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.
tián yú
Quiet and pleased: what the sage of Suwen 1 makes his task. It comes at the end of the ladder, after the true person and the ultimate person who have left the world behind; the sage stays in it, measures his appetites among its customs, has no heart of resentment or anger, does not weary the body with affairs or burden the mind with anxious thought, and so is not worn out and not scattered. The chapter's other tranquillity word, 恬惔, belongs to the teaching the sages gave; this one belongs to the sage's own practice.
huà
The first half of the chapter's most-quoted sentence, and a half that has to be read with the other: 物生謂之化，物極謂之變. Transformation is what generates; change is what happens at the extreme. The chapter means both to be the same process seen at two points, and the pair bears a great deal of weight in the chapters that follow, because the 運氣 literature is about a system that generates by turns and breaks at its extremes. The site keeps two English words for the two graphs so that the distinction survives.
biàn ǒu
What too much bitter food does. Bitter enters the lower stomach, the five grains' qi cannot overcome it, the three burners' roads all close and do not pass, so the qi turns upward and the man vomits. 變 is the precise word: what is brought up has changed, and the change is the evidence. The chapter adds that bitter goes to bone, that the teeth are where bone ends, and that it goes in and comes out again — which is how one knows it travelled to the bone.
chuán chéng
The chapter's two mechanisms of movement, named together at the end of its long discussion of transmission. 傳 is ordered movement: the viscera hand the disease along the conquest cycle, liver to spleen to kidney to heart to lung, and each handover can be counted, so the time of death can be calculated in months, or days, or in fifths of a day and night. 乘 is movement that ignores order: one emotion empties a viscus and another's qi rides into the gap — joy empties the heart and the kidney encroaches, anger lets the liver encroach, sorrow the lung, fear the spleen, anxiety the heart. Five diseases and five encroachments give twenty-five variations, and the chapter closes the section by saying these are the names of the two things it has been describing.
bìng chuán
Transmission of illness — 病 bìng, illness; 傳 chuán, to pass along — and it is the second half of this chapter's title. 《說文》 has 病，疾加也, an illness that has grown, and 傳，遽也, to hand on in haste, which together describe exactly what the catalogue shows: an illness that grows and then moves. The chapter names it once, at the head of the catalogue — 夫病傳者，心病，先心痛 — and then gives seven illnesses, each with the day each symptom arrives, the day of death if it has not abated, and the hour, in winter and in summer alike. The conclusion is what the catalogue is for: 諸病以次是相傳，如是者皆有死期，不可刺. An illness that runs the viscera in order has a date, and an illness with a date is not to be needled. The two exceptions follow immediately — where the transmission skips a viscus and stops, and where it reaches a third or fourth viscus — and those may be punctured. 張介賓 notes that the intervals are not uniform and that the text should not be forced into an arithmetic.
shù
The word the chapter uses for what the needle goes into, in three compounds inside a single sentence: 散俞 in spring, 絡俞 in summer, 俞竅 in winter. The chapter is not naming acupoints; it is naming depth and kind — the scattered points at the partings of the flesh, the points of the network vessels, the deep orifices. The single character is the constant: a place where the channel's qi comes near enough to be reached.
zhì wèi bìng
The line that made prevention central to Chinese medicine: don't wait for the disease. The chapter closes with the image that makes the point — digging a well only once you are thirsty.
zhēn xié
True qi and evil qi, named together as a pair because what matters clinically is not either one alone but whether they have joined. Chapter 27 turns on exactly this. While the evil is still loose in the blood it rises like a swell and can be met at the instant it arrives; once 真邪以合 — true and evil have merged — the wave-swell stops rising, there is nothing to wait for, and the physician must fall back on the three regions and nine indicators and regulate by what is full and what is empty. The chapter's closing indictment is of the physician who cannot tell them apart: he takes repletion for vacuity and the evil for the true, attacks the upright, and cuts short a life that should have been long.
zhēn tóu tòng
The headache that is not a branch of anything else. The chapter gives six 厥頭痛, each with its own pulse and its own channel, and then this one: the pain is severe, the whole brain aches, and the hands and feet go cold to the joints — death, not to be treated. The distinction is the chapter's whole method. A 厥頭痛 is reversed qi that can be chased to its channel; the true headache is the disease at the centre, with the extremities already cold, and no channel left to needle. Later commentators read the cold limbs as yang failing at the root while the evil holds the head.
zhēn xīn tòng
The heart pain that belongs to the heart itself. The chapter gives five 厥心痛 — kidney, stomach, spleen, liver, lung — each diagnosed by what the pain draws on and what the colour does, and each treatable at named points. Then the true one: hands and feet cold to the joints, the pain severe, onset at dawn and death by evening, or onset at evening and death by dawn. The structure is the argument. Where the pain is a branch of another organ the channel can be reached; where it is the heart's own, the extremities are already cold and there is no time.
zhēn qì
Not a second kind of qi, but the same qi unobstructed. 真 is doing the work of 'genuine': when craving and agitation subside, what follows of itself is the real thing rather than something manufactured.
tuí shàn
The mounting illness of the reverting yin in chapter 49, given in the third month — the yin within yang — with the evil lodged in the centre. The chapter states it twice: 㿗疝 with swelling of the lower abdomen in women, and 㿗癃疝, the same swelling with the passages stopped and the skin distended. Both are explained from one mechanism, yin abundant and the vessel swollen so that it does not pass.