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.
zhēn
The metal needle, as opposed to the stone of 砭石 (id 453) and as the first element of the site's entries for 九鍼 (456), 鍼石 (504), 内鍼 (850), 員利鍼 (877) and 鑱鍼 (1084). Chapter 51 uses the graph twice and both uses are about the same thing: the level at which the needle is to stop. To carry it one level further is 反, reversal — to pass the flesh is to strike the sinew, and to pass the sinew is to strike the bone.
zhēn kǒng
The puncture the needle leaves, and the one thing chapter 53 says must be handled after the needle is withdrawn: 入實者，左手開鍼空也；入虚者，左手閉鍼空也 — for repletion the left hand opens it, for vacuity it closes it. Read with the two lines before it, the reason is plain: repletion is qi having come in, vacuity is qi going out, so the opening is left open to let qi escape and pressed shut to keep it from escaping. 空 is read kǒng here, as 王冰's gloss has it, not kōng.
jiǔ biàn
Nine methods answering to the nine changes of disease: shu, distant, channel, luo, partition, great-drain, hair, ju and scorch needling. The list moves outward from the point itself to the opposite side of the body and finally to fire, and it is the earliest taxonomy of technique in the book. Its companion list, the twelve sections, follows immediately and works by compound insertions instead.
jiǔ zhēn
The therapy of the south. The land is low, mist and dew gather, the people eat sour and fermented food, their grain closes up and they cramp. What is needed is the fine needle — Wang Bing: fine means small, and the small needle regulates the waxing and waning of the vessels. Yang Shangshan reads the nine needles as the fine needles. Wang Bing closes by saying the southerners hold them in high honour.
jiǔ qì
Anger, joy, grief, fear, cold, heat, fright, labour and thought — the nine things chapter 39 says move qi, and therefore the nine things it says produce illness. Each is given a direction: up, slack, dispersed, down, drawn in, let out, disordered, spent, knotted.
jiǔ yě
The nine-fold division of space that gives the nine probes their number. The arithmetic runs outward from heaven to earth to the human and triples to nine, 以應九野 — to answer to the nine regions; and the chapter then runs it inward again, 九分爲九野，九野爲九藏 — divided into nine regions, the nine regions become nine stores. It is the same move the chapter makes with everything: a number from the sky is applied to the landscape, and the landscape is then read back onto the body. The regions themselves are not described here; what the chapter wants is the correspondence, and the licence it gives to divide a body nine ways.
jiǔ zàng
The number this chapter arrives at by squaring three: three make heaven, three make earth, three make the human being; three times three is nine; nine divides into the nine regions; and the nine regions answer to nine stores — 形藏四，神藏五. This is not the familiar count of five stores and six receptacles. It is a count made to match the nine-fold division of the sky, and the chapter drops it two lines later for the eleven of 凡十一藏取決於膽.
jiǔ yí
The nine suitabilities are simply the doctrine of the nine needles: 明知九鍼之論，是謂九宜 — to know the nine needles' account is what the word means. The chapter gives the name and no content, pushing the whole subject back to the needle treatise. Its place is structural: the chapter runs five sets — prohibitions, depletions, excesses, counterflows, suitabilities — and the first four say when not to needle. The ninth suitability is the only positive one, the single door left open.
běi zhèng
The other of the two ways a year may stand: it faces north and takes its qi rather than issuing it. The pulse is stated first for this one — 北政之歲，少陰在泉，則寸口不應；厥陰在泉，則右不應；太陰在泉，則左不應 — and the rule is then repeated by position: 北政之歲，三陰在下，則寸不應；三陰在上，則尺不應. The two administrations are exact mirrors: what 南政 answers with its inch when the three yin are above, 北政 answers with its cubit, and the other way round. The chapter draws no conclusion beyond this and the sentence that closes it — 知其要者，一言而終，不知其要，流散無窮 — and which years are northern is left, in the base text, to the reckoning of the year.
tiān shù
The number or measure heaven apportions — the chapter's word for the bound set on a life, as distinct from what a person does with it. Huang Di asks whether an old man without children has spent his material strength or whether it is simply the number of heaven; the answer is a count by sevens and eights, which treats the two as one question. The same measure reappears at the close of the counts, where even those whose span exceeds its measure still may not pass the bound.
qì shù
One half of the pair this chapter sets up against itself: 天度 governs the course of sun and moon, 氣數 records the work of generation and transformation. One warning for the reader: in ordinary Chinese 氣數 came to mean allotment, destiny, the number of one's days. Here it means nothing of the kind — it is a calendar term, the count of the qi that come round in a year.
zhì shù
治數之道，從容之葆 — the way of treatment lies in its numbers, and what preserves it is the unhurried reading. The two are put together because either without the other fails: numbers without ease become 坐持寸口，診不中五脉, a wrist held and a pulse not reached; ease without numbers becomes 妄治時愈，愚心自得, a lucky cure taken for a method. The sentence that follows is the chapter's darkest: 百病所起，始以自怨，遺師其咎 — when the hundred illnesses arise, the physician first blames himself and then leaves the fault with his teacher. 治數 thus stands at the point where the art becomes accountable: it is the measure by which a failure can be called a failure at all.