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.
pí fēng
The third stage of the disease that begins as wind-cold in the skin. Untreated at the lung it becomes lung impediment; untreated there it passes to the liver and becomes liver impediment; and then it reaches the spleen, where it is called spleen wind. Its signs are the eruption of heat, heat inside the abdomen, vexation of the heart, and the passing of yellow. It is the stage at which the chapter still allows three treatments — pressing, medicine and bathing — before the disease moves on to the kidney, where the options narrow to two, and then to the heart, after which death is a matter of counting days.
huài bìng
What an illness becomes after the wrong treatment has been repeated. Sweating, vomiting, purging and warming needles have all been tried and the disease still stands; the original pattern is gone and no single prescription fits. The book's instruction is therefore not a formula but a method: read the pulse and the signs, find what was violated, and treat that. It is also where 桂枝湯 stops — not because the formula is weak, but because there is no fixed pattern left for it to answer.
liú yǎn
Water going to excess. 水曰流衍 — water is called spreading flow — and its 紀 is 封藏: 流衍之紀，是謂封藏。寒司物化，天地嚴凝，藏政以布，長令不揚. Cold has charge of the world's transformations, heaven and earth close hard, the governance of storing is spread abroad, and the command of growing is not raised — the excess of water is told as a year that never opens. Its attributes: 其化凜，其氣堅，其政謐，其令流注，其動漂泄沃涌，其德凝慘寒雰，其變冰雪霜雹…其象冬，其經足少陰太陽，其藏腎心…其病脹. Its viscera are the kidney and the heart — the water and the fire it puts out — and its illness is fullness, the swelling of a body with nothing moving in it. The chapter closes the group with it, and the closing passage adds 政過則化氣大舉，而埃昏氣交，大雨時降，邪傷腎也: the excess at last breaks, and the harm falls on the kidney.
fū hé
Wood in its even state, and the first of the five even circuits. 木曰敷和 — wood is called spreading harmony — and the chapter then gives the whole of its 紀: 敷和之紀，木德周行，陽舒陰布，五化宣平，其氣端，其性隨，其用曲直，其化生榮，其類草木，其政發散，其候温和，其令風，其藏肝…其榖麻，其果李，其實核，其應春，其蟲毛，其畜犬，其色蒼，其養筋，其病裏急支滿，其味酸，其音角，其物中堅，其數八. The shape is the same in all five paragraphs — the circuit's name and its phase, then its qi, nature, use, transformation, class, governance, season, command, viscus, grain, fruit, the flesh of the fruit, the season it answers, its creature, its domestic animal, its colour, what it nourishes, what it falls ill with, its flavour, its note, its substance and its number — and 敷和 is the standard against which wood's two failures are read: 委和 when it falls short and 發生 when it goes to excess. Its number is eight, the number of wood.
chóng yán
Speech that doubles on itself. The chapter's cause is mechanical: the epiglottis is large and thick, so it opens and closes with difficulty and the air comes out late, and therefore the words repeat. The contrary case is given first — a small and thin epiglottis lets the air out fast and the opening is smooth — so that the two together make the point: fluency is a matter of the valve, not of the tongue. Later practice took 重言 as the word for stammering, and its account of the cause is this passage.
tóu xiàng qiáng tòng
The signature complaint of taiyang: pain running from the head into the nape, with the muscles there drawn stiff. The book puts it in the nine-character definition of taiyang disease, beside a floating pulse and aversion to cold, and every later pattern in the chapter is a variation on that sentence. It persists after mistreatment, which is how the book uses it a second time: the exterior has not been cleared.
mèn xīn
What too much sweet food does: sweet qi is weak and cannot rise to the upper burner, so it stays in the stomach with the grain; the stomach slackens, the worms stir, and the region below the heart feels stopped up. 悗 is the exact opposite of 洞 — not a hollow but a blockage. As with 洞心, the 心 here is the epigastrium rather than the organ: the chapter's symptoms are all located below the heart, and none of them is a disease of the heart itself.
jìng shùn
Water in its even state. 水曰靜順 — water is called still compliance — and its 紀 runs: 靜順之紀，藏而勿害，治而善下，五化咸整，其氣明，其性下，其用沃衍，其化凝堅，其類水，其政流演，其候凝肅，其令寒，其藏腎，腎其畏濕，其主二陰，其榖豆，其果栗，其實濡，其應冬，其蟲鱗，其畜彘，其色黑，其養骨髓，其病厥，其味鹹，其音羽，其物濡，其數六. Its two opening pairs are a manner and a policy: 藏而勿害, it stores and does no harm, and 治而善下, it governs and is good at keeping low. Neither is a restraint on water; both are what water even is, and the chapter's five transformations come out 咸整, all of them ordered, the last word any of the five paragraphs uses. Water is also the phase the chapter ends on, and the one whose even state the closing sentence of the group gathers up: 故生而勿殺，長而勿罰，化而勿制，收而勿害，藏而勿抑，是謂平氣 — the five 勿 of that sentence are the five even circuits read one by one. Its viscus is the kidney, its number six; failing it is 涸流, the dried stream, and in excess 流衍, spreading flow.
wèi qì
The seventh chapter calls it 胃脘之陽, the yang of the stomach, and it is the whole difference between a pulse that kills and one that does not: yang, in that chapter, is not a channel but this — the stomach's contribution, the faint evenness still left in a pulse. A pulse without it is the true storing pulse, and that one is fatal. Nothing in the chapter's prognosis works without the distinction.
wèi fēng
Stomach wind closes the chapter's catalogue. Food and drink will not go down, the diaphragm is blocked, the belly is full, cold food brings diarrhoea, and on examination the body is thin but the abdomen large. It is the only wind of the six named for a palace rather than a store.
shí shuǐ
In the seventh chapter, what yin and yang produce when they knot awry and there is much yin and little yang: stone water, and the lower abdomen swells. The name is a diagnosis in two words — a swelling below that has gone hard, because the yang that should move the water is not there to move it.
qí xié
An evil that has lodged where the channels do not run, and the one case in the chapter where needling crosses the body. If the disease is in a stray evil, then it is the stray evil's vessel that is treated, and it is treated by contralateral puncture — the left for the right, the right for the left. The chapter adds a second and slower rule for evil that has settled: if it lingers, the body wastes and does not move, then needle it by stages. Stray evil is thus distinguished from the winds of chapter one by where it sits rather than by what it is: not the evil that comes in season, but the one that has wandered off the map of the channels.