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.
xià zhì
The dividing line by which chapter 31 splits one disease into two named diseases. Cold damage that develops into heat is called warm disease if it comes before the summer solstice and summerheat disease if it comes after. Nothing is said about the cause changing — it is one cause, one progression, and two names read off the calendar. This is the chapter's closing move, and it answers the opening one: heat diseases are all of the class of cold damage, and even when they are divided by season they are still that class.
shǔ
The name chapter 31 gives to cold damage that has developed into heat after the summer solstice, the counterpart of warm disease before it. The chapter's therapeutic note for summerheat is one line and is easy to get wrong: the sweat should be let out along with it, and must not be stopped. This is the same logic that governs the three-day rule earlier in the chapter — follow the direction the disease is already taking rather than opposing it.
fǎ tiān zé dì
Chapter 25's description of practice at its highest: not applying a technique but answering a situation, so that the response comes like an echo and follows like a shadow. The phrase is set directly against the competence of the common workmen, who know only that the empty should be filled and the full drained. The clause that closes the sentence is the one readers remember: 道無鬼神 — there are no ghosts or spirits in the way. It is the book's clearest refusal to explain a good outcome by anything other than the physician's own responsiveness.
jīng shuǐ
The rivers of the earth, used in chapter 27 as the middle term of the correspondence that the whole chapter argues from: heaven has its mansions and degrees, earth has its rivers, the human being has channels. Because of that correspondence the chapter can describe four kinds of weather — mild, frozen, baking, gusting — and have each one say something exact about the blood: quiet, congealed and dragging, boiling over, heaving into ridges. The image is not decorative. It is what licenses the chapter's central claim, that an evil entering a pulse behaves like a river meeting wind.
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.
bā dòng
The eight winds and, more importantly, their variation. Chapter 25 lists holding their changes alongside the alternation of the five conquests as one of the attainments that put a physician beyond deception and let him go out and in alone. The emphasis falls on 變, change: it is not a table of eight winds to be memorised but a set of movements to be tracked, in the same way the chapter later wants the physician to track the comings and goings of qi rather than to know its name.
bā zhèng
The eight upright are the eight nodes of the year, and they enter this chapter at its last turn, where the sage's knowledge is summed up: heaven and earth, the four seasons, the five viscera and six receptacles, female and male, outer and inner, needling and moxa and stone and drug — and then 八正九候，診必副矣, in the eight upright and the nine indicators his diagnosis must match. The eight are the two solstices, the two equinoxes and the four beginnings of the seasons; 正 is the due weather of each, and the chapter's point is that a diagnosis which does not answer to them is not a diagnosis. The nine indicators beside it are the three sectors and three depths of the pulse, which have their own entry.
bā fēng
One of the things the physicians of middle antiquity used ten days of decoction to drive out. Wang Bing quotes the Ling shu for the eight names and for what each wind does: the child wind from the east strikes the sinews and lodges in the liver, the weak wind from the south-east strikes the flesh and lodges in the stomach, the great weak wind from the south strikes the vessels and lodges in the heart, the scheming wind from the south-west strikes the flesh and lodges in the spleen, the hard wind from the west strikes the skin and lodges in the lung, the breaking wind from the north-west strikes the small intestine channel, the great hard wind from the north strikes the bone and lodges in the kidney, and the baleful wind from the north-east strikes the armpit and flank and lodges in the large intestine.
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.
wǔ yùn
The five phases taken as a calendar. They succeed one another, each presiding in its turn, and when the appointed day is reached the ring begins again — 如環無端, like a ring without end. Note what this chapter asks of them: not what the five phases are, but whether a physician can tell which is in charge and whether it has come early or late. Later books build the enormous system of 五運六氣 on this word; here it is still a way of keeping time.