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.
rì chéng sì jì
The last and strangest of the chapter's death-hours. The chapter assigns an hour to each kind of pulse: the cold-heat disease dies at dawn, heat in the centre and heat disease at midday, wind disease at dusk, water disease at midnight. But the pulse that is 乍疏乍數、乍遲乍疾 — scattered, then rapid, slow, then swift, never settling — gets no hour at all; it dies on a day that rides the four quarters of the year. The phrase is usually taken as the four turning-points, the eighteen days at the end of each season when one quarter is handing over to the next, and the reading fits: a pulse with no fixed rate is given a time with no fixed season.
ěr míng
Ringing in the ears, and chapter 49's clearest example of how this chapter explains a symptom: not from the part affected, but from the month. Greater yang governs the first month, and in the first month yang qi that should still be low rises instead; the upward leap is what is heard.
qǐ jū yǒu cháng
Suwen 1's phrase for a life with a schedule. It sounds trivial and is not: in these texts sleep and waking are the first thing the seasons change, and irregularity is named as a cause of decline.
shēng míng
Fire in its even state. 火曰升明 — fire is called rising brightness — and its 紀 runs: 升明之紀，正陽而治，德施周普，五化均衡，其氣高，其性速，其用燔灼，其化蕃茂，其類火，其政明曜，其候炎暑，其令熱，其藏心，心其畏寒，其主舌，其榖麥，其果杏，其實絡，其應夏，其蟲羽，其畜馬，其色赤，其養血，其病瞤瘛，其味苦，其音徵，其物脉，其數七. Two words carry the judgement: 正陽 and 周普 — the upright yang, and a virtue given out on every side. Fire even is not fire damped; it is fire governing by its rightness rather than by its force, and its five transformations come out 均衡, even in measure, where wood's spread and levelled. Its viscus is the heart, its creature the feathered, its number seven; when it fails it does so as 伏明, brightness hidden, and when it goes too far as 赫曦, blazing sunlight.
shàng xíng jí ér xià
The rule chapter 29 gives for how a disease travels along its channel: it goes one way until it can go no further, and then it reverses. Yang disease rises to the extreme and then descends; yin disease descends to the extreme and then rises. The chapter has prepared the reader for this by describing the two circuits — yin qi up from the foot to the head and down the arm to the fingertips, yang qi up from the hand to the head and down to the foot — so the statement is a consequence of anatomy rather than an oracle. It also explains the line that follows it: wind, being yang, strikes above first; damp, being yin, strikes below first.
gēn jié
The pair that gives the chapter its name and its method. A channel has a root at its extremity — Zhiyin for taiyang, Lidui for yangming, Qiaoyin for shaoyang, and the well points of the three yin — and a knot where its qi gathers: the eye, the nape, the ear, the throat, the chest. The opening paragraph says what is at stake in losing them: 不知根結，五藏六府，折關敗樞，開闔而走，陰陽大失，不可復取. The doctrine is not the five transports of Chapter Two, though it uses the same verbs: the transports describe a limb, root and knot describe a whole channel from its tip to its destination. The chapter then lists all twelve channels' root, flow, pour and entry, and closes the first movement with 此所謂十二經者，盛絡皆當取之.
yuán lì zhēn
One of the nine needles: round in the shaft and sharp at the point, made for work between the surface and the deep. Chapter 28 names it once, in a practical entry — the lesser yin transport points, five of them three inches out from the spinal vertebrae, are to be taken with the round-sharp needle. The chapter elsewhere uses the metal-radical 鍼 for every needle it names, including as a verb: here it is a tool, two lines later it is an action.
bēn tún
The accumulation of the kidney, described by its movement rather than its substance. 微急，爲沉厥奔豚，足不收，不得前後 — a slightly urgent kidney pulse gives sinking reversal and the running piglet, with the feet not gathered and no passage before or behind. The name says what the patient feels: something rushes up from below, reaches the chest and the throat, and then subsides. The chapter pairs it with 沉厥, sinking reversal, because both are failures of the kidney's downward office; and it adds the two signs that make the diagnosis, cold feet and blocked passages, which are the same failure seen from the other end.
tóng zhèng
The table's way of saying that a year's musical note is the upright one for its element, so that no separate name is needed: 太陽、太徴、太陰、戊辰、戊戌同正徴. The four kinds of it are written over twelve rows of the table, one to five times each — 同正徴一、同正宫三、同正角三、同正商五 —and the construction has one outside extension, 諸同正歲 in the passage on jueyin governing the heaven, where it marks a year in which every one of the six qi agrees with the season it enters, so that 氣化運行同天 and there is nothing for the year's own qi to do. Both uses turn on the same idea: 同正 is agreement, and agreement is the absence of a difference worth naming.
zhèn xīng
The planet Saturn, the star of earth and of the centre, and the one this chapter names whenever the earth circuit moves or the water circuit fails. Its name is what earth does: to press down and settle, holding the other four to their seasons. Earth in surplus answers to it (歲土太過…上應鎮星), and so does water falling short, because when water is short it is damp that rises (歲水不及，濕乃大行…上應鎮星); and it comes back a third time for the flood that follows (大雨至，埃霧朦鬱，上應鎮星).
yú yuán shàng wū
Getting over walls and onto roofs — the strongest of the behaviours chapter 30 lists for severe Yangming disease, and the one that prompts its sharpest question: how can a sick man do what he could not do when well? The answer is that the four limbs are the root of all the yang, and when yang is exuberant the limbs become full enough to do what they could not do before. The ability is real but it belongs to the disease.
shǎo qì
In chapter 22 it comes with what may be the chapter's most accurate clinical phrase: too little qi to carry on the breath. The lung has run short, not in air but in the power to continue it, and the sentence catches something every clinician recognises — the pause before the next breath is where it fails, not the breath itself. Deafness and a dry throat arrive in the same sentence, which places the shortage squarely at the lung and nowhere else.