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.
jīng gǔ
The tuberosity at the base of the fifth metatarsal, the last landmark of the leg measurement. From the outer ankle to it is three cun, and from it to the ground is one cun. In this chapter it is a bone and nothing more; the same name later becomes the name of the bladder channel's source point, which lies on the same prominence, and the commentators who read the point back into the measurement confuse a landmark with an address.
líng lán zhī shì
The archive in which the teaching is sealed, and the name the chapter takes. The Emperor does not simply accept the doctrine: he fasts, chooses an auspicious day, waits on a good omen, and only then stores it away — 以傳保焉, to hand on and keep safe. The rite is the point, and it is the earliest statement in the book of what a medical text is for: not to be heard once, but transmitted.
líng shì
The room in which a teaching is laid away, and the last thing this chapter does with its discourse: 乃擇良兆而藏之靈室，每旦讀之，命曰氣交變，非齊戒不敢發，慎傳也 — he chooses a good omen, lays it in the chamber of the spirit, reads it every morning, names it, and says it may not be opened without fasting and purification, and is to be handed on with care. It is not a metaphor for memory. It is the room a house keeps for what belongs to its spirits, and the same kind of room Suwen 8 means by its 靈蘭之室: the place where a text is kept because it is not for everyone.
jīng shuǐ
The rivers of the earth, used in chapter 27 as the middle term of the correspondence that the whole chapter argues from: heaven has its mansions and degrees, earth has its rivers, the human being has channels. Because of that correspondence the chapter can describe four kinds of weather — mild, frozen, baking, gusting — and have each one say something exact about the blood: quiet, congealed and dragging, boiling over, heaving into ridges. The image is not decorative. It is what licenses the chapter's central claim, that an evil entering a pulse behaves like a river meeting wind.
jīng mài
The chapter opens its answer by conceding what everyone knows. Twelve channels, three hundred and sixty-five connecting vessels — 此皆人之所明知，工之所循用也. The point of naming them is not to teach anatomy but to remove an excuse: a physician who fails has not failed for want of a map. The map is public, counted, and old. What is not public is the use of it — 精神不專，志意不理，外内相失，故時疑殆 — and the first of the four failures is precisely to diagnose without the principle of yin and yang, going against and following. The channels are therefore the chapter's floor, not its ceiling: everything it counts as a failure happens above them, in the physician who has the count by heart and still cannot read the case.
jīng luò
The warp and the weft of the body's conducting system: the channels that run, and the networks that bind them and branch from them. Chapter 24's single use is worth attending to because it is causal rather than descriptive — repeated fright stops them passing through, and the consequence is numbness. The chapter's habit throughout is to put the treatment where the tissue is rather than where the complaint is, and here the tissue is the conducting system itself, which is why the prescription is rubbing and wine rather than a drug taken inward.
chán zhēn
One of the nine needles, with a broad, slightly rounded head, used to break into what has gone deep. The chapter calls for it exactly once, for the marrow-adhering disease, and the call is the chapter's admission that the ordinary needle is not enough. In the phrase that names it, 鍼 appears twice — as the tool and as the act.
xī zhōng
A locus for letting blood, named 'the middle of the cleft'. The chapter uses it three times — at the head of the greater yang malaria, in the escalation of the 'if it does not end' sequence, and for pain that begins in the lower back and spine. Which exact point it is has been argued since the commentaries; the one thing every reading agrees on is that it is a place to bleed.
cū gōng
The villain of the chapter. The coarse workman does not begin treatment until the illness has already taken a shape, does not root his treatment in the four seasons, does not know sun and moon, does not examine what follows and what goes against — and then blusters that the case can still be attacked. Wang Bing glosses the blustering: 兇兇 means not considering whether a thing is possible. His illustration is a starving man fed to repletion: the fault is not in the food but in the timing and the measure. The old illness has not ended before a new one has begun.
róng sè
The chapter's subject for its central passage: the colour of the face, read by position and by depth. Depth tells you the remedy and the number of days; position tells you whether the case is rebellion or compliance — and the sides are reversed for men and women. It is the second of the two things 揆度 is applied to in this chapter, after the pulse, and chapter 13 had already paired them as 色脉, colour and pulse.
zhuān jīng
The heart as the single place where the essence of the five viscera is gathered undivided. The chapter's opening anatomy reads: 夫心者，五藏之專精也；目者，其竅也；華色者，其榮也 — the heart is the concentrated essence of the five viscera, the eye is its orifice, the bloom of the face is its glory. 專 is not 'special' but 'undivided': the five essences are not five separate stores but one essence gathered at the heart, which then goes out at the eye and shows on the face. This is what lets the whole chapter argue about tears from the heart: what leaves the eye is what the heart holds.
bìng néng
The condition or bearing of an illness: 能 read as 態, not the ordinary 能. The chapter's great method runs 循尺滑濇寒溫之意，視其大小，合之病能，逆從以得，復知病名 — follow the cubit's smooth and rough, cold and warm, look at its great and small, join it to the condition of the illness; the contrary and the compliant being obtained, the name of the illness is known again. So 病能 is what the signs are joined to before the name is pronounced: the illness as it presents, not yet named. The Suwen has a whole discourse under this title (病能論, ch46), and the usage there is the same.