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.
bǔ xiè
This is the chapter's most practical teaching and its most counter-intuitive. Every viscus has one flavour that supplements it and another that drains it, and the pairing is decided not by the phase the viscus belongs to but by what the viscus wants: the liver desires dispersal, so acrid — which is the metal flavour, the phase that conquers wood — supplements it. Bitter firms the kidney but drains the spleen; sweet relaxes the spleen yet drains the heart. A flavour is not a property, it is a lever, and which way it moves depends on the organ at the other end.
hàn
Chapter 21 hands out five sweats and gives each a different viscus to come from: eating to repletion sweats the stomach, fright that seizes the essence sweats the heart, carrying weight on a long road sweats the kidney, running in fear sweats the liver, labour sweats the spleen. The move is diagnostic rather than decorative — each sweat reports which store has been drawn on. Later chapters take sweat as an ending rather than a message: the final sweat that precedes death in the channel endings, and the drenching sweat that accompanies a lung pulse so dissipated that its colour stays bright.
hàn chū
Sweat appearing on the body. The book reads it three ways: as the sign of wind strike when it comes with fever, aversion to wind and a slack pulse; as the sign of recovery when it follows a shiver and the pulse is right; and as the sign of yang leaking away when it runs like beads of pearl or will not stop after sweating has been used. The same two characters can mean deliverance or danger, and only the pulse and what comes with it decide which.
kě hàn kě xiè
The chapter's rule for treating the six-channel progression, stated as a boundary at three days. While the three days are not yet full the disease is in the three yang and has not entered the depots, so it can be sweated out; once the three days are full it has gone inward, so it must be drained. The principle behind the rule is given in the line that precedes it: treat by opening the vessel of whichever depot is affected, and the disease will decline day by day. The rule tells you when; that line tells you what to open. The chapter returns to the same logic at the end, where summerheat must be let out with the sweat and not stopped.
lǒng qǐ
To swell up in a ridge. Chapter 27 uses the image three times: the river heaves into ridges when a sudden wind rises, the arrival of the pulse also swells at times, and — the decisive case — when true qi and evil have merged the wave-swell no longer rises. That last use is why the word matters. The swell is the only thing that can be watched; when it stops there is nothing left to wait for, and the physician has to change method entirely, from meeting the evil to regulating by what is full and empty among the three regions and nine indicators.
yē yē
The smothering heat of a malaria fit — heat of the sun-and-sultry kind rather than the flaming kind. The chapter pairs it with 熇熇 so that the two words between them cover the whole feel of the fever: blazing outward, stifling inward. It occurs once in the Suwen, here.
jié cì
A piercing that is not retained. In the sinew chapter it always follows the heated needle and always carries the same measure: 以知爲數，以痛爲輸 — stop when the patient feels the thing, and take the painful spot as the point. The name distinguishes it from the retained needling of the channel chapter, where depth and the count of breaths are what matter; here speed is the technique.
wěi dǐ
The lower end of the spine, given as the terminus of a count rather than a shape. From the spinal bone down to it there are twenty-one vertebrae and three chi. The chapter then divides that length: the upper vertebra is one cun and a fraction of four, the odd fraction falls to the lower ones, and the upper seven come to nine cun and seven eighths. It is the only place in the book where the spine is both counted and measured.
qióng gǔ
The bone at the lower end of the spine, which the chapter itself glosses as the sacral bone. It comes at the close of the treatment for the falling disease: the physician keeps company with the patient, watches where the seizure will take hold, bleeds the full place and keeps the blood in a gourd; when the fit comes the blood stirs, and if it does not stir the sacrum is cauterised twenty壮. The gloss is the earliest plain equation of 窮骨 with 骶骨, and it is why the entry matters: the book stops to define its own anatomical word.
shèng wáng
Not a grade of person in this chapter but a name given for a result: he who can read colour and pulse keeps far from death and near to life, the way of living is lengthened, and he is called a sage king. Wang Bing's note is dry about who qualifies: the emperors of high antiquity heard the way and practised it diligently, and only a sage king manages to use it constantly. The word is distinct from 聖人 — the sage of Suwen 1 is a private attainment; the sage king of this chapter is a public one, and the chapter's last movement makes the connection explicit by comparing bad medicine to bad government.
sàn
The scattered quality: a pulse without root, whose beats come apart instead of gathering. It appears once in the five chapters, and once is enough: 傷寒欬逆上氣，其脉散者死，謂其形損故也 — a cough with rebelling qi, and a pulse that scatters, means death, because the body has already been damaged. The entry therefore records the one occurrence and the reason given for it, and refuses to build a shape out of later handbooks.
qī yào
The sun and moon with the five planets, and in this chapter the things that weave the emptiness while the five phases attach themselves to the earth. The line is a pair, and the pair is the chapter's model of how change works: 天垂象，地成形，七曜緯虚，五行麗地. What is above moves and gives images; what is below holds still and gives forms. The chapter then says why that matters — because form and essence are as root to branches, one may look up at the images and know what is far off.