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.
èr shí bā huì
The number the chapter gives to the body's junctions, and the last of the correspondences it lists. The Emperor has just said that the needle matches heaven above, earth below and man in the middle, that it counts the patterns of heaven, measures the order of earth, separates the five viscera within and orders the six palaces without — and then adds that the channels have twenty-eight meetings, all with a complete circuit. The number is a correspondence, not an anatomy: twenty-eight is the count of the lunar mansions, and the meetings of the channels are offered as the body's answer to the sky. What the chapter does with it is characteristically sober: having claimed the whole cosmos for the needle, it concludes that the needle can kill a man and cannot raise the dead, and that this too is the way of things.
èr shí qī qì
經脉十二，絡脉十五，凡二十七氣 — twelve channels and fifteen connecting vessels make twenty-seven, and the chapter calls the sum a number of qi rather than of vessels, because it is counting traffic and not pipes. The next sentence is the one that matters: 二十七氣所行，皆在五腧也 — all twenty-seven run through the five transport points. Everything the body has, therefore, can be reached from the forearm, the hand, the leg and the foot.
liǎng qiāo
The two qiao vessels — 兩 liǎng, a pair; 蹻 qiāo, the vessels named from lifting the foot, which is what they govern — and 王冰 identifies them without hedging: 兩蹻，謂陰陽蹻脉, the yin and the yang qiao. The chapter names them once, and it names them for the case where nothing else works: 病不知所痛，兩蹻爲上. Every other instruction in this last passage has something to go on — the pain the patient can point to, the pulse that has moved, the vessel that is diseased on the wrong side — and this one has none. The two qiao are what is offered instead: not a point for the pain but a place to begin when there is nothing to follow. The site reads 蹻 as qiāo from chapter 41 onward, and chapters 59 and 60 count the pair among the points. The word in this form occurs once here and has not appeared on the site before.
liǎng shén
The pair whose engagement produces the body. The chapter has just asked how what is one qi comes to be distinguished into six names, and the first answer is this: the two spirits engage, join and form the shape, and it is always born before the body — this is called essence. The sentence is the book's shortest account of conception, and its difficulty is the word 神. It is not the alertness of a living person, which the same graph names elsewhere; it is the potency of the two parents before there is a person at all. Later readings take the two as yin and yang, or as the father's and mother's essence, and the ambiguity is kept here rather than resolved.
zhì shù
What the chapter says it is about, in the phrase 請言道之至數 — allow me to speak of the ultimate numbers of the Way. In this chapter the numbers are not arithmetic for its own sake; they are prognostic. Ten days for shallow colour, twenty-one for deep, a hundred for very deep, a hundred for the untreatable. And at the end the chapter says the terrifying thing about them: once the counter-movement has passed, 不復可數 — the count cannot be taken up again. The same word 數 carries both the prognostic numbers and the counting that stops.
shàng jiāo
The upper of the three burners, opening at the upper mouth of the stomach. It runs up beside the throat, pierces the diaphragm, spreads in the chest, goes out to the axilla and follows the tai yin, returning to the yang ming; it ascends to the tongue and descends to the foot yang ming. It travels with the camp qi twenty-five degrees in the yang and twenty-five in the yin, and after fifty degrees meets in great assembly at the hand tai yin. Its image is mist: what rises and spreads, moistening the upper body without being seen to do it.
shàng jīng
A medical book that no longer exists, named here only to say what it was about. Chapter 46 closes by glossing the five books it has drawn on — 上經, 下經, 金匱, 揆度, 奇恒 — and gives each one clause: the Upper Classic speaks of qi communicating with heaven, and so sets the frame within which the Lower Classic speaks of how diseases change.
dài yǎn
The first sign of the greater yang's ending. It is a small phrase for a very specific thing — the eyes fixed upward and not coming back — and the chapter puts it first of three, before the arched back and the spasm. Later medicine kept the word for this sign, and the commentary glosses it as the eyes no longer turning. It is characteristic of the chapter's way of writing about dying: not a state, but a thing you can see.
zhì dào
The word closes the chapter, and it closes it three times: 請起受解，以爲至道 — let me rise and receive the explanation, and take it as the utmost Way; 不知合至道，以惑師教 — to receive the transmission without being able to join it to the utmost Way is to be confused about the master's teaching; 語子至道之要 — I will tell you the gist of the utmost Way. The three uses map the chapter's ending: the disciple asks for it, the master says that having it is not the same as being able to join it, and then he states its gist in two lines — 病傷五藏，筋骨以消. What makes the term worth an entry is that 至道 is never defined in the abstract. It is identified with a concrete claim about what happens when the illness reaches the five stores, and with the warning that a teaching received and not joined becomes the very thing that misleads.
chì hòu
The watchposts from which the year is watched. The chapter quotes 《大要》 for it: 彼春之暖，爲夏之暑；彼秋之忿，爲冬之怒。謹按四維，斥候皆歸，其終可見，其始可知 — the warmth of spring becomes the heat of summer, the anger of autumn becomes the rage of winter; keep to the four corners and the posts all come home, so that the end can be seen and the beginning known. The word is the chapter's one military image for the physician's work: what is watched is not a season but the turning of one season into the next, at the corner where it happens and before it has happened. It belongs with 四維 in the same sentence, and it is why the passage can go on at once to a counted lag of thirty days and to the seasonal pulses of 《脈要》.
dì dào
The way of the earth — the passage that closes at forty-nine, when the heavenly water is exhausted. The chapter names it once, at the end of the woman's count, and it is the only place in Suwen 1 where the body is spoken of as a way that can be blocked rather than a store that can be drained: 天癸 is what is spent, 地道 is what closes, and between them the count ends and the body can bear no more.
ruò
The weak quality: a pulse without force, sinking under light pressure. It belongs to the yin family and most often marks a lack at the cubit (尺脉弱，名曰陰不足) or on the yin side (陰脉弱者，榮血弱也). It pairs with slow, with astringent and with relaxed, and each pairing names a different shortage. The one surprise is 諸弱發熱: weakness at the inch can also produce fever, because the yin that should hold the yang is insufficient.