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.
qí héng
The other of the chapter's two arts, and the harder one: the anomalous is what the rule does not cover. Qibo defines it in three words — 奇𢘆者，言奇病也, it speaks of strange illness — and the chapter spends the rest of its length showing what that means in practice: colour on the wrong side, doubled yang, a pulse with no stomach qi in it, a disease travelling into the organ that conquers it. The same word gives 奇𢘆之府 in chapter 11, the palaces that hold rather than transmit — there too it marks what breaks the rule.
sè
The astringent quality: the opposite of slippery, a pulse that moves with difficulty, as if the blood were thick or the channel dry. It belongs to the yin family and pairs most often with faint, weak, slow and deep. In this book it is nearly always a sign of lack — of blood, of nutritive qi, of fluid — and once, at the instep, of food unable to enter. The base text writes 濇, not 澀; the two are one word and this site keeps the base form.
bèi shù
The five points on the back, one to each viscus, found by measuring the body against itself: the span between the nipples is folded in half, another straw is cut to half of that, its ends are propped into a triangle, and the triangle is walked down the spine from the great vertebra — lung, heart, liver and spleen (left and right corners of one measure), then kidney. This is the oldest surviving account of how the back transport points were located, and the striking thing about it is that it uses no fixed unit at all: the rule is a proportion of the patient's own body. The chapter calls the result 灸剌之度, the measure for cautery and puncture.
píng rén
What the whole chapter measures by. A balanced person is not an ideal of vigour but a set of numbers: the pulse moves twice on the out-breath and twice on the in-breath, once more as the breath settles, five times in all, with the deep long breath counted in on top. That count is the standard, and because the physician himself is not ill he can use his own calm breathing as the ruler against which the patient's pulse is read. Everything else in the chapter is a distance from this mark: one beat to a breath is scant qi, three with agitation is warmth, wind or impediment, four or more, or a pulse that now races and now stalls, is death.
bàn xià tāng
The decoction Bo Gao prescribes for the eye that will not shut. The reasoning is given first: the defending qi cannot enter the yin, so it stays outside and the yang tract is full; fill the deficiency and drain the excess, open the road, and the drink finishes the work — 飲以半夏湯一劑，陰陽已通，其臥立至. The formula itself is a piece of kitchen craft: water drawn from a stream a thousand li away, lifted and poured ten thousand times, five sheng of the clear part boiled over a reed fire, one sheng of sorghum millet and five ge of prepared pinellia added, simmered down to one and a half sheng, strained, and drunk a small cup at a time three times a day until it takes effect. The chapter's interest is not the drug but the making: the water is agitated to break its heaviness, the fire is of reeds to keep it light, and the dose is 以知爲度 — until the patient knows it, not until the cup is empty.
xuè luò
The answer to the chapter's opening question. Huang Di asks about the strange evil that is not in the channels; Qibo answers in three words: it is the blood luo. What follows is a catalogue of what happens when such a vessel is pricked — collapse, spurting, dark thick blood, clear blood half water, swelling, pallor, fretting, and no change at all — each with its mechanism. The term names a class of vessel that is neither channel nor ordinary luo: the place where an evil lodges when it has nowhere else to go, and where bleeding rather than needling is the treatment.
róng
The chapter's word for what shows. The heart's bloom is the complexion, the lung's the body hair, the liver's the nails, the spleen's the lips, the kidney's the hair of the head — each organ is given a tissue it is matched with and a place where that tissue can be read. At the end of the colour table the five images wrapped in white silk are called 外榮, the outer bloom that the five storing organs generate. Across the whole chapter the test is the same: a bloom gleams through, a dead colour lies on the surface.
huá sè
The bloom of the face, named as the heart's 榮. The chapter sets three things side by side: the heart is the concentrated essence of the five viscera, the eye is its orifice, the bloom of the face is its glory. 竅 is where the heart's essence goes out; 榮 is where it shows. The pair explains why grief can be read on the face: 有亡，憂知於色 — when something is lost, the grief is known in the colour. Chapter 10 gives each organ its own 榮; here the word is given to the heart alone, because the heart is where the five essences are gathered.
yīng zhōng
The breast, named once, as the place where the transporting point of foot yangming lies: 足陽明，挾喉之動脉也，其腧在膺中. The sentence sorts the six yang channels by where they approach the face: yangming clasps the throat and its transport is in the breast; yangming of the hand comes next, outside it and short of the curved cheek by a cun; taiyang of the hand is at the curved cheek; shaoyang of the foot behind it; shaoyang of the hand above the Wangu bone; taiyang of the foot at the hairline. 膺中 is thus a station in a route, and the point it names is not given — the chapter's business here is order, not location.
míng táng
The hall Huang Di sits in at the opening of this chapter, and the room the Suwen uses whenever the business is the ordering of a year rather than the treatment of a patient. The chapter's sentence gives it four verbs — sit, set right, look out over, examine and establish — and all four belong to the calendar: 始正天綱，臨觀八極，考建五常. What follows from the hall is not a remedy but a question about why two orders of things fail to agree.
tuō yíng
The first of the two ills that have no outside cause, and the reason the first error is an error. A man was once honoured and has since fallen low; no evil has struck him, but the illness is born within, and it is called 脱營, the camp draining away. Wang Bing's gloss ties the name to the history: 嘗貴後賤，謂之脱營. What drains is the camp qi, the portion that runs inside the vessels; when it comes away the body dwindles day by day, the qi is deficient and without essence, and the man is chilled and startled from time to time. The physician who examines him finds nothing — the illness is not in the viscera and receptacles, and the bodily form has not changed — so he doubts, and does not know the name. That is precisely the case the chapter says one must ask about before treating.
yíng
The shape the winter pulse takes. Where the spring pulse is straight and the summer pulse rises and falls, the winter pulse is said to arrive sunken and beating — deep under the finger, held in like a camp at rest. The image is not of weakness but of containment: this is the season in which the myriad things close and store. Its excess is a pulse that feels like a flicked stone, hard and unyielding; its deficiency is a departure that hurries, and with it come lassitude, pain along the spine, scant qi, and a heart that hangs as if hungry.