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.
xiù mén
The deepest point the camp qi reaches on its upward course. The qi ascends from the liver to the lung, follows the throat, enters the orifice of the hang sang, and comes to its end at the gate of xu. The commentators place it at the back of the nasal cavity, above the soft palate — the place where breath and the channel's qi meet, and past which the chapter says the qi does not go. It is named once in the book and never described, which is why every gloss of it is an inference from the route that leads there.
jīn guì
A lost book whose subject chapter 46 states in four graphs: it decides life and death. The chapter lists it third among the five it has drawn on, and the clause is the shortest it gives any of them — diagnosis at its most final. The name survives in the title of the Suwen's own fourth chapter, 金匱真言論.
sūn luò
The finest vessels — the branches of the branches. The chapter's treatment rules distinguish three tiers: if the disease is in the channel, treat the channel; if it is in the grandchild network, bleed the grandchild network; if it is a blood disease with pain in the body, treat the channel and the network together. Elsewhere in the chapter the network vessels appear as the place where a pulse that is intermittent and hooked puts its disease. The anatomy is the point: the needle goes to the depth the disease has reached, and no deeper.
dà dīng
The boil that comes of eating too well. Suwen 3 lists it among the things that happen when the yang qi is opened and then met by something: sweat that meets dampness gives pimples and prickly heat, and rich food gives a great boil — and one takes it as though holding an empty vessel, which is to say that nothing in the body resists it. 丁 is read as 疔, the sore whose root goes deep.
dà mèn
The name the chapter gives the master disorder. Clear qi belongs in the yin and turbid qi in the yang, the nutrient qi follows the vessels and the defensive runs counter to them; when clear and turbid interfere and the confusion gathers in the chest, that is the great congestion. It is not one of the five disorders but their common root — the five that follow, in heart, lung, intestine and stomach, arms and legs, and head, are the places where the confusion comes out. The patient is fretful, silent, head bowed and still, and the treatment is neither supplement nor drain but guidance, because nothing here is in excess or deficit.
tài yī
The Great One is the chapter's mover. On the winter solstice it takes up its dwelling in the Leaf-Hiding palace; forty-six days later it moves to Heaven's Keeping, then to the Granary Gate, the Yin Hollow, the Heaven Palace, the Dark Bend, the Granary Fruit and the New Hollow, forty-five or forty-six days in each, and comes back to Leaf-Hiding — a year. 太一日遊 — it travels day by day, and when it shifts, 天必應之以風雨: the sky must answer with wind and rain, and whether the rain comes on the day, before it, or after it decides the year. Its changes are read for ruler, minister, officer, general and people according to the palace it is in. The name is a piece of Han cosmology rather than medicine, and its presence in the Lingshu is the clearest evidence that the book contains a calendar layer as well as a clinical one.
dà shù
The first of the back transport points, and the one that gives the row its name. It lies at the end of the shuttle bone — 杼骨, the high bone of the first vertebra — which is why later needling identified it with Dazhu, just below the nape. The chapter's interest is not the point but the order: the five viscera are reached from the back, and the great transport is where the count begins. Its position is stated before any other, and the rest follow at the fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh and fourteenth vertebra, so that the spine becomes a map of the organs. The name is therefore a claim about rank: of all the transports on the back this is the great one, the one through which the whole row is entered.
tài yī tiān fú
Both agreements at once: a year that is a heaven tally — the circuit agreeing with the qi that presides above — and a year meeting — the circuit agreeing with the branch — at the same time. The chapter names it in answer to a question the base text gives without 帝曰 in front of it: 天符歲會何如？ Of the three, it is the honoured one, and the chapter grades the three as offices: the heaven tally holds the law, the year's position issues commands, and the great unity is the person himself. The severity follows the rank — struck by the holder of the law the illness is swift and perilous, by the issuer of commands slow and lingering, and by the honoured one sudden and fatal.
dà gǔ
The chapter's anatomy of meeting places. 王冰：大經所會，謂之大谷也；十二分者，謂十二經脈之部分。小絡所會，謂之小谿 — three hundred and fifty-four of them, less the twelve transport points. These are where the defence qi comes to rest and where evil qi lodges as a guest, and needle and stone are sent along them to drive it out. 張介賓 counts the eight ravines as the two elbows, two armpits, two hips and two hollows behind the knees.
tài xū
The opening words of the 太始天元冊文, the document the chapter says it has been examining for ten generations, and the only cosmological image in a chapter otherwise made of arithmetic: 太虚廖廓，肇基化元. The line is one of a hymn in four-graph phrases — 萬物資始，五運終天; 布氣真靈，總統坤元; 九星懸朗，七曜周旋 — and it does what the surrounding sentences do not, which is to say that the circuits arise from somewhere. 《說文》 glosses 虛 as 大丘, a great mound: the word began as an emptied height rather than as nothing at all, which is closer to what this chapter means by it.
máo
The autumn quality of the pulse. Chapter 18 gives it in the same frame as the rest: 秋胃微毛，曰平 — slightly hair-like with stomach qi in it is balanced; hair much and stomach qi little is lung disease; hair alone without stomach qi is death; and hair carrying string in it foretells illness in spring. The dying lung pulse at the end of the chapter is the same quality taken to its end: 如物之浮，如風吹毛, like a thing afloat, like hair blown on the wind — lightness that has lost its root.
bó mài
The pulse of the passage that runs 搏脉痺躄，寒熱之交 — a hammering pulse with blockage and lameness, which the chapter explains as cold and heat meeting in the body. It is one of the few places the book gives a pulse-quality and its clinical company together, and it sits two clauses from the opposite finding, 脉孤, the pulse with nothing behind it. Between the pulse that attacks the fingers and the pulse that has nothing to push it, the chapter has covered both ends.