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.
kè zhǔ
The guest qi and the host qi, and the one contest in the chapter that admits no revenge: 帝曰：客主之勝復柰何？歧伯曰：客主之氣，勝而無復也. Everywhere else in the discourse a victory invites a return — 有勝之氣，其必來復也 — and the whole earlier passage on 勝復之動 turns on that. The guest and the host are the exception, because the year's qi and the place's qi meet only once and part: what wins, wins. The chapter then draws the rule of conduct from it — 帝曰：其逆從何如？歧伯曰：主勝逆，客勝從，天之道也 — the host's victory runs against the order and the guest's runs with it, which is why the passage on treatment that follows says 必安其主客.
dǎo yǐn
Guiding the qi and drawing out the body — the exercise therapy the Suwen names where the needle is forbidden. Chapter 47 gives it as the treatment of the breath accumulation, and pairs it with medicine in a way that makes the division plain: the exercises move what drugs cannot, and drugs alone will not do.
dǎo qì
The name for what the needle does when there is nothing to supplement and nothing to drain. In the five disorders the qi is not in excess or deficit but out of order, so the technique is neither: enter slowly and withdraw slowly, and the qi is led back to its course. The chapter sets the three names in one sentence — guiding the qi, the formless supplementing and draining, and making the essence the same — and the distinction is its quiet conclusion: where the disease is disorder rather than quantity, the instrument is direction, not force.
dǎo yǐn àn qiāo
The therapy of the centre, and the only one of the five that the text says came out rather than came from. The land is flat and damp, the food is plentiful and the work is light, and the illnesses are weakness, reversal, cold and heat. Wang Bing glosses all four syllables: guiding and pulling means shaking the sinews and bones and moving the joints; pressing means pressing down on the flesh; lifting means raising the hands and feet briskly. He adds that people of the centre use it as the proper way of nourishing the spirit and regulating the qi.
yǒng shuǐ
An illness of water: the belly is soft to the touch, water qi has lodged in the large intestine, and walking fast makes it slosh audibly. The fifth and last of the cold transmissions, from lung into kidney.
qì mén
The opening the yang qi uses. Suwen 3 sets the day out in three movements — the human qi is born at dawn, the yang qi is at its height at midday, and by sunset it is already empty, so the gate of qi closes. The rule the chapter draws from that closing is the rule for evening: gather in and refuse the outside, disturb neither sinew nor bone, meet neither mist nor dew. Break the rule for these three times and the form is left worn and thin.
pò mén
The lower gate. It is counted with the palaces in function — it discharges and does not store — and yet the chapter says it serves the five storing organs as their emissary, and it is named for the lung, because the lung holds the po. Nothing that enters by the mouth is meant to stay; this is where the chapter's rule about not holding things long reaches its end.
xiù mén
The deepest point the camp qi reaches on its upward course. The qi ascends from the liver to the lung, follows the throat, enters the orifice of the hang sang, and comes to its end at the gate of xu. The commentators place it at the back of the nasal cavity, above the soft palate — the place where breath and the channel's qi meet, and past which the chapter says the qi does not go. It is named once in the book and never described, which is why every gloss of it is an inference from the route that leads there.
jīn guì
A lost book whose subject chapter 46 states in four graphs: it decides life and death. The chapter lists it third among the five it has drawn on, and the clause is the shortest it gives any of them — diagnosis at its most final. The name survives in the title of the Suwen's own fourth chapter, 金匱真言論.
sūn luò
The finest vessels — the branches of the branches. The chapter's treatment rules distinguish three tiers: if the disease is in the channel, treat the channel; if it is in the grandchild network, bleed the grandchild network; if it is a blood disease with pain in the body, treat the channel and the network together. Elsewhere in the chapter the network vessels appear as the place where a pulse that is intermittent and hooked puts its disease. The anatomy is the point: the needle goes to the depth the disease has reached, and no deeper.
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.
dà mèn
The name the chapter gives the master disorder. Clear qi belongs in the yin and turbid qi in the yang, the nutrient qi follows the vessels and the defensive runs counter to them; when clear and turbid interfere and the confusion gathers in the chest, that is the great congestion. It is not one of the five disorders but their common root — the five that follow, in heart, lung, intestine and stomach, arms and legs, and head, are the places where the confusion comes out. The patient is fretful, silent, head bowed and still, and the treatment is neither supplement nor drain but guidance, because nothing here is in excess or deficit.