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.
gǔ kōng
The opening in a bone — the foramina and sockets through which the vessels pass — and this chapter's own word for the places one treats. It never defines the term; it enumerates it, going down the body: 髓空在腦後三分，在顱際鋭骨之下, then 一在齗基下, 一在項後中復骨下, 一在脊骨上空在風府上; 脊骨下空在凥骨下空; 數髓空在面俠鼻; 或骨空在口下當兩肩; 兩髆骨空在髆中之陽，臂骨空在臂陽，去踝四寸兩骨空之間; 股骨上空在股陽，出上膝四寸; 䯒骨空，在輔骨之上端; 股際骨空，在毛中動下; 凥骨空在髀骨之後，相去四寸. What distin-guishes this from a list of points is the last line of the section: 扁骨有滲理，湊無髓孔，易髓無空 — a flat bone seeps, joins, exchanges marrow, and has no opening. So the 空 belongs to bones of a certain kind, and a point in this chapter is a fact about a bone before it is a fact about a channel. The chapter counts with a different word, 穴 — 水俞五十七穴者, 行六穴 — which is why both are recorded here. 空 is read kōng throughout, as written, and not kǒng as in 鍼空 in chapter 24. The word occurs seven times in this chapter, and the chapter is named for it; it has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on the site before.
hún shù wéi yī
The phrase the whole chapter turns on, and the one the next chapter quotes back. The Emperor has the nine needles as nine chapters and nine instruments; what he lacks is the knot that holds them. 渾 is the word for what has not yet been divided, 束 the word for tying a bundle, and the compound is a demand for a method that is one thing rather than nine. Qi Bo's answer is three images — sun and moon, water and mirror, drum and echo — each an inside read from an outside without delay, and the closing formula of examination is the knot itself. 《禁服》 opens with Lei Gong quoting this very phrase at the Emperor and asking what it means, which is the book's own way of saying that the chapter succeeded: the question was answered, and the answer became a text.
cháng liū
Bowel flow is the second of the six lesions and the slowest. 有所結，氣歸之，衛氣留之，不得反，津液久留，合而爲腸溜，久者數歲乃成 — something forms a knot, the qi returns to it, the defending qi stays there and cannot turn back, the fluids remain a long time and join into a bowel flow; the long ones take several years to complete. The chapter adds the one sign that separates it from the next: 以手按之柔 — press it and it is soft. That softness is what makes it 溜 and not 瘤, fluid and not hardened tissue, and it is why the same passage can go on to describe 昔瘤 as the same knot pressed and found hard.
bó yāng
肓之原出於脖胦，脖胦一 — the source of the membrane issues at boyang, and boyang is one. It is the twelfth of the twelve sources and the only one that belongs to no viscus: with 鳩尾 it makes the pair 膏之原 and 肓之原, the fat above the diaphragm and the membrane below it. The chapter gives no location, only a count; later texts place it below the navel and call it 氣海, and 素問 40 already says 肓之原在臍下. The word is the reason the twelve are not simply five times two.
nǎo fēng
Brain wind is the first of the two head winds chapter 42 names: wind qi that travels up by 風府, the point at the nape where wind gathers. Wang Bing explains the route — above the wind palace lies the brain door, and so wind that follows the palace upward reaches the brain.
máo zhé
The sign that stands at the end of all five true visceral pulses. Each of the five has its own shape under the finger and its own colour in the face — the liver's is like running a finger along a blade and the complexion green-white, the heart's like a string of coix seeds and red-black — and each closes with the same three words: 毛折乃死, when the body hair breaks, then death. It is the one sign the chapter repeats five times without variation, and it is not a pulse sign at all: it is something you see on the body when the lung, which governs the skin and its hair, can no longer send anything to the surface.
xī jī
A long-standing accumulation under the ribs, named for the breath that has stopped moving rather than for the mass itself, and defined in chapter 47 as much by what cannot be done to it as by what it is: it does not hinder eating, it is not to be cauterised or needled, and drugs alone will not disperse it. The treatment the chapter names is guiding-and-pulling together with medicine.
jīng míng
In chapter 17 精明 wears two hats, and the chapter uses both. First it is the eyes themselves — the thing you look at (視精明) alongside the pulse. Second it is the complexion: 精明五色者，氣之華 也, the five colours are the flower of the qi. Then the chapter makes the same word do diagnostic work in reverse: if a man calls the long short and the white black, his 精 has declined. The eyes are thus both the instrument of examining and one of the things examined.
fā shēng
Wood going to excess. 木曰發生 — wood is called bursting growth — and its 紀 is 啓㪝: 發生之紀，是謂啓㪝。土疏泄，蒼氣達，陽和布化，陰氣乃隨，生氣淳化，萬物以榮. The earth loosens and gives way, the green qi reaches through, the yang's harmony spreads its transformations, the yin follows after, and the growing qi thickens everything into bloom. Its attributes are the excess form of the paragraph: 其化生，其氣美，其政散，其令條舒，其動掉眩巔疾，其德鳴靡啓坼，其變振拉摧拔…其象春，其經足厥陰少陽，其藏肝脾，其蟲毛介…其病怒. Where the even circuit's viscus is the liver alone, this one's is 肝脾, liver and spleen together — the excess of wood reaches the earth it overcomes. And where the even and short paragraphs end by saying which phase the circuit turns into, this group ends instead on the harm: 邪乃傷肝, 秋天's reaping comes back against it, and the trees wither.
shěng
A blight that falls, and in this chapter always a blight that falls *somewhere*: 其眚東、其眚南、其眚四維、其眚西、其眚北. It is paired with 災 throughout, and the two are not the same word — 災 is the disaster, and 眚 is where and on whom it lands. Each of the five passages that give it a direction goes on to give the viscus and the places the illness lodges in, so that a direction, an organ, and an outside are named together: wood falling short has its calamity in the east, its viscus the liver, its illness within in the flanks and without in the joints. The graph began as a film over the eye, and the sense of a visitation that spoils came from that.
huái zǐ
To be pregnant. Chapter 40 turns it into a rule of diagnosis: the body has the illness and yet there is no deviant pulse — the pulse does not testify against the pregnancy.
qì yī ér zǒu
One of the behaviours chapter 30 explains in the severe stage of Yangming disease: the patient casts off his clothes and runs. The chapter's explanation is heat — Yangming governs the flesh, its vessel is rich in blood and qi, evil lodging there turns to heat, and a body full of heat cannot bear clothes. The same behaviour recurs in the later literature as a stock sign of mania, but chapter 30 gives it no mental cause at all.