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.
pí bù zhǔ shí
The doctrine that the spleen, unlike the other four depots, presides over no single season. Chapter 29 asks the question directly and answers it in two steps. First, the spleen is earth and rules the centre. Second, because earth grows the ten thousand things, the spleen is present throughout the year rather than in one quarter of it — governing by delegation for eighteen days at the turn of each season, seventy-two days in all. The doctrine became standard: the spleen is present at the hinges of the year, and that is why it has no season of its own.
méng yá
What the superior physician rescues: the disease while it is still a shoot. Chapter 26 attaches three conditions to it — the physician must first see the qi of the three regions and nine indicators, must rescue while the qi can still be fully regulated, and must act before anything has been ruined. The image explains the chapter's whole theory of diagnosis: since the sprout has no form and cannot be seen or tasted, the only way to catch it is to read the indicators rather than wait for signs.
wéi jīn
The sinews of the neck that act as stays. When the foot shaoyang sinew is diseased they tighten from left to right, the right eye cannot open, and because the left is bound to the right the injury falls on the left corner while the right foot becomes useless. The chapter names this 維筋相交, the crossing of the stays, and it is the only place in the book where a sinew disease is described by the side it crosses to.
bù
The unit of sky this chapter walks out the year in: sixty degrees and a remainder, twenty-four of which make a day by heaping a surplus of a hundred ke. Six steps take you from the position of sovereign fire round through minister fire, earth, metal, water and wood and back again — which is why the chapter can say that the six qi answer to the changes of the five phases. The step is the largest of the three units the chapter measures with: the step of sixty degrees, the initial of thirty, and the ke of the water clock.
dòng
The stirring quality: a pulse that stirs at one spot rather than flowing through the position, shaped like a bean and shaking under the finger. The book gives it two origins. In the first, yin and yang strike together and the pulse is named stirring; yang stirring brings sweat, yin stirring brings fever. In the second, a rapid pulse at the bar with no head or tail, big as a bean, is the stirring of contending qi. The ordinary verb 動 — as in 動則爲痛 — is not this quality, and the entry keeps them apart.
wèi mài
The conduit of the stomach, which chapter 46 reads to diagnose an abscess of the gastric duct, and which it then says is the pulse at the neck: 人迎者，胃脉也. When that pulse counterflows and is exceedingly full, heat has collected at the mouth of the stomach and cannot move on — and that damming is the abscess. The chapter thus ties the wrist's 胃脉 to the neck's 人迎 in one sentence.
wèi wǎn
The receiving part of the stomach. The chapter names it once, as the reason food will not go down in wind water — the duct is blocked. It belongs to a small run of explanations that place the disease's origin in the stomach: the rumbling in the belly, the heaviness that makes walking hard, and the fretting with inability to eat.
shí jiǎ
The mass that sits in the womb and stops the menses. Cold qi lodges at the uterine gate, the gate closes, the qi cannot pass, and the blood that should have been discharged is not; it clots and stays, grows day by day until the belly looks like a pregnancy, and the menses no longer come on time. The chapter adds that it occurs only in women and can be guided out. Set against 腸覃 the pair is exact: one is outside the intestine, moves under the hand and leaves the calendar alone; the other is inside the womb, is fixed and abolishes the calendar. The name 瘕 is worth keeping — it is the word for a mass that is not simply a tumour, and the stone in it says hardness rather than material.
biān shí
The therapy of the east. Its people eat fish and crave salt; fish heats the inside and salt gets the better of the blood, so the texture of the skin is loose and they break out in abscesses. For that, the stone is the thing to open them with. Wang Bing: the stone needle is a needle made of stone, and the Classic of Mountains and Seas speaks of a mountain whose stone is like jade and can be used as a needle. Wang Bing adds a sentence that matters: people of the east still use it. This chapter's claim is that the method came out of a place, not out of a sage's head.
shí
The winter quality of the pulse, stated in chapter 18 like the rest: 冬胃微石，曰平 — slightly stony with stomach qi in it is balanced; stone much and stomach qi little is kidney disease; stone alone without stomach qi is death; and stone carrying hook in it foretells illness in summer. The chapter closes the whole set on the same image: the dying kidney pulse is 辟辟如彈石, beating like stones flicked off the finger — hardness that has lost its pliancy.
xián
The spring quality of the pulse, and the pattern after which all five seasonal qualities are stated in chapter 18: 春胃微弦曰平 — slightly string-like, with stomach qi still in it, is the balanced pulse; string much and stomach qi little is liver disease; string alone, with no stomach qi at all, is death; and string appearing inside the autumn pulse foretells illness when spring comes. At the end of the chapter the same image returns stripped of its moderation: the dying liver pulse is 如新張弓弦, like a newly drawn bowstring.
shàng gōng
The physician who acts before the disease has a form. Chapter 26 gives the definition in one sentence: he rescues the sprout, he must see the qi of the three regions and nine indicators first, and he rescues while the qi can still be fully regulated and nothing has yet been ruined. The contrast with 下工 is not about skill with the needle but about when the work begins — and the chapter has just spent a long passage explaining that what the superior physician sees does not appear outwardly at all, which is why everyone else fails to see it.