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.
dà
The large quality: a pulse broader and fuller than ordinary, the first of the yang family in the opening sentence of the book. Its interest lies in a contradiction the text does not hide: at the inch, 大爲實 (large is replete); after a mistaken treatment in Taiyang, 大則爲虚 (large is empty). Same quality, opposite conclusions, because the second is a large pulse drained of substance by sweating. The entry keeps both, since a reader who knows only one will misjudge the other.
yè zhé
Leaf-Hiding is the first of the eight palaces and the one the year turns on. 太一常以冬至之日，居叶蟄之宫 — on the winter solstice the Great One dwells there, and after the round of the other seven it returns: 四十五日，日復居叶蟄之宫，曰冬至矣. The name is a calendar image rather than an anatomical one: 蟄 is the insect's winter hiding, and the palace is the north, the point at which the year's qi is most withdrawn. The chapter uses it twice more — the day of the solstice is the day on which wind and rain are watched, and a wind from the south at that moment is 虚風, the evil that will be stored in the bone until spring.
xiǎo dà
The lesser and the greater — 小 xiǎo, small; 大 dà, great — which in this chapter means urine and stool. The chapter sets the rule in four words: 小大不利治其標，小大利治其本. When the passages do not flow, the branch is treated; when they flow, the root is. It is the same reasoning it has just applied to fullness in the centre, and it is the second of only two situations in the chapter that reverse the order of treatment. Later the same rule is written from the other end — 先小大不利而後生病者，治其本 — and read plainly it contradicts the first sentence; 張介賓 takes the two as mutually explanatory rather than opposed, and the base text is printed as it stands. The catalogue that follows is full of the same thing in other words: 小便閉 four times, 閉塞不通 once, 腹脹 three times.
dì shì
The whole answer to the chapter's question, in four words. Asked why one disease can be treated five ways and still get better, Qibo replies that the lie of the land makes it so — the methods differ because the ground differs, not because the physicians disagree. Wang Bing unpacks it: the reference is to the generative, growing, gathering and storing of heaven and earth, and to the disposition of high and low, dry and damp. Everything that follows — east, west, north, south, centre — is this sentence unfolded.
mìng mén
In this chapter the life gate is the eye: 太陽根于至陰，結于命門，命門者，目也. The definition is given in four characters and is not argued, because the chapter's business is to say where each channel is knotted, and for taiyang the answer is the eye. The name matters because later medicine gave 命門 to a place in the kidney and made it the source of the body's fire; that sense is not here and must not be read back. What is here is a topographical statement: the yang of the foot taiyang gathers at the organ of sight, which is why the eye is where its diseases show and where its points are taken.
zhěn qīng
診輕 is the chapter's last name for its own method, and it is a name with a textual shadow. 明引比類從容，是以名曰診輕 — to draw plainly on the matching of kinds and the Congrong is what is called the light touch in diagnosis; and the Song editors note that the 太素 reads 診經, the canon of diagnosis, rather than 診輕. Either way the sentence closes the chapter on method: what Lei Gong did with the slack-limbed man was to reach for a familiar name, injury of the lung, instead of matching kinds until the spleen showed. The light touch is the opposite of that — not a light judgement, but a reading that need not strain because the kind has been found.
dú shǐ
The last of the six names in the chapter's second answer. The six are given places in a household: 三陽爲父，二陽爲衛，一陽爲紀；三陰爲母，二陰爲雌，一陰爲獨使. Father, mother, guard, female, order — each of these is a relation, and a relation needs two terms. The lone envoy is the exception: an office held alone, a commission carried out without a partner. The one yin is the last of the yin, the channel the chapter elsewhere calls 厥陰, and what it carries is the office of bringing the yin to its end and handing it over — which is why the answer that follows begins with 二陽一陰 and ends with 一陰一陽代絕. The phrase is a small piece of political imagery inside a medical argument, and it does real work: it says that the one yin is not weaker than the others but differently placed.
cháng
The long quality: a pulse whose coming and going extend beyond the position, so that it seems to pass under the finger and keep going. It is not one thing in this book. In the liver it is the soft length of wood (濡弱而長); in the heart it is length joined to surging (洪大而長); in the Yangming stage of cold damage it is length in all three positions at once (尺寸俱長). The entry therefore reads length by the organ or stage that carries it.
fāng zhì jūn chén
The rule by which the drugs in a formula are ranked: one is lord because it attacks the disease, the others are ministers because they second him, and others again are envoys because they carry the ministers' work out — 主病之謂君，佐君之謂臣，應臣之謂使. The chapter puts the rule and then immediately fences it off: 非上下三品之謂也, not what the three grades of the pharmacopoeia mean. The numbers that fix it are given earlier, when the emperor asks how large a formula may be: 君一臣二，制之小也；君一臣三佐五，制之中也；君一臣三佐九，制之大也 — one lord, two ministers, the small formula; one lord, three ministers and five assistants, the middle; one lord, three ministers and nine assistants, the large. 君臣 is therefore a relation inside a prescription, not a rank of the drugs in themselves, and the chapter's point is that the same drug may be lord in one formula and minister in the next.
shī jīng
The second of the two ills that have no outside cause. A man was once rich and has since grown poor; no evil has struck him, and yet it is called 失精, the loss of essence. The pairing with 脱營 is exact: 脱營 takes the camp, 失精 takes the essence, and together they cover the two things a body keeps in reserve. What follows in the text is common to both — the five qi linger and stay, the illness finds something to join, the body dwindles, the qi is deficient and without essence, the illness runs deep and there is no qi, and the man is chilled and startled. The physician who does not ask this history will look for the illness in the viscera and find nothing there, which is the first of the five errors.
xià jiāo
The lowest of the three burners, separating from the coiled intestine and pouring into the bladder. Grain and water lie together in the stomach, become dregs, and descend into the large intestine; the seeping part goes down by a separate course and filters into the bladder. The chapter's proof of it is the wine: wine enters after the grain and leaves as urine before it, because its qi is fierce and clear. Its image is a drain — what is carried away and not kept.
xià jīng
A medical classic that no longer exists, quoted here for one sentence: when the stomach is not harmonious, sleep is not settled. The Suwen cites the Lower Classic several times, usually beside an Upper Classic; what is left of it is what other books chose to copy out, and this line was copied more than most.