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.
jiǔ ruò
The therapy of the north. The land is high, the people sleep out in the open and live on milk, the cold settles into the storing organs and they swell. What is cold is warmed by burning. Wang Bing: burning with fire and mugwort is what is meant by cautery, and he notes that people of the north still practise it. The base text writes the word 爇; the received text writes 焫. They are the same word.
jiǔ cì
The pair of external methods the Suwen sets against drugs: burning moxa and needling. Chapter 24 reaches for it twice — once as the treatment for disease of the vessels, and once as what the back transport points are measured for. The graph the base text writes deserves a note of its own: 剌 with the phonetic 束 is a separate word meaning perverse, and it stands here for 刺, to pierce. Every one of the chapter's eight occurrences is to be read cì, and the closing six-channel rules settle it — they are rules about letting blood, and 剌 là would make nonsense of them.
biàn
The second half of 物生謂之化，物極謂之變, and the half that makes the sentence a warning. A thing's being generated is transformation; a thing's arrival at its extreme is change. The chapter then uses the word exactly that way: 動靜相召，上下相臨，陰陽相錯，而變由生也 — when motion and stillness call to one another, the upper and the lower press on one another, and yin and yang cross, change arises out of it. Change is not growth; it is what growth produces when it has gone as far as it can.
chāng yáng
Flourishing yang — the vessel later acupuncture calls 復溜, on the foot lesser yin. Chapter 41 gives it the gravest entry in the chapter: pain into the breast, blank sight, and at its worst an arched back with the tongue curled and speech gone.
jīng qì
The qi that travels the channels, and specifically its arrival — the event chapter 25 builds its whole technique around. The chapter's sequence is precise: wait for the empty to fill and the full to empty, then when the channel qi has arrived hold on to it and do not let it go. Depth and shallowness lie in the will, far and near are as one, and the hand is like gripping a tiger. The term is the hinge between the chapter's theory and its practice: everything before it is preparation, everything after it is what you do in the instant you have.
jīng suì
The channel tunnels — 經 jīng, the warp; 隧 suì, a hidden course, which 王冰 glosses 隧，潛道也 — and the word is the road a channel runs in rather than the channel itself. This chapter uses it five times and leans on every one. It says what they are for: 五藏之道，皆出於經隧，以行血氣. It says what follows if they are not kept: 血氣不和，百病乃變化而生，是故守經隧焉 — guard the tunnels, which is the sentence the chapter's whole counsel hangs on. It writes the treatment of qi on them: 氣有餘則冩其經隧…不足則𥙷其經隧. And it closes its account of method with them: 刺此者，取之經隧，取血於營，取氣於衛. The word is not the same as 脈 or 絡, and the chapter keeps the three apart: the network vessel is where blood is drawn from, the channel is what must not be struck, and the tunnel is the course that is guarded and drawn on. It has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
huò luàn
Sudden confusion of the bowel — vomiting and purging together, coming on at speed. Chapter 28's entry for it is pure practice and no prognosis: needle five beside the transport points, and three at the foot yang brilliance and above it. It stands in a run of entries that all begin with 暴, suddenly — the sudden abscess, the sudden abdominal fullness, the sudden grief, the sudden inversion — and what groups them is not the organ affected but the way they arrive.
chōng yáng
The pulse at the instep where the stomach channel's qi surges through, and the pulse this chapter takes when the wood circuit is in surplus. The rule the chapter follows, without ever stating it, is that a circuit in surplus strikes one phase and the pulse taken is that phase's own channel pulse: 歲木太過，風氣流行，脾土受邪 — wood in surplus strikes the earth of the spleen — and so it is 衝陽, the stomach's pulse, whose stopping means death. 絶 here is the pulse ceasing, not the channel being cut; the chapter says of all five pulses that when it is 絶 there is death and no cure.
cì
The graph that the 1550 base text writes where modern texts write 刺, to needle. It is a scribal variant, not a different word: throughout this chapter it is read cì and means the act of needling a channel. Chapter 32 is built on it — the title itself means needling heat, and the chapter's whole procedure is to name the channel to be needled for each depot's heat disease. The site transcribes the base graph and reads the intended word.
zhōu bì
The obstruction that travels. The chapter opens by describing a pain that shifts up and down with the vessels, left answering right, and Qibo answers that this is 衆痺, not 周痺; the true 周痺 lies in the blood vessels, goes up and down with them, and cannot cross from side to side, each attack keeping to its place. The naming is given at the close: it is not in the depots, it has not come out to the skin, it sits alone between the flesh and the sinews, and true qi cannot go all round — therefore it is called circulating. Needling follows the direction of the pain: below first if it travels down, above first if it travels up.
jié jìng fǔ
The lower half of the chapter's treatment for oedema: drain the bladder. Chapter 8 had already given the bladder its office — 州都之官, the regional capital where fluids gather and are let out by qi transformation. Chapter 14 draws the therapeutic consequence: clean it out. Sweating above and draining below, and then the essence can be taken up in season.
qīng zhuó
The pair that organises the chapter. What receives grain is turbid, what receives qi is clear; the clear is poured into the yin and the turbid into the yang. The chapter then follows the two through the throat, the lung, the stomach and the channels, and ends with the rule that makes them clinically useful: the clear qi is slippery and the turbid rough, so needle the yin deep and the yang shallow — and when clear and turbid interfere, adjust by number. The pair is physiological, not moral: turbidity is what has been used, clarity what has not.