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.
chōng mài
The vessel the chapter calls the sea of the conduit vessels — the deep channel that irrigates the ravines and valleys of the body and joins yang brightness at the ancestral sinews. It is the one place in the Suwen where the two seas are said to meet.
sān lǐ
The point chapter 54 names first, and the only one in the Suwen transcribed here so far whose place the text troubles to state: 所謂三里者，下膝三寸也 — the so-called Three Li is three inches below the knee. Two neighbours come with it: 巨虚, where with the foot raised the shinbone alone sinks in, and 下廉, simply the place that is sunken below. The chapter's reason for stopping on them is the sentence it has just written — that each of the nine needles has what it is fitted to — and the place is part of what it is fitted to.
chū sān rù yī
The arithmetic of breath, and the reason the chapter turns from flavours to food. Heaven and earth nourish a man with essence qi, and the great tally of that exchange is three out to one in: what is spent exceeds what is taken, and the excess is the cost of living. The sentence sits directly after the lungs are said to let breath out and take it in, so that the count is at once respiratory and dietary; and it is followed at once by the practical consequence — half a day without grain and the qi weakens, a full day and it is scant. The number is not a measurement but a warning: because the account runs at a deficit, food cannot be missed, and the five flavours that follow are the means of paying it.
sān bù sān lǐ
One of the four signs of a life that reaches its term, and the only one that is felt rather than seen. The three sectors are the three divisions of the pulse — above, below and the middle — and the three miles are the points of that name on hand and foot; 起 means that they rise under the finger, full and close to the surface, not that the bone stands high. Set beside 骨高肉滿 the clause makes a pair: one speaks of the pulse, the other of the frame, and the chapter needs both because a long life is not a single tissue. The difficulty is that 三里 can mean a distance as easily as a point, and the commentators divide; the reading adopted here is the points, because the verb 起 belongs to what answers the hand.
sān yīn sān yáng
The six channels, and the number that bothers the sixth chapter: if heaven and earth have only yin and yang, why does the body have three of each? The answer given there is that the six are what a pair becomes when it is divided — separated they are three and three, joined they are one yin and one yang.
sān hé
The third and fullest of the chapter's three agreements, and the only one with a consequence attached: 三合爲治, when three things fit, there is governance. The three are the two already named plus their coincidence — a year that is both 應天 and 承歲 at once. Later writing on the doctrine gives that year its own name, 太乙天符, and sets out what follows from it; here it is the climax of a sentence whose whole purpose is 氣可與期 — that the qi of a year can be met on time, because the agreements that govern it can be counted.
tì
The alarm that chapter 30 describes in a patient with Yangming disease when he hears the sound of wood. It is paired with 驚, the sudden start, and the pair is explained by the conquest sequence: the stomach is earth, wood conquers earth, and so the sound belonging to wood reaches him where he is vulnerable. The chapter's own control is bells and drums — metal does not conquer earth, and metal leaves him unmoved.
biāo běn
In this chapter the pair carries a specific and surprising assignment: the illness is the root and the physician is the tip. The Discourse on Decoctions and Fermented Liquors states it negatively — 病為本，工為標，標本不得，邪氣不服 — and this chapter states it positively: tip and root are matched, and the evil qi submits. When they are not matched, the chapter says, the consequence is 亡神失國: the spirit is lost and the state with it. So 標本 here is not a doctrine of symptoms versus causes, as it later became; it is a statement about the fit between a doctor and a case.
qǔ
Tooth decay — 齲 qǔ — and 《說文》 gives the word as 𤘐, 齒蠹也，从牙禹聲, with 齲 as the 或體 written from 齒; 區禹切. The phonophore is 禹, a worm, and 桂馥 says why: 禹，蟲也，故文从禹 — the tooth has something in it. 段玉裁 quotes 《釋名》: 齲，朽也，蟲齧之缺朽也, and 《史記》, where the 倉公 has a minister with 齲齒. This chapter gives it one line and no discussion: 齒齲，刺手陽明。不已，刺其脉入齒中，立已 — the shortest prescription it writes, and the only one for a disease rather than for a network vessel. The teeth return twice more, both times as a sign: 上齒寒 alongside the blocked nose and the nosebleed, and 齒脣寒痛 at the very end, where the evil has been carried up to the upper teeth. The word occurs once and has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.
tián dàn
The interior state in which the chapter's protection works: quiet, unstirred, free of appetite. The transmitted text varies between 惔 and 淡; the variant is recorded in the collation notes rather than settled here.
tián yú
Quiet and pleased: what the sage of Suwen 1 makes his task. It comes at the end of the ladder, after the true person and the ultimate person who have left the world behind; the sage stays in it, measures his appetites among its customs, has no heart of resentment or anger, does not weary the body with affairs or burden the mind with anxious thought, and so is not worn out and not scattered. The chapter's other tranquillity word, 恬惔, belongs to the teaching the sages gave; this one belongs to the sage's own practice.
huà
The first half of the chapter's most-quoted sentence, and a half that has to be read with the other: 物生謂之化，物極謂之變. Transformation is what generates; change is what happens at the extreme. The chapter means both to be the same process seen at two points, and the pair bears a great deal of weight in the chapters that follow, because the 運氣 literature is about a system that generates by turns and breaks at its extremes. The site keeps two English words for the two graphs so that the distinction survives.