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.
liù liù zhī jié
Heaven's unit in this chapter: six rounds of sixty days make the year of three hundred and sixty days, and the days left over are swept into an intercalary month. Earth answers with nines of nine. The claim the chapter builds on this is that the body is counted the same way — three hundred and sixty-five nodes, nine stores. Note that 節 in the next breath means a node of the body, not a division of the year: the chapter is making the pun deliberately.
liù shí shǒu
The sixty heads of the extraordinary and the constant: an ancient diagnostic writing in sixty sections, named here and now lost. The chapter says 奇恒之勢，乃六十首 — the configurations of the extraordinary and the constant are sixty in number — and then states what a physician does with them: 診合微之事，追陰陽之變，章五中之情，其中之論，取虛實之要，定五度之事，知此乃足以診. So the sixty heads are not sixty diseases but sixty heads of reading: the finest agreements, the changes of yin and yang, the conditions within the five viscera, and from them the crux of deficiency and excess and the five measures. The number sixty is the old round of the calendar applied to diagnosis, as the sixty-year cycle is.
chǐ zhī pí fū
The skin of the forearm, felt as a third witness beside the colour of the face and the movement of the pulse. The chapter pairs them one by one: an urgent pulse and the skin is urgent, a slow pulse and the skin is slow, a small pulse and the skin is reduced, a large pulse and the skin rises, slippery with slippery, rough with rough. Then the rule that makes the region worth examining: 善調尺者，不待於寸 — one who is good at the cubit need not wait for the inch. The passage is the earliest systematic statement of what later needling called 尺膚診, and its logic is the same as the drumstick's: the inside and the outside are one event.
chǐ fū
The skin of the cubit is chapter 74's diagnostic surface. Huang Di asks whether one may do without looking at the colour and feeling the pulse, and read the disease from the cubit alone — 獨調其尺，以言其病，從外知内. The answer is a table of textures: 尺之緩急、小大、滑濇 and 肉之堅脆 give the form of the disease; skin slippery and oily means wind; rough as the scales of a dried fish means water overflowing into the drinks; hot with a racing pulse means warmth-disease; cold with a small pulse means drainage and lack of qi; hot first and cold after means cold-heat. The chapter then reads heat and cold by location along the arm — elbow, forearm, palm — and maps them onto the body above and below the waist. It is the Lingshu's most systematic piece of surface diagnosis, and the word 尺膚 keeps it apart from the pulse that is taken at the same inch.
pí fū zhuó
The last of the chapter's signs of death, and the most physical. Three verdicts are given in a row: a swift pulse is not disease; a slow pulse is disease; a pulse that does not come and go is death. Then, without a pulse at all, the skin sticks — 皮膚著者死 — the flesh is gone and the skin has adhered to what is left. The chapter has spent its length on numbers, sectors and hours; it ends by asking a finger to test whether there is anything left under the skin.
cù
The skipping quality: a rapid pulse that stops once and returns. The book defines it against its twin: 脉來緩，時一止復來者，名曰結；脉來數，時一止復來者，名曰促 — the same single stop, knotted when the pulse is slow, skipping when it is rapid. Its cause is yang excess (脉陽盛則促，陰盛則結). Later in the book the same character is the ordinary verb 'to hurry' (當促其間) and the adjective 'to shorten' (再逆促命期); neither is a pulse, and both are marked.
huǎn jīn
The loose sinew of the abdomen, named for its texture rather than its place. An accumulation on it mimics the yang brightness accumulation: pain after eating, ease when hungry. It is also the path by which a mass at the membrane source spreads its pain outward — 痛而外連於緩筋. Being slack is not a fault: it is why the evil can lodge there at all, and why the pain behaves differently from pain fixed in a tight place.
huá
The slippery quality: a pulse that slides under the finger without resistance. It stands in the yang family and answers repletion, yet the Pingmai fa gives it a second and more exact origin: 翕奄沉，名曰滑 — the closing and sinking together of yin and yang is what produces slip, and when the two are harmonious the pulse is slippery and the positions are level. Slip is thus not simply heat; it is the sign of two qi meeting without obstruction.
chí
The slow quality: fewer beats than the breath calls for. In the yin family it pairs with astringency to name disease of the viscera, and it is the quality that forbids purgation while it lasts. Yet the same word is used in a second, technical sense in the Pingmai fa, where 榮氣和，名曰遲 — the harmony of the nutritive qi is itself called slow. A reader who takes every 遲 for a sick pulse will misread that passage, so both senses are entered below.
rú
The soft quality: a pulse supple and yielding, without hardness. In this book it is chiefly the liver's own softness — 其脉微弦，濡弱而長，是肝脉也 — and the quality a spring pulse ought to have (二月之時，脉當濡弱). It becomes a sign of loss only when it stands alone at the inch: 諸濡亡血. Softness is therefore normally a good sign, and the entry marks where it turns.
gū zhī fǔ
The name the chapter gives the triple burner, and the reason it gives is structural: every other fu is paired with a zang — lung with large intestine, heart with small intestine, liver with gallbladder, spleen with stomach, kidney with bladder — and the triple burner is left over. Yet it is not functionless. It is 中瀆之府, the fu of the central sluice; 水道出焉, the waterway issues from it; it attaches to the bladder and constrains the lower burner. The chapter thus states in one line the problem later physiology argued for centuries — an organ with a function and no shape — and refuses to solve it, because its business is pairing, and pairing is what the triple burner does not do.
mài gū
A pulse that has lost what it should have behind it — the stomach qi that makes a pulse gentle and deliberate. The chapter reads it in one word: 脉孤爲消氣, a solitary pulse means the qi is being consumed. It belongs to the same family as chapter 7's 真藏脈, the true storing pulse that appears when the stomach qi is gone, and as 懸絶 in the same chapter — the pulse that has been cut loose from everything that fed it.