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.
hè hè
Blazing heat, the first of the three states in which needling is forbidden. The rule the chapter draws from it is the one it is famous for: at the very height of a fit, any attack ruins; follow the decline and the undertaking prospers. Treating malaria is a matter of timing, not of force.
jiān jué
A collapse brought on by prolonged overwork: yang qi becomes distended, the essence is consumed, and by summer the condition breaks out as sudden blindness, deafness and loss of consciousness. The chapter compares it to a dyke bursting.
sì shí cì fǎ
The chapter's middle, and the reason it spends so long on the calendar: each season has its own depth and its own kind of point, and needling against the season produces a named harm. The chapter lists twelve of them, one for each wrong pairing of season and division, each with the symptom that will tell you what you did. Then it gives the rule in eight words: 春夏秋冬，各有所刺，法其所在.
róng píng
The name Suwen 2 gives to the three months of autumn. Growth has stopped; things stand at their measure. The rule drawn from it is the rule for autumn: sleep early and rise early, get up with the cockerel, calm the will so as to soften the flaying of autumn, gather the spirit and the qi in, and let the lung qi be pure. Breaking it harms the lung, and winter brings food-diarrhoea.
qī sǔn bā yì
The rule of taking from the yin and adding to the yang — the one thing the chapter says must be known if the two are to be regulated at all: 能知七損八益，則二者可調；不知用此，則早衰之節也. What follows in the chapter is the accounting. At forty the yin qi is already half and the way a life is lived begins to fall off; at fifty the body grows heavy and the ears and eyes dim; at sixty the yin withers, the qi is greatly spent, the nine orifices no longer run freely, and the lower is empty while the upper is full. Set against that is what the same knowledge buys: ears and eyes clear, body light and strong, the old made young again and the young better governed. Wang Bing reads the numbers as the yin's seven and the yang's eight, which is why the phrase is a rule of proportion and not a list.
zhèn āi
A named needling method for the upper body: on a 丙丁 day one may not 振埃 at the shoulder, throat and 廉泉. The image is a hand brushed down a sleeve — the evil is superficial, and the needle scatters it rather than chasing it. The chapter gives only the prohibition, so what survives of the method is its name and its region: above the collarbone, in the throat. With 發矇 and 去爪 it forms a trio of methods named by gesture.
shàn
A painful swelling, named in chapter 48 twice over: once as what a large, tight, sunken pulse in the kidney or liver makes, and once as what tightness in the third yin makes. The chapter then splits it by site — heart shan when the heart pulse is racing, slippery and tight, lung shan when the lung pulse is sunken and racing — so that one name is held while the pulse alone decides which viscus is meant.
shàn jiǎ
Two abdominal complaints named as one phrase in chapter 18, and given twice. The first time from a pulse: 寸口脉沈而弱，曰寒熱及疝瘕、少腹痛 — sunken and weak at the inch opening means alternating cold and heat, together with shan and jia and pain in the lower abdomen. The second time from a different pulse arriving at the same place: 脉急者，曰疝瘕少腹痛. What the chapter is doing is matching a quality of the pulse to a region of the body; both a sunken weak pulse and a tense one land in the lower abdomen.
shào yáng
The third of the three yang: the exterior of ceasing yin, rooting at Qiaoyin on the fourth toe, and holding the office of the pivot — the hinge between what opens and what closes.
shào yīn
The second of the three yin, and its pivot. It lies behind greater yin; in the yang half of the chapter the region of the great surge is where lesser yin runs. Its root is Yongquan in the sole.
shén
Not a soul and not a god: the alertness by which a person notices, responds and is present. It is the half of a person that can be kept within or scattered outward, and in these texts it can be nourished, wearied, or lost.
shèng rén
The figure the texts use for a person who gets it right — not a moral paragon but someone whose conduct matches the way things actually work. In Suwen 2 the sage is the one who follows the seasons and treats illness before it exists.