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.
huǎn jīn
The loose sinew of the abdomen, named for its texture rather than its place. An accumulation on it mimics the yang brightness accumulation: pain after eating, ease when hungry. It is also the path by which a mass at the membrane source spreads its pain outward — 痛而外連於緩筋. Being slack is not a fault: it is why the evil can lodge there at all, and why the pain behaves differently from pain fixed in a tight place.
gū zhī fǔ
The name the chapter gives the triple burner, and the reason it gives is structural: every other fu is paired with a zang — lung with large intestine, heart with small intestine, liver with gallbladder, spleen with stomach, kidney with bladder — and the triple burner is left over. Yet it is not functionless. It is 中瀆之府, the fu of the central sluice; 水道出焉, the waterway issues from it; it attaches to the bladder and constrains the lower burner. The chapter thus states in one line the problem later physiology argued for centuries — an organ with a function and no shape — and refuses to solve it, because its business is pairing, and pairing is what the triple burner does not do.
gū zàng
The spleen, and the reason it cannot be read like the others. Liver, heart, lung and kidney each take a season — spring, summer, autumn, winter — and each therefore has a pulse shape that should appear when its season comes round. The spleen takes none; it is earth, standing at the centre, and its office is to irrigate the four quarters. That is why its normal state cannot be seen in the pulse at all: it is distributed among the other four rather than present in its own right. Only its disorder shows — arriving like flowing water when it exceeds, like a bird's beak when it falls short.
shuǐ zōng
The source of water, defined by a chain of three identifications: 水宗者，積水也。積水者，至陰也。至陰者，腎之精也 — the source of water is gathered water; gathered water is utmost yin; utmost yin is the essence of the kidney. The argument runs downward, from the visible tear to the kidney: water is not made at the eye, it is gathered, held and released. And it is held — 宗精之水所以不出者，是精持之也 — the water of the source essence does not come out because the essence holds it, supports it and wraps it.
lǚ jīn
The sinew beside the spine, and the seat of one of the chapter's seven accumulations. Its signs are the most paradoxical of the set: hunger makes the mass appear, food makes it vanish, and pressure cannot find it — because it lies behind the intestine, so an empty gut lets it show and a full one hides it. The name's 膂 is the spine itself; 旅 in the graph gives the image of a column drawn up in ranks.
shén jī
What a living thing has and a dead one does not, named for the trigger that sets a mechanism off. The chapter gives it in a single conditional: if exit and entry are abandoned, the spirit mechanism perishes in transformation; if rising and falling cease, the qi that stands is isolated and in peril. The two halves are the two pairs of movements — exit and entry keep the mechanism alive, rising and falling keep the qi standing — and the chapter then generalises: no vessel is without them. The only thing that neither generates nor transforms, the chapter closes, is the true person, who is one with the way.
shén cáng xíng cáng
The nine stores of the body, split two ways. Five are spirit stores — the liver, heart, spleen, lung and kidney, which hold something invisible and can be ruined past repair; four are form stores, which hold the shapes of things. The number comes from the arithmetic of the chapter: three sectors of three probes make nine, the nine answer to the nine regions, and the nine regions become the nine stores. What the chapter does with the distinction is blunt: when the five are ruined their colour must go dull, and once the colour has gone dull there is death. The whole nine-fold scheme, in other words, lands on a single clinical remark about the face.
wèi wǎn
The receiving part of the stomach. The chapter names it once, as the reason food will not go down in wind water — the duct is blocked. It belongs to a small run of explanations that place the disease's origin in the stomach: the rumbling in the belly, the heaviness that makes walking hard, and the fretting with inability to eat.
shí jiǎ
The mass that sits in the womb and stops the menses. Cold qi lodges at the uterine gate, the gate closes, the qi cannot pass, and the blood that should have been discharged is not; it clots and stays, grows day by day until the belly looks like a pregnancy, and the menses no longer come on time. The chapter adds that it occurs only in women and can be guided out. Set against 腸覃 the pair is exact: one is outside the intestine, moves under the hand and leaves the calendar alone; the other is inside the womb, is fixed and abolishes the calendar. The name 瘕 is worth keeping — it is the word for a mass that is not simply a tumour, and the stone in it says hardness rather than material.
hé yú
The point of the breastbone, used in this chapter as the middle landmark of the trunk. Two measurements hang on it: from the supraclavicular fossa down to it is nine cun, and from it down to the heavenly pivot is eight cun. Each length carries a consequence — over nine the lung is large, under it the lung is small; over eight the stomach is large, under it the stomach is small. The bone is thus not only a landmark but a gauge of the organs behind it.