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.
gù xié
The chapter's answer to its own question, and a word that changes the shape of the argument. Something was hurt before — dampness that lodged in the blood and between the muscles, a fall that left blood inside, an anger or a meal or a change of weather that was never resolved — and it stayed, silent. When the pores open and wind and cold come, the new evil does not act alone; it joins the old, and the two together produce the illness. 相襲 is the verb: to come upon in succession, like garments put on one over another. The concept is the chapter's real contribution, because it explains illness without an obvious cause: nothing new was needed, only the arrival of a small thing upon an old one. It is also why the chapter can speak of ghosts and mean it medically — what comes from so far back leaves no trace at the door.
xī liú
The old tumour is the third of the six lesions and the hard one. It begins like the bowel flow — 已有所結，氣歸之，津液留之，邪氣中之 — a knot forms, qi returns to it, fluids stay, evil enters it; then 凝結日以易甚，連以聚居 — it congeals and grows worse by the day, joining into a colony — 爲昔瘤，以手按之堅, and pressed it is hard. The pair 腸溜/昔瘤 is the chapter's demonstration that the same cause gives a soft mass or a hard one according to time: 溜 is fluid still moving, 瘤 is what has stopped. 昔 does the work of a diagnosis in a single character.
kāi hé shū
The three offices by which the six channels are ordered. Yang: greater yang opens, yang brightness closes, lesser yang pivots. Yin: greater yin opens, ceasing yin closes, lesser yin pivots. The image is a door — one leaf swings out, one leaf shuts, and the hinge is what makes the two a single moving thing.
chuán huà zhī fǔ
Stomach, large intestine, small intestine, triple burner and bladder. They are born of the qi of heaven, their qi images heaven — which in this chapter means one thing only, that it does not stop — and therefore they discharge and do not store. They take in the turbid qi the organs are finished with and carry it out. Wang Bing: the dregs are changed and passed out, they cannot be held long within, but once transformed must be transmitted and discharged.
fēn lǐ
Where the chapter says the needle goes, in every season but at different depths: 及與分理 in spring, 循理 in autumn, 於分理 in winter. It is the same word that gives 腠理, the interstices of the skin, from chapter 1 onwards. The chapter's point is that the seams of the body are the map — you follow them, you do not measure your way in.
yù jié
The knot that grief ties. The sentence it stands in is the fourth item on the list of what a physician must know: 必知終始，有知餘緒，切脉問名，當合男女，離絶菀結，憂恐喜怒，五藏空虛，血氣離守 — know the end and the beginning and the remaining threads, feel the pulse and ask the name, fit it to man and woman, and know parting and cutting off, the pent-up knot, grief and fear, joy and rage, the five viscera empty, the blood and qi scattered and not keeping their place. 離絶 is the severance, 菀結 what the severance leaves: qi that cannot move on. The pair of graphs carries a whole diagnosis of the passions, and the chapter's verdict on the physician who does not know it is blunt — 工不能知，何術之語, if the craftsman cannot know these, what art is there to speak of?
pò
The soul that is tied to the body, and in this chapter the thing left behind when the yang is gone: 其魄獨居 — its po dwells alone. The phrase says, without saying it, that the patient is as good as dead: the yang has left and only the corporeal soul remains, keeping the body company by itself. The same word gives 魄門, the gate of the po, in chapter 11.
shù lǐ
The principle of the transport points is what 守數據治 must not lose. The chapter's closing argument runs: in treating illness the qi kept within is the treasure, and one follows and seeks out its principle; seek it and not find it, and the fault lies in the outer and the inner; keep to the numbers and treat by them, and do not miss the principle of the transport points. Able to practise this, a man is never in danger all his life. Not knowing it, the five viscera are pent up and ripen and abscesses break out in the six receptacles. 俞 is read shù and is the same word as 腧, the point through which channel qi is reached; 理 is the order of depth and course that makes one point the place to needle and another not. The phrase therefore carries the whole of the chapter's technique in two graphs: not the point as a mark, but the reason it is a point.
rán gǔ
The projecting bone — 然 rán, the first half of the name 然谷; 骨 gǔ, a bone — and 王冰 identifies it without hedging: 然骨之前，然谷穴也。在足内踝前起大骨下陷者中，足少陰滎出. It is the bone that rises in front of the inner ankle, and the point below it takes its name from it. This chapter names it three times, never alone — always 然骨之前 — and always as the place to bleed when the foot lesser yin network is the trouble: once for sudden heart pain with swelling, once for the man who has fallen and is holding blood, once for a throat too swollen to swallow spit. Every one of the three ends the same way, with blood and with time: 如食頃而已, 出血立已. Later numbering makes 然谷 the second point of the kidney channel; the chapter uses no numbers, only a bone that can be felt and a hollow under it. The word has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
mài
The pulse, considered three ways at once. As flesh it is the web of vessels; as movement it is what the finger feels at the wrist; as reading it is the chief instrument of diagnosis in this book. The five chapters open by dividing all pulses into a yang family (大、浮、數、動、滑) and a yin family (沉、濇、弱、弦、微), then name the six robbers that can make any pulse sick (弦、緊、浮、滑、沉、濇). Every quality entered beside this headword is one member of those families, and each is defined by the situation the base text puts it in rather than by a later handbook.
zhǔ qì
The qi that holds its place. At the end of the chapter, after the four prohibitions and the licence to offend against them when the weather has turned, comes the last question: 假者何如？ and the answer 有假其氣，則無禁也，所謂主氣不足，客氣勝也. The six 主氣 are the fixed seasonal qi — 厥陰風木、少陰君火、少陽相火、太陰濕土、陽明燥金、太陽寒水 — each in charge of two months; the 客氣 is the qi the year brings. When the visiting qi is stronger than the one in charge, the prohibitions of 四畏 can be set aside. The pair 主/客 is the chapter's final distinction, and it is the one that makes the whole sixty-year apparatus usable at the bedside.
wàng qì
The qi that is in its season and at its full. The chapter explains with it the one failure of treatment that is not the formula's fault: 帝曰：服寒而反熱，服熱而反寒，其故何也？歧伯曰：治其王氣，是以反也. To treat the season's own qi is to treat what is strongest and should be left; the medicine reaches the qi that is at its height and drives it, and the patient's cold turns to heat or his heat to cold. Pressed further — 帝曰：不治王而然者，何也？ — the chapter gives the second cause, 不治五味屬也, and the passage on the five flavours entering the stomach follows. The word therefore carries both halves of the argument: what happens when the season's qi is treated, and what happens when the flavours go to their own viscera and the qi grows with use — 久而增氣，物化之常也；氣增而久，夭之由也.