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.
xuè kū
Blood that has dried up rather than blood that has been lost: a wasting of the blood in youth, from a great haemorrhage or from entering the chamber drunk, marked by the menses failing and answered with cuttlebone, madder and abalone juice.
niào xuè
Blood in the urine, together with a dribbling block: what the bladder produces when the 胞 shifts heat into it. 溺 is read niào, not nì.
huāng
This is what liver depletion does, and the chapter sets it carefully against what liver repletion does. Repletion gives pain below the flanks drawing into the lower abdomen and a temper; depletion takes the senses away. Nothing is blind — rather the eyes are blurred and take nothing in, the ears take nothing in, and fear arrives like someone about to be arrested. It is the same order of symptom the chapter gives for depleted qi elsewhere: the organ stops sending, so the orifices stop receiving.
tǐ tòng
Pain throughout the body, the sign of cold binding the exterior. It stands in the one sentence that defines cold damage, beside aversion to cold, retching and a tight pulse in both positions. The book's other word for generalised pain, 一身盡疼, belongs to dampness in chapter four; the two are the same kind of complaint under different names, and the chapter's usage, not a rule, decides which is written.
gǔ wěi
The flaccidity of the bones, from heat in the kidney, described twice: once as the withering of bone and marrow with the back unable to straighten, and once as the outcome of great heat met on the road, where yang qi is struck down within and the heat lodges in the kidney. The Lower Classic is quoted: bone flaccidity arises from great heat.
gǔ bì
Cold that has got into the bone. It is diagnosed by two negatives that do not look like a pair: the body cannot be warmed from outside, and it does not shiver. The chapter explains both at once — the kidney, which is water and makes bone, has stopped generating, so the marrow does not fill; and there is no shivering because the liver is one yang and the heart a second, while the kidney is a solitary store, so one water cannot overcome two fires.
nǎo fēng
Brain wind is the first of the two head winds chapter 42 names: wind qi that travels up by 風府, the point at the nape where wind gathers. Wang Bing explains the route — above the wind palace lies the brain door, and so wind that follows the palace upward reaches the brain.
máo zhé
The sign that stands at the end of all five true visceral pulses. Each of the five has its own shape under the finger and its own colour in the face — the liver's is like running a finger along a blade and the complexion green-white, the heart's like a string of coix seeds and red-black — and each closes with the same three words: 毛折乃死, when the body hair breaks, then death. It is the one sign the chapter repeats five times without variation, and it is not a pulse sign at all: it is something you see on the body when the lung, which governs the skin and its hair, can no longer send anything to the surface.
xī jī
A long-standing accumulation under the ribs, named for the breath that has stopped moving rather than for the mass itself, and defined in chapter 47 as much by what cannot be done to it as by what it is: it does not hinder eating, it is not to be cauterised or needled, and drugs alone will not disperse it. The treatment the chapter names is guiding-and-pulling together with medicine.
qì yī ér zǒu
One of the behaviours chapter 30 explains in the severe stage of Yangming disease: the patient casts off his clothes and runs. The chapter's explanation is heat — Yangming governs the flesh, its vessel is rich in blood and qi, evil lodging there turns to heat, and a body full of heat cannot bear clothes. The same behaviour recurs in the later literature as a stock sign of mania, but chapter 30 gives it no mental cause at all.
huò luàn
Sudden confusion of the bowel — vomiting and purging together, coming on at speed. Chapter 28's entry for it is pure practice and no prognosis: needle five beside the transport points, and three at the foot yang brilliance and above it. It stands in a run of entries that all begin with 暴, suddenly — the sudden abscess, the sudden abdominal fullness, the sudden grief, the sudden inversion — and what groups them is not the organ affected but the way they arrive.
dēng gāo ér gē
Climbing to a high place and singing, listed in chapter 30 among the things a patient does in severe Yangming disease. The chapter explains the climbing by the fullness of the limbs when yang is exuberant, and does not explain the singing separately — it belongs to the same excess. Later literature reads the pair as a standard sign of mania; chapter 30 reads it as the limbs having more yang in them than usual.