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.
fèi cháo bǎi mài
Four words that carry the whole argument of the chapter's middle. Every vessel reports to the lung, which is why the lung's own movement — breathing — is the place where the circulation can be read off. The sentence immediately before has traced food qi from stomach to sinew to heart to vessels; the sentence after takes the union of hair and vessel essence into the storehouse, out to the four viscera, and back to the steelyard, where balance makes the inch at the qi mouth. Read together, they are the reason a single pulse site can judge the body, and the reason later doctrine could put diagnosis at the wrist at all.
mǔ zàng
The chapter's way of sorting the five viscera by sex rather than by phase. Liver and heart are male stores; spleen, lung and kidney are female. The division is neither anatomical nor moral: it marks which two of the five belong with the generating, outward, yang half of the cycle and which three with the receiving, storing, yin half. What follows confirms the reading, because each viscus is then given its colour, season, tone, flavour and day in an unbroken series, and the male pair heads it. The vocabulary is borrowed from breeding — 牡 is a bull, 牝 a cow — and the borrowing is deliberate: the five stores are being treated here as stock, each with a season and a yield, which is exactly what the five changes need them to be.
fù suǐ bìng
The name the chapter gives to a shank so sore it cannot be touched: the evil has adhered to the marrow. It is the chapter's deepest and most violent case, treated not with the ordinary needle but with the chisel needle at Cut bone, letting blood — and it is one of the very few conditions in the Suwen to be given a formal name of its own.
bǐ lèi
To match kinds is the chapter's working method, and it is set against mere recitation. Lei Gong can recite the Canon of the Pulse, upper and lower chapters, and still cannot 别異比類, tell differences apart and match kinds. Huang Di's rebuke is that a physician who does not 引比類 has knowledge that is not clear — 不引比類，是知不明也 — and the sage, by contrast, 循法守度，援物比類，化之冥冥. The method is named six times and comes to rest at the very end of the chapter, joined to the Congrong: 明引比類從容, to draw plainly on the matching of kinds and the Congrong, is what the chapter calls 診輕.
kōng zhōng zhī jī
The hollow of the point and the movement of qi within it. 機之動不離其空中者，知氣之虚實，用鍼之徐疾也 — the mechanism never leaves its hollow: what moves there tells you whether the qi is excess or deficient, and that decides whether the needle goes slowly or quickly. Then the finer state: 空中之機清浄以微者，鍼以得氣，密意守氣勿失也 — when the mechanism in the hollow is clear and still and subtle, the needle has obtained qi, and the practitioner keeps his mind on it and does not let it go. The word 機 is chosen: a trigger is not a substance but the point at which something is released.
bìng jī
The mechanism of illness: what makes a disease do what it does. The chapter introduces it twice — 無失病機 at the end of the passage on the six transformations, 審察病機，無失氣宜 when the emperor asks for it outright — and then answers with nineteen articles, each of the form 諸…，皆屬於某: 諸風掉胘，皆屬於肝；諸寒收引，皆屬於腎；諸氣膹鬱，皆屬於肺. Fifteen articles name a viscus, four name heat, and the whole is closed by 謹守病機，各司其屬，有者求之，無者求之. What the word holds is therefore not a symptom but the point where the six qi and the viscera meet: the same shaking may belong to liver or to fire, and the article that claims it is the 機, the trigger.
qì jiāo
The region between the qi of heaven above and the qi of earth below, and the place the chapter assigns the human being to. It is not a boundary but a habitation: 上下之位，氣交之中，人之居也. The received line the chapter then quotes puts a hinge in the middle of it — above the heavenly pivot heaven governs, below it earth governs — and says that in the region where the qi meet, the qi of the human follows and the ten thousand things go by it. Everything the chapter has measured up to this point — the steps, the ke, the initial and the middle — is measured so that this place can be found.
mó yuán
The space between the stomach and intestines and the flesh over them. Chapter 39 lodges cold there twice: once so that pressing disperses the blood and cures the pain, once so that the blood cannot move and an accumulation forms.
yuè shì
Menstruation, called here the monthly affair. Its absence is listed among the signs of wind water and is the last of them to be explained: the womb vessel is closed because the qi presses upward on the lung and the heart qi cannot pass downward. The chapter's explanation is notable for placing the cause above the womb rather than in it.
zhōng jiāo
The middle of the three burners, lying in the stomach behind the upper burner. What it receives is strained of dregs, its fluids are steamed, and the refined part is poured upward into the lung vessel and changed into blood to nourish the living body. Because blood is made here, the chapter says nothing is more precious and that this alone travels the channel tunnels — which is why the camp qi is said to issue from the middle burner. Its image is foam: matter working, churned and rising.
yuè sǐ shēng
The moon's dying and living — 月 yuè, the moon; 死 sǐ, its waning; 生 shēng, its waxing — and the chapter uses the phrase four times as the rule that sets the number of insertions: 以月死生爲數, 以月死生爲痏數. The count is spelled out once: 月生一日一痏，二日二痏，十五日十五痏，十六日十四痏 — rising by one a day to fifteen at the full, then 漸少之 as the moon dies. It is the only arithmetic in the chapter, and it is given to exactly the complaints the chapter is about — wandering obstruction, the hip, the low back — things with no fixed place. The chapter then refuses to leave it mechanical: 用針者，隨氣盛衰，以爲痏數，針過其日數，則脱氣，不及日數，則氣不冩. The moon gives the number; the qi decides. The phrase has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
yuè guō
The moon's visible circumference, treated in chapter 26 as the clock that the blood keeps. When the rim is full, blood and qi are replete and the flesh firm; when it is empty, flesh wastes, the channels empty, the defence qi leaves and the form is left alone. The clinical rule follows directly: do not supplement at the full moon and do not treat at all when the rim is empty. The chapter's physiology of the calendar rests entirely on this word being about the rim rather than the moon as an object.