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.
bù kě guà yǐ fà
Too fine for a hair to hang on — the margin by which the moment can be missed. Chapter 27 states it twice within four lines, once as a definition ("not to be hung by a hair" means waiting for the evil's arrival and then releasing the needle) and once as the mark that separates the physician who knows the trigger from the one who does not. It is the concrete form of the chapter's two prohibitions: the evil's coming cannot be met, its going cannot be pursued. Between those two, everything depends on a hair.
chūn xià yǎng yáng, qiū dōng yǎng yīn
The line that set the pattern for seasonal therapy, and one of the most argued-over sentences in the corpus. Read simply, it says: work with the season's own movement instead of against it.
ròu kē
Flesh that has stopped answering: it does not feel, and later it cannot be used, while looking entirely unchanged. The chapter attributes the numbness to construction qi and the loss of use to defence qi, and adds the line that makes the whole passage a diagnosis rather than a description — when body and will no longer have one another, it is called death.
shén líng
The inborn perceptiveness the chapter ascribes to the infant Huangdi. Read as 'divine', it turns a description of temperament into a claim about gods — which the sentence does not make. What is being described is an unusually quick child.
bì qì
The chapter's answer to cold that comes from inside a person who is not thinly dressed and never took cold: there is much obstructing qi, yang qi is scant and yin qi abundant, and the body is cold as though just drawn out of water. Not a disease name so much as a state — the qi is blocked, and warmth is what blocked qi cannot deliver.
bì rè
In chapter 43 the answer to why some obstructions run cold and some hot is a matter of proportion. Much yang and little yin lets the disease qi prevail; yang meets yin and the disease comes out as heat. The chapter needs a name for it and makes one by putting the two graphs together.
tóng bìng yì zhì
The principle chapter 46 draws from its abscess of the neck: what is called one disease may be two states, and the state settles the treatment. While the qi of the abscess is still growing one opens it with the needle; once qi is full and blood has gathered one drains it with stone. The chapter is careful to say that both grades carry the same name — 同名異等 — so the difference is in the disease and not in the physician.
piān fēng
One-sided wind is what wind becomes when it strikes a transport on one side of the body rather than settling in a store. Chapter 42 sets it beside 偏枯 (withering on one side), and one line of commentary — Slippery Shou's, cited by Guo Aichun — holds that the opening list's 偏枯 should in fact read 偏風.
fā méng
A named needling method, listed under the prohibitions: on a 甲乙 day one may not needle the head, nor 發矇 in the ear. The name says what it does — it opens a film, and what it opens here is the ear, later comment identifying the points inside the auditory meatus. Two things follow. First, early needling had methods named for their effect rather than their site. Second, even a good method has days on which it must not be used.
kāi guǐ mén
The upper half of the chapter's two-handed treatment for oedema: sweat the patient. Wang Bing glosses it as opening the mysterious storehouse and sending the qi out. It is named in the same breath as cleaning the pure storehouse, so the whole treatment is: let water out through the skin above and through the bladder below. Every later Chinese discussion of 水腫 inherits this pair.
fán yuān
煩冤 is the symptom that runs through both halves of the chapter. It appears first in Lei Gong's question: 肝虚、腎虚、脾虚，皆令人體重煩冤 — deficiency of liver, kidney or spleen all make the body heavy and the chest oppressed. It returns in Huang Di's reading of the case: 欬嗽煩冤者，是腎氣之逆也, cough with oppression is the kidney qi rebelling. The word is not 煩躁, fretful agitation; 冤 carries the sense of being bent and unable to straighten, so the whole phrase is a fullness that has no way out. That is why it belongs with 體重 and with 欬嗽 rather than with restlessness.
yì yì
A closed-in, brooding discomfort — the feeling of something shut up inside. The chapter uses it as the last sign of the ceasing yin malaria: fearfulness, shortness of qi, and an oppressed belly. Doubled, it is a state rather than a moment.