié hóu
The laryngeal prominence, taken as the top of the trunk's vertical scale. The chapter measures downward from it: four cun to the middle of the supraclavicular fossa, nine more to the sword bone, eight more to the heavenly pivot, six and a half more to the pubic bone. Every later figure depends on where this first point is taken, which is why the commentators argue about whether the measure starts at the knot itself or at its lower edge.
qí héng
The other of the chapter's two arts, and the harder one: the anomalous is what the rule does not cover. Qibo defines it in three words — 奇𢘆者，言奇病也, it speaks of strange illness — and the chapter spends the rest of its length showing what that means in practice: colour on the wrong side, doubled yang, a pulse with no stomach qi in it, a disease travelling into the organ that conquers it. The same word gives 奇𢘆之府 in chapter 11, the palaces that hold rather than transmit — there too it marks what breaks the rule.
sè
The astringent quality: the opposite of slippery, a pulse that moves with difficulty, as if the blood were thick or the channel dry. It belongs to the yin family and pairs most often with faint, weak, slow and deep. In this book it is nearly always a sign of lack — of blood, of nutritive qi, of fluid — and once, at the instep, of food unable to enter. The base text writes 濇, not 澀; the two are one word and this site keeps the base form.