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 zhōng
The second word of the chapter's title, and the whole of its second half: 願聞十二經脉之終奈何. What follows is the book's anatomy of dying — six passages, one for each pair of channels, naming the signs by which you will know that this channel has finished: the eyes carried upward, the sweat that comes at the end, the face black, the teeth seeming to lengthen. The chapter's last line calls them 十二經之所敗, the ruin of the twelve channels.
shǐ dào
The channel whose length is a prognosis. The chapter has just described the body that reaches a hundred years — a deep and long envoy road, high and square foundations and walls, a regulated camp and guard — and then, asking why others die before their time, gives the same features in the negative: the road is not long, the walls are low. Two readings have been offered and both are kept here: the nostrils, where breath comes and goes, and the road of the spirit in the region of the philtrum. Either way the argument is the same, and it is architectural: depth and length mean that what passes is slowed and protected, and a house whose gate is short is a house that wind enters. The word 使 matters — what travels is sent, and the road is the course it is sent along.
huì yàn
The door of the voice, third in the chapter's chain of instruments: the throat is the road of water and grain, the windpipe the passage of air up and down, the epiglottis the door of voice, the lips the shutter, the tongue the trigger, the uvula the gate, the nasopharynx the vent of divided qi, the hyoid the servant of spirit that moves the tongue. Sudden loss of voice is cold lodging at the epiglottis, so that it can neither open nor close. Its size explains the stammer: thick and large, and the air comes out late.
fēn zhì
The two equinoxes and the two solstices, defined by the state of the qi rather than by the calendar: 岐伯曰：氣至之謂至，氣分之謂分。至則氣同，分則氣異。所謂天地之正紀也. At a solstice the qi is single — 冬至 is pure yin and 夏至 pure yang, so the qi is the same throughout; at an equinox the qi is divided — at 春分 yang is on the left and yin on the right, and the reverse at 秋分, so the qi is not the same. The chapter calls the pair 天地之正紀, the regular record of heaven and earth, which is the same phrase it uses at the very end for the six qi's own register. It is given here as the sequel to 幽明: the dark and the bright are cold and heat, and the four points are where cold and heat turn.
pí jīng
脾精 names the answer to the case Lei Gong misreads. A man has slack and heavy limbs, pants, coughs and passes blood; Lei Gong takes it for injury of the lung and dares not treat. Huang Di shows where the illness actually sits: 四支解墯，此脾精之不行也 — the four limbs slack and heavy is the essence of the spleen not moving. The spleen rules the limbs, and its refined essence is what keeps them filled; when it does not move, the limbs go lax. The same paragraph has already said why: 脾氣之外絶，去胃外歸陽明, the spleen qi cut off from without and returning to the yang brightness, so that what should have gone to the limbs has gone elsewhere.
qí héng zhī fǔ
Brain, marrow, bone, vessels, gallbladder and the womb. They are born of the qi of earth, they store in the yin and image the earth, and they store without discharging — which is what a storing organ does, not what a palace does. Wang Bing gives the reason they cannot be classed with the true organs: they are not paired with them as interior and exterior, the gallbladder is joined to the liver yet does not pass things along as the palaces do, and the womb both takes in and gives out. The name keeps both halves of the paradox.
mù xì
The eye connection is the anatomical tie the chapter needs for its argument. The five essences are wrapped and knotted, 而與脉并爲系，上屬於腦，後出於項中 — bound with the vessels into a cord that goes up to the brain and out at the back of the neck. That single sentence gives evil a road: 故邪中於項，因逢其身之虚，其入深則隨眼系以入於腦. Once in, the brain turns, 腦轉則引目系急 — the turning pulls the cord tight — and the tight cord makes the eyes giddy, and the giddiness scatters the essence and the essence scatters into double vision. The term is the hinge of the chapter: without a physical connection there would be no way from the nape to the sight.
mù kē
Where water first shows. The chapter opens its account of water with a single sign: a slight swelling above the eye hollow, as though the patient had just risen from sleep. The place is chosen with care — the skin is thin, the tissue loose, and water, being yin and tending downward, collects where resistance is least; the same observation is made in the Suwen's discourse on febrile disease, where swelling below the eyes introduces the account of water. From there the chapter follows the course: the neck pulse moves, there is a cough from time to time, cold in the inner thigh, swelling of the shins, and then the belly enlarges and the water is established. The hollow is thus a threshold: what appears there is not yet the disease, but it is the place where the disease can first be seen.
miàn wáng
The face's seat of judgement, at the tip of the nose, and the one landmark the chapter names twice over. Above it lies the small intestine; below it the bladder and the uterus; and on it the colours of the two lower regions are read — in men a small-belly pain that reaches the testis, in women disease of the bladder and the womb, with the shape of the colour deciding whether the illness scatters or gathers. The name is political: the nose is where the face is governed, and the colours that appear there are the ones that concern generation. It is also the point at which the map turns from the viscera to the organs of reproduction, which is why the two paragraphs that follow are the most explicit in the book on the subject.
wēi
The faint quality: the pulse at the edge of touch, felt but scarcely. It closes the yin family in the opening sentence and is the commonest single quality in these chapters, which makes it the easiest to over-read: 微熱 and 微煩 are adverbs, not pulses. As a pulse it says decline — of yang at the inch, of nutritive qi when it pairs with astringency, of the whole movement when it is like a spider's thread. With relaxation it can also mean recovery is at hand (脉微緩者，爲欲愈也), so faintness is read by company, not alone.
pìn zàng
The complement of 牡藏, and the larger half of the division: three viscera to two. Spleen, lung and kidney are female stores, and the reasons are not stated but can be read off the sequence that follows — earth that receives and transforms, metal that gathers and stores, water that closes and hides. The chapter then does something the scheme does not require: it gives the female three viscera exactly the same fivefold apparatus as the male two, so that each has a colour, a season, a tone, a flavour and a pair of days. The point of the pairing is not hierarchy but the count: five viscera, five changes, five transports, twenty-five in all. 牝 and 牡 are the only words in the chapter that sort the viscera by sex, and they are dropped as soon as the count is made.
shí wǔ luò
The fifteen collateral vessels: one separating luo for each of the twelve channels, one for the governing vessel, one for the supervising vessel, and the great luo of the spleen. Each is named, given a starting point and a pair of signs, full and deficient, that identify it. The chapter's closing rule is still used: 實則必見，虚則必下，視之不見，求之上下 — when full they are seen, when deficient they sink; if not seen, seek above and below.