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.
gū zàng
The spleen, and the reason it cannot be read like the others. Liver, heart, lung and kidney each take a season — spring, summer, autumn, winter — and each therefore has a pulse shape that should appear when its season comes round. The spleen takes none; it is earth, standing at the centre, and its office is to irrigate the four quarters. That is why its normal state cannot be seen in the pulse at all: it is distributed among the other four rather than present in its own right. Only its disorder shows — arriving like flowing water when it exceeds, like a bird's beak when it falls short.
tiān zǐ
Chapter 25's redefinition of the imperial title as an epistemic one: not the man who rules the myriad things but the man who knows them. The definition is sandwiched between two other claims about knowing — that heaven and earth become father and mother to whoever answers the four seasons, and that the black-haired people share their food and know none of it. Read together, the three clauses describe a hierarchy of knowledge rather than of rank, which is unusual and worth noticing.
huà yuán
What to give before anything else. Each of the six 司天之政 closes with a set of orders, and in each the same phrase appears: 必折其鬱氣，先資其化源. The source is the mother of the qi the year has too little of — supply it, and the failing season recovers from below rather than being forced from above. The idea belongs to the 五運 method: every phase is generated by another, and a year whose qi is short is a year in which the generator must be reinforced. It stands in the chapter just before the diet and the prohibitions, as the first of the three things the 治則 asks for.
shuǐ zōng
The source of water, defined by a chain of three identifications: 水宗者，積水也。積水者，至陰也。至陰者，腎之精也 — the source of water is gathered water; gathered water is utmost yin; utmost yin is the essence of the kidney. The argument runs downward, from the visible tear to the kidney: water is not made at the eye, it is gathered, held and released. And it is held — 宗精之水所以不出者，是精持之也 — the water of the source essence does not come out because the essence holds it, supports it and wraps it.
yuán
The sixth point of a fu channel, inserted between the stream and the river: 過于京骨…爲原. The five zang have five points and no separate source; the six fu have six, and the extra one is the source. The reason is stated nowhere and implied everywhere: a zang stores and its qi is reached at the transport, a fu transmits and its qi must be met where it passes. Later needling solved the asymmetry by taking the transport of a yin channel as its source, which is why the yin channels are said to have a source at all. Chapter One's twelve sources are a different count of a different thing — two for each viscus plus the fat and the membrane — and the two reckonings should not be merged.
nán zhèng
One of the two ways a year may stand, to which the chapter sends the reader when asked where the yin is on the wrist: 陰之所在，寸口何如？歧伯曰：視歲南北，可知之矣. 南政 is the year that faces south and issues its commands, and the pulse it gives is stated in one line: 南政之歲，少陰司天，則寸口不應；厥陰司天，則右不應；太陰司天，則左不應，諸不應者，反其診則見矣 — the three yin, when they stand above in such a year, are not answered at the wrist, and a reversed reading finds them. A second line gives the rule by position rather than by name: 南政之歲，三陰在天，則寸不應；三陰在泉，則尺不應，左右同. The base text leaves it to the reckoning of the year to say which years these are, and the commentators divide: 王冰、張介賓、馬蒔 make the years of 甲己 earth the southern ones on the ground that earth is honoured among the five, 張志聰 makes 戊癸 fire the southern ones, and a third view reckons by the southern declination of the ecliptic.
tiān shòu
The span of years heaven allots. Suwen 1 uses it for the case that tests its own count: a man already old who yet has children. His span, Qi Bo says, has passed beyond the measure, his qi and vessels stay open and his kidney qi has something left over — but even so, the sentence that follows says, a man does not go past sixty-four and a woman not past forty-nine, because by then the essence qi of heaven and earth is spent. The exception is real and it is bounded.
lǚ jīn
The sinew beside the spine, and the seat of one of the chapter's seven accumulations. Its signs are the most paradoxical of the set: hunger makes the mass appear, food makes it vanish, and pressure cannot find it — because it lies behind the intestine, so an empty gut lets it show and a full one hides it. The name's 膂 is the spine itself; 旅 in the graph gives the image of a column drawn up in ranks.
shén jī
What a living thing has and a dead one does not, named for the trigger that sets a mechanism off. The chapter gives it in a single conditional: if exit and entry are abandoned, the spirit mechanism perishes in transformation; if rising and falling cease, the qi that stands is isolated and in peril. The two halves are the two pairs of movements — exit and entry keep the mechanism alive, rising and falling keep the qi standing — and the chapter then generalises: no vessel is without them. The only thing that neither generates nor transforms, the chapter closes, is the true person, who is one with the way.
shén bù shǐ
Qibo's two-word answer to the hardest question in the chapter, and perhaps in the book: why does a patient with the best physician, the correct methods, and every advantage of nearness and attention still not recover? Because the needle and the stone are only a method; what they work on is the patient's spirit, and once the spirit will not answer them, no method reaches him. The chapter gives the mechanism at once — appetites without end, cares without stop, and the construction stagnates and the defence is dispelled. It is the same doctrine as chapter 13's 得神者昌，失神者亡, stated from the physician's side instead of the patient's.
shén cáng xíng cáng
The nine stores of the body, split two ways. Five are spirit stores — the liver, heart, spleen, lung and kidney, which hold something invisible and can be ruined past repair; four are form stores, which hold the shapes of things. The number comes from the arithmetic of the chapter: three sectors of three probes make nine, the nine answer to the nine regions, and the nine regions become the nine stores. What the chapter does with the distinction is blunt: when the five are ruined their colour must go dull, and once the colour has gone dull there is death. The whole nine-fold scheme, in other words, lands on a single clinical remark about the face.
shén zhuǎn bù huí
Four lines that later commentators never stopped quoting, and the doctrine the chapter is written to deliver: the spirit's motion is one-directional. If it reverses, it is no longer turning, and the mechanism is lost. Everything in the chapter — the colour that climbs and is called rebellion, the pulse that travels into what conquers it, the season that runs backwards — is an instance of this one rule. It is also the nearest the book comes to saying what life is: a turning that goes one way.