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.
suì xīng
The planet Jupiter, the star of wood and of the east, and the one this chapter names when the wood circuit moves. Its name is the year: the planet steps through the lodges and returns in twelve years, and 歲 came to mean the year itself. In the ten tables of the chapter each circuit closes with 上應 and a star, and wood answers to this one — in surplus (歲木太過…上應歲星), in falling short (歲土不及…上應歲星), and again when revenge comes and the wind rises (復則大風暴發…上應歲星).
xià bū
The chapter uses six named divisions of the day — dawn, sunrise, midday, the declining sun, late afternoon, midnight — and gives each viscus its own three-hour pattern among them. Late afternoon is the hour the liver does worst, the hour the lung does best, and the hour the kidney falls quiet. A patient whose complaints keep this schedule is being read as a clock, and once read, the clock can be used: the chapter's whole argument is that these hours are predictable from the phases.
tiān guāng
The light of the sky — sun, moon, stars — as something to be read and matched rather than merely seen. Chapter 26 opens its answer with a three-part rule: take heaven as the model, earth as the standard, and join the two to the light of heaven. The third clause is the operative one, because everything that follows — watching the moon's phases before you drain or supplement, tracking the shifting light to fix the site, standing square and waiting — is a specification of it. The same phrase appears in chapter 25, where it governs the whole argument of that chapter rather than the calendar.
bēi jiān
Earth falling short. 土曰卑監 — earth is called low confinement — and its 紀 is 減化: 卑監之紀，是謂減化。化氣不令，生政獨彰，長氣整，雨乃愆，收氣平，風寒並興. The transforming qi no longer gives the command; the qi that gives birth stands out alone; the growing is trimmed even; the rain misses its time; the harvesting stays level; wind and cold rise together. Then what is seen: 草木榮美，秀而不實，成而粃也 — the plants are handsome and flower, and come to nothing; what ripens is chaff. Nothing in this paragraph is violent. Earth short does not destroy the year; it lets the year flower and then fails to fill it, which is why its 紀 is called 減化 and its harm, when it falls, is the spleen's. Its 從 is wood, 從木化也 — the phase that overcomes earth — and its 眚 comes on the four corners.
zài quán
The qi that has charge of the lower half of the year, and the counterpart of 司天. This chapter names the six — 少陽、陽明、太陽、厥陰、少陰、太陰 — and with each says what may not arise: 故少陽在泉，寒毒不生；陽明在泉，濕毒不生；太陽在泉，熱毒不生. Each then gives the flavour that belongs to the qi, the treatment that follows from it, and the grain that grows under it — 其味辛，其治苦酸，其榖蒼丹 — so that a year's medicine is read off from what lies below. The six come back in the passage on the five classes, where 在泉 decides which kind of creature comes to nothing in the second half. 司天 and 在泉 are never in the same half of the year: the qi above in one half is below in the other.
xiù dù
The mansions of the sky and the degrees they are divided into — the fixed, measurable order of heaven. Chapter 27 opens its answer with a three-part correspondence: heaven has its mansions and degrees, earth has its rivers, the human being has channels. The point of naming the sky first is that the sky is the term that is measurable: the sages set up their measures so as to answer to heaven and earth, and the physician's measures inherit that answering. The reading matters — xiù, the astronomical plural, not sù, lodging.
yíng huò
The planet Mars, the star of fire and of the south, and the one this chapter names most often of the five. Its name is its behaviour: a glimmer that confounds, because the red star wanders and doubles back and will not hold a course. Fire answers to it in surplus (歲火太過…上應熒惑星) and on revenge; metal falling short answers to it too, because fire is what rises against metal (歲金不及，炎火乃行…上應熒惑星). Twice in one paragraph, once for the circuit and once for what strikes it.
chén xīng
The planet Mercury, the star of water and of the north, and the one whose name is a time of day. It keeps close to the sun and shows itself only at its hours, and so it became the marker of them. Water in surplus answers to it (歲水太過…上應辰星), fire falling short answers to it (歲火不及…上應辰星), and it comes back a third time for the cold that strikes back at metal (復則寒雨暴至…上應辰星). The chapter pairs it with 熒惑 more often than with any other star, because water and fire are the two that answer each other.
xiàng huǒ
The second of the two fires, and the one that does the work. 相火以位 — the minister fire by its station — is half of a sentence whose other half is 君火以明: where the sovereign fire rules by giving light, the minister fire rules by holding the place it has been given and acting in it. This chapter gives it that place in so many words — 少陽之上，相火主之 — and it is worth noticing that in the chapter's own list of the six qi, the name that appears is 相火 and not 君火; lesser yin is given 熱氣, heat qi. The two fires are paired in the doctrine and not symmetrical in the list.
dūn fù
Earth going to excess. 土曰敦阜 — earth is called mounded height — and its 紀 is 廣化: 敦阜之紀，是謂廣化，厚德清靜，順長以盈，至陰内實，物化充成，煙埃朦鬱，見於厚土，大雨時行，濕氣乃用，燥政乃辟. Thick virtue at rest, growing followed to fullness, the utmost yin solid within, the world's transformations brought to completion, mist and dust shrouding the thick earth, the great rain falling in its season, the damp qi employed and the dry governance pushed aside. Its attributes: 其化圓，其氣豐，其政靜，其令周備…其象長夏，其經足太陰、陽明，其藏脾、腎…其病腹滿，四支不舉，大風迅至，邪傷脾也. The excess of earth shows as fullness — a full belly, four limbs that will not lift — and it too is told as plenty before it is told as trouble. Its viscera are spleen and kidney, the earth and the water it overcomes.
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.
yù fā
The moment a pent-up qi lets go. The chapter treats it twice: once in the 治則 for 少陰司天, where the prescription is 折其鬱發，先取化源，無使暴過而生其病也; and once at the very end, in the five treatments, where 火鬱發之 is itself the cure for pent-up fire. Between the two sits the longest passage of the chapter, five paragraphs on 土鬱之發、金鬱之發、水鬱之發、木鬱之發、火鬱之發, each naming its sign in weather and in men and closing with its season and its number — 怫乃發也，其氣四. The chapter's whole account of disaster is the working out of these two graphs.