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.
ruǎn ruò
The late-summer quality of the pulse, and the only one of the five the chapter states without an image: 長夏胃微耎弱曰平, slightly soft and weak, with stomach qi in it, is balanced; weak much and stomach qi little is spleen disease; and where the other four are said to kill when they stand alone, this one is given as 但代无胃曰死 — the intermittent pulse without stomach qi — the softness having failed so far that the beat itself drops out. Softness appears again at the end of the chapter as the good sign it is: the balanced liver pulse is 耎弱招招, like lifting the tip of a long bamboo pole.
róu chì
A yielding convulsion, produced when the lung shifts heat into the kidney. The base text writes 痓 (chì), not 痙 (jìng); the two graphs are routinely confused and the site keeps the base-text form.
suān
A sore, aching pain — the sickness-radical 痠, which the base text keeps distinct from 酸, sour. The chapter uses it only of the shank: once for the ache that precedes a fit and so tells the physician where to needle first, and once for the ache of the marrow-adhering disease, which is so severe the leg cannot be touched.
shú mǐ
One sheng of glutinous millet, added to the boiling water in the pinellia decoction. Its function in the formula is twofold and the chapter says neither: the starch gives the decoction a body that holds the pinellia's sharpness off the stomach, and a sticky grain settles what the chapter calls the qi that will not stay down. It is also the reason the decoction is strained and drunk as a clear liquid — 去其滓，飲汁一小杯 — the grain is cooked to exhaustion and thrown away. In the pharmacology of the period 秫 belongs with 黍 under 稷, the glutinous millet of the north, as against 稻 and 粱.
jūn huǒ
The first of the two fires in 君火以明，相火以位. The chapter needs six qi for five phases, and fire is the one that is doubled: 木火土金水火 is the list it gives for earth, with fire appearing at both ends. Of the doubled pair, the sovereign fire is the one that rules by being bright rather than by acting — 以明 — while the minister fire 以位, by holding its station. The chapter itself puts the minister fire on 少陽 (少陽之上，相火主之) and gives lesser yin heat (少陰之上，熱氣主之), which is why later writing on the circuit qi assigns 君火 to 少陰 and 相火 to 少陽.
bù bì qīn shū
The loss, in severe Yangming disease, of the ordinary distinction between family and outsiders — the patient rails and curses without sparing either. Chapter 30 places it immediately after abusive speech and explains both by yang exuberance, which makes it one of the earliest statements that shame and propriety can be casualties of a bodily state. It stands as the counterpart to the chapter's earlier symptom, in which the distressed patient cannot bear anyone at all.
chì
The body drawn taut: neck and back rigid, jaw locked, the whole trunk arched backward. The book divides it into a hard form, with fever, no sweat and aversion to cold, and a soft form, with fever, sweat and no aversion to cold; a third line gives the general name to fever with a deep fine pulse, and a fourth traces the whole thing to sweating too much. Its signs are given at length — cold feet, hot head, red face, restless head-shaking, locked jaw, arched back.
chì zòng
The chapter's word for what the body does when the greater yang ends: 戴眼、反折、瘈瘲 — eyes up, spine arched, and this. The two characters are a pair and the pair is the point: 瘈 is the contraction, 瘲 the letting go, and the condition is the two alternating. It is the earliest occurrence of a word that Chinese medicine never stopped using.
shén zhì
Spirit and will taken as one pair. The argument runs: 夫水之精爲志，火之精爲神，水火相感，神志俱悲，是以目之水生也 — water's essence is the will, fire's essence is the spirit; water and fire stir each other, and when spirit and will grieve together, the water is born in the eye. The pair is not decorative: 神 and 志 belong to different viscera, heart and kidney, and to different elements, fire and water, and the tear comes only when both are moved. Later the pair comes apart: 神不慈則志不悲 — if the spirit is not kind, the will does not grieve, and no tears come.
pí wèi
The depot and the palace that together turn food and drink into the qi the body runs on. Chapter 29 gives the pair its classic formulation: the stomach is the sea of the five depots and six palaces, and the spleen is what moves the stomach's fluids onward. Because they are exterior and interior to one another — Yangming outside, Taiyin inside — the same body can be struck in two different ways: evils that arrive from without are taken by the yang side and settle in the palaces, while damage done by eating and drinking out of measure is taken by the yin side and settles in the depots.
pí dān
Heat in the spleen showing itself as a sweet taste in the mouth. Chapter 47 traces it to a diet of rich and sweet food: fat makes heat within, sweetness makes the centre full, the qi overflows upward and the illness turns into wasting and thirsting. The treatment is lan, given to remove the stale qi that has accumulated.
pí bì
Obstruction lodged in the spleen, reached through the flesh and the long summer. The chapter gives it four signs: the four limbs go slack, there is coughing and vomited fluid, and above there is a great blockage. It is the one store obstruction whose signs are given almost entirely in terms of the limbs and the upper body.