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.
fèi bì
The white case. The pulse arrives racing and floating, empty above and full below, and there is fright. Accumulated qi sits in the chest; the breathing is laboured and the qi itself is empty, and the disease comes with cold and heat. Its cause is the most ordinary thing in the chapter: drunkenness, and going in. The chapter pairs the laboured breathing with an empty pulse, which is the point — the effort is real and the qi is not there.
fèi qì
The qi of the lung. Suwen 2 gives it both the rule and the penalty: the rule for autumn is to keep the will from reaching outward so that the lung qi is pure, and the penalty for getting autumn wrong is that Taiyin · greater yin does not gather in and the lung qi is scorched and full. It is the one of the four storehouse qi in this chapter that the text tells you how to keep as well as how it fails.
fèi xiāo
Lung wasting: produced when the heart shifts cold into the lung. Its sign is that the patient voids more than he drinks, and the chapter judges it untreatable.
fèi fēng
Lung wind is the first of the five store winds chapter 42 describes. It is pale rather than flushed, worse in the evening than by day, and read above the eyebrows. Wang Bing explains the evening worsening: by day yang qi is at the surface, at evening it goes inward and the wind answers it.
zhèng yǎn
Lying flat on the back — in this chapter a test rather than a posture. The person with wind water cannot do it; doing it brings on coughing because the water qi presses upward on the lung, and brings up clear water with the cough. The chapter pairs it with the swelling below the eyes: one sign above, one below, both read as water.
zài quán
The qi that has charge of the lower half of the year, and the counterpart of 司天. This chapter names the six — 少陽、陽明、太陽、厥陰、少陰、太陰 — and with each says what may not arise: 故少陽在泉，寒毒不生；陽明在泉，濕毒不生；太陽在泉，熱毒不生. Each then gives the flavour that belongs to the qi, the treatment that follows from it, and the grain that grows under it — 其味辛，其治苦酸，其榖蒼丹 — so that a year's medicine is read off from what lies below. The six come back in the passage on the five classes, where 在泉 decides which kind of creature comes to nothing in the second half. 司天 and 在泉 are never in the same half of the year: the qi above in one half is below in the other.
dà
The large quality: a pulse broader and fuller than ordinary, the first of the yang family in the opening sentence of the book. Its interest lies in a contradiction the text does not hide: at the inch, 大爲實 (large is replete); after a mistaken treatment in Taiyang, 大則爲虚 (large is empty). Same quality, opposite conclusions, because the second is a large pulse drained of substance by sweating. The entry keeps both, since a reader who knows only one will misjudge the other.
yè zhé
Leaf-Hiding is the first of the eight palaces and the one the year turns on. 太一常以冬至之日，居叶蟄之宫 — on the winter solstice the Great One dwells there, and after the round of the other seven it returns: 四十五日，日復居叶蟄之宫，曰冬至矣. The name is a calendar image rather than an anatomical one: 蟄 is the insect's winter hiding, and the palace is the north, the point at which the year's qi is most withdrawn. The chapter uses it twice more — the day of the solstice is the day on which wind and rain are watched, and a wind from the south at that moment is 虚風, the evil that will be stored in the bone until spring.
xiǎo dà
The lesser and the greater — 小 xiǎo, small; 大 dà, great — which in this chapter means urine and stool. The chapter sets the rule in four words: 小大不利治其標，小大利治其本. When the passages do not flow, the branch is treated; when they flow, the root is. It is the same reasoning it has just applied to fullness in the centre, and it is the second of only two situations in the chapter that reverse the order of treatment. Later the same rule is written from the other end — 先小大不利而後生病者，治其本 — and read plainly it contradicts the first sentence; 張介賓 takes the two as mutually explanatory rather than opposed, and the base text is printed as it stands. The catalogue that follows is full of the same thing in other words: 小便閉 four times, 閉塞不通 once, 腹脹 three times.
dì shì
The whole answer to the chapter's question, in four words. Asked why one disease can be treated five ways and still get better, Qibo replies that the lie of the land makes it so — the methods differ because the ground differs, not because the physicians disagree. Wang Bing unpacks it: the reference is to the generative, growing, gathering and storing of heaven and earth, and to the disposition of high and low, dry and damp. Everything that follows — east, west, north, south, centre — is this sentence unfolded.
mìng mén
In this chapter the life gate is the eye: 太陽根于至陰，結于命門，命門者，目也. The definition is given in four characters and is not argued, because the chapter's business is to say where each channel is knotted, and for taiyang the answer is the eye. The name matters because later medicine gave 命門 to a place in the kidney and made it the source of the body's fire; that sense is not here and must not be read back. What is here is a topographical statement: the yang of the foot taiyang gathers at the organ of sight, which is why the eye is where its diseases show and where its points are taken.