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.
chuāng lóng
Where the shaoyang is knotted, and the chapter defines it at once: 窗籠者，耳中也 — the window cage is the middle of the ear. The image is exact: a hollow that admits sound and holds it, open and enclosed at the same time. As with the life gate, the interest is topographical. The three yang of the foot are knotted at the eye, the cheek and the ear, which is to say that all three end at the head, and the chapter's list of their roots and knots is in effect a map of how the leg channels reach the face. Later needling identified 窗籠 with Tinggong, in front of the ear; the chapter itself only says the middle of the ear.
jiǔ bèi
The chapter's last word, and its sharpest. Wine is the essence of water and grain, the liquid of cooked grain; its qi is fierce and swift; it distends the stomach, drives qi upward, floats the liver and sets the gallbladder athwart. For that moment the coward is the equal of the brave man — and when the qi fails he repents. The name says what the chapter has argued throughout: courage is a state of the viscera, and wine counterfeits it by producing the same state for an hour. 悖 is the word for running against order, so the phrase is not a description of drink but a verdict on borrowed courage: courage out of its proper place, which cannot be held and leaves the man worse than it found him.
zhēn yá
The wisdom teeth, the last teeth to come and the sign that growth has reached its extreme. Suwen 1 names them twice, at twenty-one in the woman's count and at twenty-four in the man's, and both times with the same clause: the wisdom teeth come and growth reaches its extreme. They are the only sign in either count that is the same for both sexes — the counts differ by seven and eight, but the teeth that close growth come to both.
nǚ zǐ bāo
The last of the six extraordinary constant palaces, and the one whose case is hardest, because it plainly takes things in and puts things out and yet is not a palace of transmission. Wang Bing's answer: what it takes in is essential qi, what it gives out is a formed body — and giving out a formed body is not the same act as passing dregs along. So it stores, in the sense this chapter cares about.
qū yín
The faintest clinical signs — the open mouth, the moan — used in chapter 25 as the test of a physician's perception. The chapter pairs them twice: first as something so small it takes a mastered eye to see at all, then as the thing the Emperor explicitly asks to be taught a method for. The pairing with 秋毫 is what makes the term more than a synonym for groaning: these are signs at the limit of visibility, and the whole argument of the chapter is that the difference between the common workman and the one who goes out and in alone is what each can see at that limit.
suì lù
The year's exposure is the name for a whole population falling ill at once, and the chapter's answer to why. Wind and rain on the solstice are the year's first sign; a wind from the south then is 虚風 and enters those who are out in the day; it lodges in the bone and does not come out until spring opens the seams of the skin, and then a second wind from the west meets it, 此兩邪相搏，經氣結代者矣. 故諸逢其風而遇其雨者，命曰遇歲露焉 — whoever meets that wind and that rain has met the year's exposure. The rest of the chapter is the calendar of such years: the wind on the first day of the first month read by direction, the signs of particular months, and the difference between a year that is in harmony and one that is not.
nián jì
The age taboo of the twenty-five types: from seven, every ninth year — sixteen, twenty-five, thirty-four, forty-three, fifty-two, sixty-one — is a great taboo for those whose form and colour overcome one another, and they should take care of themselves. The interval is nine because the reckoning is by the phases, and the reason is stated in the previous paragraph: at the year when the overcoming phase is added, feeling the outside world brings illness on. It is not divination; it is the five phases turned into a scale of age.
yīn chǐ
The moving vessel of the yin at the cubit — that is, the pulse of the hand taiyin at the forearm — said here to lie at Wuli, and called 五腧之禁, the place where the five transporting points must not be needled. The sentence is short and its reference is not settled: Zhang Jiebin takes 陰尺 as Chize, the sea point of the lung, and 五里 as the point of that name on the large intestine channel; Ma Shi takes the whole phrase as the moving vessel at Wuli of the hand yangming. Both agree on the practical point, which is that a deep-lying vessel there is not to be pierced carelessly.
yǒu gù wú yǔn
The chapter's answer to its own hardest question. 黄帝問曰：婦人重身，毒之何如？歧伯曰：有故無殞，亦無殞也 — a pregnant woman with a disease must be treated; if the disease is really there, the strong drug does not kill. The licence is immediately bounded: 大積大聚，其可犯也，衰其太半而止，過者死. The rule is therefore not permission to be bold but a rule about proportion: treat the cause, and stop when the disease is mostly gone. It is the last clinical sentence of the chapter, coming after the sixty years of the table and the five treatments for pent-up qi, and it is placed there deliberately — everything before it describes what the year does; this one says what may be done in return.
zéi fēng
The chapter's subject, and the word it sets out to qualify. A thief is not stronger than other men; he enters where no one is watching, and the whole discourse turns on that image. The question is why a man who never leaves his screens or his chamber should fall ill at all, and the answer is not that the thief was absent but that something was already inside: dampness lodged from an old injury, blood in the flesh, a fall, a sudden fit of anger, a meal out of season. When the pores open and wind and cold arrive, they join the old evil and the illness is made. So 賊風 is real but not sufficient; the chapter's interest is in the interior that makes a thief of an ordinary wind, which is why the same chapter can end by explaining illnesses that look like the work of ghosts.
nào zé
Thinned and made glossy by heat. Chapter 27 uses the word once, in the sentence that explains how an evil actually gets in: cold makes the blood congeal and drag, heat makes the qi thin and glossy, and the empty evil enters and lodges on the strength of that loosening. The term belongs with 淖液 of chapter 26, where the same 淖 describes blood thinned by warm bright weather; here it is the qi, and it is not an advantage but an opening.
nào yè
Blood in warm, bright weather: loose, moist, thin. The term is one half of the pair on which chapter 26's argument rests — the other half is 凝泣, blood congealed and sluggish under a cold overcast sky. Because the blood is thin, the defence qi floats, the blood is easily drained and the qi moves easily; and that is why the chapter says to needle without hesitating in warm weather but not at all in cold. The word is descriptive, not pathological: 淖液 is the state that makes treatment work.