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.
cóng róng
The Congrong is at once a method and a book. As a method it is the unhurried reading that lets a pulse be taken for what it is rather than for what it resembles — and the chapter's whole first half is a list of resemblances: a deficient spleen that floats like the lung, a small floating kidney that looks like the spleen, a tight sinking and scattering liver that looks like the kidney. As a book it is the ancient canon Wang Bing names 上古經篇名, and the Quan Yuanqi recension of this very chapter was titled 從容別白黑, distinguishing white from black by the Congrong. The word comes three times, and each time it marks the point where resemblance gives way to distinction: 然從容得之, 夫從容之謂也, and at the close 明引比類從容, where the method is named together with the matching of kinds.
cháng shù
The opening table of chapter 24 and the one the whole chapter hangs on: each of the six channels has a fixed allotment of blood and qi, and the allotment is a fact about the person rather than about the illness. It is the reason the chapter can end with six needling rules instead of six opinions — where a channel is plentiful you may let, and where it is scant you may not. Readers should note that the graph 數 is read shù here and shuò in the chapter's phrase for repeated fright; the two senses sit six paragraphs apart in the same text.
mù zì
The corner of the eye. The sentence runs 夫一水不勝五火，故目眦盲 — one water cannot overcome five fires, and so the corner of the eye goes blind. The five fires are the five viscera's yang; the one water is the essence. In reversal the yang gathers above (陽氣并於上), the fire alone gives light (則火獨光也), and the corner, where the eye's vessels gather, is scorched. The base writes 眦 and not 眥, and the site prints the base's form.
chǐ
Chapter 17 ends by mapping the forearm. The inner sides of the cubit correspond to the lower ribs; its outer side assesses the kidney and its inner side the abdomen. Above it, at the middle attachment, the left outer side assesses the liver and the inner the diaphragm, the right outer the stomach and the inner the spleen; above that, the right outer the lung and the inner the chest, the left outer the heart and the inner the chest centre. Front assesses front, back assesses back; what reaches highest concerns chest and throat, what reaches lowest concerns the lower body. This is the earliest systematic statement of the regions of the wrist pulse, and the chapter's partner to 寸口.
chǐ cùn
The two regions of the pulse at the wrist — 尺 toward the elbow, 寸 toward the hand — taken together as the place a verdict is read. The chapter gives four of them in a row: 不當其位者病，迭移其位者病，失守其位者危，尺寸反者死，陰陽交者死. The sequence is deliberate — illness, illness, peril, death, death — and the pair 尺寸 belongs to the last two. Note what the chapter has just said: the changes of heaven and earth do not show in the pulse at all. What does show is whether the pulse is in its own place.
míng míng
What the physician sees and no one else does. Chapter 26 defines it precisely: it means that form, qi, construction and defence do not appear outwardly, and yet the practitioner knows them, because he has cross-matched the sun's warmth, the moon's phases and the floating and sinking of the seasonal qi. The word carries the chapter's epistemology — looked at, it has no form; tasted, it has no flavour — and it leads straight into the closing passage on spirit, which is dark at first and then brightly, singularly clear.
yōu míng
The dark and the bright, and the two seasons they belong to: 岐伯曰：兩陰交盡，故曰幽；兩陽合明，故曰明。幽明之配，寒暑之異也. The definition is arithmetic done on the names of the two terminal qi. 厥陰 is 兩陰交盡 — two yin meeting their end — and that is 幽; 陽明 is 兩陽合明 — two yang joining their brightness — and that is 明. Set the one against the other and you have the difference of cold and heat. The chapter offers the pair as the ground of the 分至 that follows, so that the solstices and equinoxes can be named from it: 至則氣同，分則氣異.
suǒ shèng rì
The day on which a depot's own phase is at its height and so prevails over the disease — the day on which the sweat is due. Chapter 32 uses the phrase twice, both times as a general rule that gathers up the five depot cases it has just set out, and the five cases show what the phrase means: each depot sweats on the day of its own phase, not on the day of the phase it conquers. The phrase is distinct from the 所勝 of the ordinary five-phase conquest cycle.
rì dié
Spleen illness is clear when the sun declines and worse at sunrise, the reverse of what most readers expect from a yang organ, and the reason is the hour rather than the light: the earth phase holds sway in the wei hour, so the spleen — earth — is clear then, and sunrise belongs to wood, which conquers it. The chapter uses only these two marks for the spleen, dawn to afternoon like the others but with its own two points, because these are the two hours its fate turns on.
yǎo míng
窈冥 is what Huang Di says he asked about. Lei Gong answered out of the Canon of the Pulse, and the rebuke is that a written book cannot answer a question about what is not written: 吾問子窈冥，子言上下篇以對，何也. Wang Bing identifies the deep and dark with 形氣榮衛, the form, qi, blood and defence that do not appear outside and that the skilled physician alone knows — the same 冥冥 that Suwen 26 calls 視之無形，嘗之無味. The word thus stands at the head of the chapter's method: what must be read is precisely what cannot be seen.
tài xī
In the counting that opens chapter 18, the deep long breath is the thing that does not fit the rule. Five movements to a breath is the standard; but a person from time to time takes a longer breath, and the pulse moves once more within it. The chapter's word for counting that extra beat is 閏, the intercalary month inserted to keep the calendar true: the surplus is not an error but a regular one, and it must be counted in before the standard can stand. Later in the language 太息 comes to mean a sigh; in this chapter it is simply the breath by which the count is completed.
chén
The deep quality: a pulse that lies below the surface and is felt only when the finger presses to the bone. In this book 沉 heads the yin family and answers winter and the kidney. It rarely stands alone: 沉而遲 is cold in the interior, 沉而細 is the dampness block, 沉而數 at the instep is repletion. The quality is therefore read by what it keeps company with, and the entry below follows those pairings rather than defining a shape in the abstract.