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.
shén mén
The pulse at the wrist on the heart channel, and the pulse this chapter takes when the water circuit is in surplus: 歲水太過，寒氣流行，邪害心火 — water in surplus strikes the fire of the heart — and so it is 神門, the heart's pulse, whose stopping means death. Its name is the last of the five and completes the set: wood takes Chongyang, fire takes Taiyuan, earth takes Taixi, metal takes Taichong, water takes Shenmen, and in every case the pulse taken belongs to the phase that the circuit in surplus strikes. The chapter names the pulse and gives its verdict; it never says why that pulse, and the five together say it.
shén míng
What issues from the heart's office. Unlike 神 on its own, which in this book is the spirit a person has or loses, 神明 is the clarity by which one knows and judges — and it is the reason the chapter can move from the heart to good government in a single step: a ruler is clear or not clear, and 明 is the same word. 王冰：「神明者，神之明也。」
yí jīng biàn qì
The whole therapy of high antiquity, and the title of this chapter. Wang Bing glosses the two verbs plainly: 移 is to shift, 變 is to alter, and both are done so that evil does not injure the upright and the spirit is restored and strong and guarded within. The chapter's argument is that this used to be enough, and is not any more — not because the method was lost, but because the kind of person it worked on no longer exists.
dòng lì
Shivering: freezing and trembling. The chapter is interested in the one patient who does not do it — so cold that nothing warms him, and yet still. The explanation is that the liver is one yang and the heart a second, so there is fire enough left that the cold never turns into shivering, even though one water cannot overcome two fires.
xiǎn xī
The shivering of an oncoming cold fit, the word the chapter uses for the yang brightness malaria and, as 洒洒然, for the kidney malaria. It is a binome built from two water-words, and the chapter's doubling of it — 洒淅洒淅 — marks the shivering as coming in waves rather than once.
shuí
The buttock — the flesh of it, not the bone. Chapter 49 uses the word twice, both in its opening complaint, and it is one of the few places in the Suwen where this graph is written; the received text often substitutes 臀. Wang Bing's note 脽音誰 is what fixes the reading.
bì cáng
The name Suwen 2 gives to the three months of winter, and the last of the four season names. The door is shut and what was gathered is put away. The rule drawn from it is the rule for winter: sleep early and rise late, wait for the sun, hide the will away as though you had something to keep, leave the cold for the warm, and let nothing out through the skin. Breaking it harms the kidney, and spring brings flaccidity and inversion.
zhěn jīn
A lasting illness of the sinews, read off a rapid cubit pulse with the sinews tense and visible. Chapter 47 adds two things: the abdomen is necessarily drawn tight, and if white or black colour shows the illness is severe. The word 疹 is the same one the chapter used earlier for an illness that has been allowed to form.
jīn wěi
The flaccidity of the sinews, laid to heat in the liver and, in the chapter's second account, to desire unmet and sexual excess. The Lower Classic is quoted for the summary: sinew flaccidity arises in the liver and comes of sexual excess. It is the one of the five whose cause the chapter gives twice.
jīn liū
Sinew flow is the first of the chapter's six lesions. The mechanism is given in one sentence: 有所疾前筋，筋屈不得伸，邪氣居其間而不反，發於筋溜 — something attacks the front of the sinew, the sinew contracts and cannot stretch, evil lodges in the gap and does not return, and it issues as a sinew flow. The name is descriptive rather than clinical: 溜 is what runs and gathers, and the lesion is the place where the evil has pooled in a tissue that cannot move it on. The chapter pairs it with 腸溜, which forms the same way inside the bowel and takes years to do it, and with 昔瘤, which hardens under the hand. The three together are the chapter's account of how a passing evil becomes a standing mass.
jīn mó
The sinews and their wrapping sheets, the tissue assigned to the liver. Chapter 44 uses it to show why liver heat produces cramping before it produces flaccidity: the membranes dry first, the sinews tighten, and only then does the limb fail.
jīn bì
The obstruction that comes of meeting the three qi in spring. Because the sinews are the tissue of spring and the liver is the store that the sinews are matched with, sinew obstruction that is not put right and meets evil again goes inward and lodges in the liver. In its own place it shows as an inability to bend and stretch.