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.
lóng
In chapter 23 it is the bladder's disorder, and it arrives in a pair: when the bladder is impeded, dribbling obstruction; when it is no longer held, urine passed unawares. The two together are worth more than either alone — one is a door that will not open, the other a door that will not shut, and the chapter is describing the same organ failing in both directions. It also shows what kind of book this entry belongs to: 癃 is not yet a disease category here, it is one half of a description of an organ's range.
hé liú
Water falling short. 水曰涸流 — water is called dried stream — and its 紀 is 反陽: 涸流之紀，是謂反陽。藏令不舉，化氣乃昌，長氣宣布，蟄蟲不藏，土潤，水泉減，草木條茂，榮秀滿盛. The command of storing is not raised; the transforming qi is the one that prospers; the growing qi is spread abroad; the hibernating creatures do not hide; the earth is moist; the springs fall; the plants put out branches and are full of bloom. It is a mild and generous-looking year with the water gone out of it, and the chapter calls that 反陽 because the yang that should have gone under for the winter has come back up in its place. Its 從 is earth, 從土化也; its harm falls on the kidney, and its 眚 on the north. 靜順 is water storing and keeping low; 涸流 is the same water with nothing left to store.
gǔ zhàng
The abdomen distended like a drum: eat at dawn and you cannot eat at dusk. Chapter 40 answers it with chicken-draff wine and adds the condition that makes the cure fail — eating without measure, so that the qi gathers in the belly again.
fú gǔ
The image by which the chapter states that colour, pulse and the skin of the cubit cannot disagree. 夫色脉與尺之相應也，如桴鼓影響之相應也，不得相失也 — their response is like that of drumstick and drum, shadow and echo; they must not lose one another. Three images are used and each adds something: the drumstick and drum are simultaneous, the shadow follows the form without interval, the echo answers the sound without choice. The conclusion drawn is not ornamental but diagnostic — 故知一則爲工，知二則爲神，知三則神且明矣 — since the three always agree, one who reads one is a workman, two a spirit, three both.
suǒ zé
The second of the two transmissions of disease of the third yang: 三陽爲病，發寒熱，下爲癰腫，及爲痿厥腨㾓，其傳爲索澤，其傳爲頽疝. The third yang falls ill with cold and heat, sends sores down to the lower body, brings flaccidity and cramping in the calves — and then transmits. One transmission is 索澤: the moisture is used up and the skin goes lustreless. The other is 頽疝, a swelling that hangs. The chapter gives the pair as the two directions the same heat can go — outward to the surface, downward to the private parts — and 索澤 names the outward one.
kǒu zào
The mouth dry for want of fluid. The book uses it twice, and the two uses divide the word: in lesser yin disease the dryness comes with thirst and a dry tongue, because heat is burning the kidney water; in the dampness patient it comes with a wish for water that cannot be drunk, because the fluid will not rise. Dryness with thirst and dryness without it are not the same complaint.
gān ǒu
Retching with nothing brought up. It appears once, in the wind strike paragraph, paired with a ringing in the nose, and both are read as wind disturbing the stomach and the lung's qi. The book distinguishes it from 嘔逆 not by severity but by what the word points at: 嘔逆 names the qi going the wrong way, 乾嘔 names the empty effort that results.
míng míng
What the physician sees and no one else does. Chapter 26 defines it precisely: it means that form, qi, construction and defence do not appear outwardly, and yet the practitioner knows them, because he has cross-matched the sun's warmth, the moon's phases and the floating and sinking of the seasonal qi. The word carries the chapter's epistemology — looked at, it has no form; tasted, it has no flavour — and it leads straight into the closing passage on spirit, which is dark at first and then brightly, singularly clear.
yōu míng
The dark and the bright, and the two seasons they belong to: 岐伯曰：兩陰交盡，故曰幽；兩陽合明，故曰明。幽明之配，寒暑之異也. The definition is arithmetic done on the names of the two terminal qi. 厥陰 is 兩陰交盡 — two yin meeting their end — and that is 幽; 陽明 is 兩陽合明 — two yang joining their brightness — and that is 明. Set the one against the other and you have the difference of cold and heat. The chapter offers the pair as the ground of the 分至 that follows, so that the solstices and equinoxes can be named from it: 至則氣同，分則氣異.
suǒ shèng rì
The day on which a depot's own phase is at its height and so prevails over the disease — the day on which the sweat is due. Chapter 32 uses the phrase twice, both times as a general rule that gathers up the five depot cases it has just set out, and the five cases show what the phrase means: each depot sweats on the day of its own phase, not on the day of the phase it conquers. The phrase is distinct from the 所勝 of the ordinary five-phase conquest cycle.
rì dié
Spleen illness is clear when the sun declines and worse at sunrise, the reverse of what most readers expect from a yang organ, and the reason is the hour rather than the light: the earth phase holds sway in the wei hour, so the spleen — earth — is clear then, and sunrise belongs to wood, which conquers it. The chapter uses only these two marks for the spleen, dawn to afternoon like the others but with its own two points, because these are the two hours its fate turns on.
yǎo míng
窈冥 is what Huang Di says he asked about. Lei Gong answered out of the Canon of the Pulse, and the rebuke is that a written book cannot answer a question about what is not written: 吾問子窈冥，子言上下篇以對，何也. Wang Bing identifies the deep and dark with 形氣榮衛, the form, qi, blood and defence that do not appear outside and that the skilled physician alone knows — the same 冥冥 that Suwen 26 calls 視之無形，嘗之無味. The word thus stands at the head of the chapter's method: what must be read is precisely what cannot be seen.