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.
qī zhěn
The seven things that single a probe out. Examine the nine probes and ask which one is unlike the rest: the one that is alone small is diseased, alone large is diseased, alone swift is diseased, alone slow is diseased, alone hot is diseased, alone cold is diseased, alone sunken is diseased. The chapter then does something unusual — it admits that these signs can lie. If the seven signs appear but the nine probes still follow one another, the patient does not die; the diseases of wind and the monthly disease look like the seven signs and are not them. It is only when a seven-sign disease is joined by probes that have themselves gone bad that death follows, and then with hiccup and belching.
duǎn qī
The subject of the chapter's last movement, and the thing Lei Gong has to ask for three times. First he says 請問短期 and the emperor does not answer at all; then 雷公復問 and is told only 在經論中; then he asks a third time, 請聞短期, and the answer comes. 短 is opposed to 長: not the long term of a chronic course but the near term, the date within reach. What the answer gives is not a number of days but a calendar — winter's illness ending as spring goes out, spring's when the grass dries, summer's at the Lian water, autumn's rising and stopping of itself — and it closes on 期在石水 and 期在盛水. The threefold asking is part of the teaching: a term of death is not volunteered, and the silence in the middle is not refusal but the test of whether the question is meant.
jīng jīn
The system of twelve tracts that bind the skeleton and are named after the channels they follow. They begin at the toes or fingers, knot at the ankle, knee, hip and nape, and end in the head; they never enter a zang or fu, and so their diseases are all on the surface: cramp, contracture, a joint that will not bend, a mouth drawn aside. The chapter's closing rule is the whole of their pathology — cold arches them back and tightens them, heat lets them go slack, and where heat is present the heated needle is forbidden.
liù biàn
The six pulse qualities the chapter has just run through five times, taken together and given rules of treatment. The six are urgent, slow, large, small, slippery and rough; each was given in a 甚 and a 微 form for every zang, and now each is given a cause and a needle: 諸急者多寒，緩者多𤍠，大者多氣少血，小者血氣皆少，滑者陽氣盛，微有𤍠；濇者多血少氣，微有寒. The treatment section that follows is the most practical page in the chapter — deep and retained for the urgent, shallow and quick for the slow, hit the vessel and press the hole for the rough — and it ends with the one case that is not needled at all: 諸小者，陰陽形氣俱不足，勿取以鍼，而調以甘藥也.
liù jīng
The six vessels — three yang and three yin — taken together as the frame for clinical description. Chapter 45 is one of the places in the Suwen where they are used exactly that way: first what inversion looks like in each of them, then the counterflow form, down to the hand vessels at the end.
liù hé
One of the frameworks that Jiu daiji fitted colour and pulse to, listed with metal, wood, water, fire and earth, the four seasons and the eight winds. Wang Bing does not gloss the word here; his commentary treats it as the space within which the eight winds blow and the seasons come and go, which fits the reading of 六合 as the four directions plus above and below. A second reading, common in Han calendrical writing, takes it as the conjunctions of the twelve branches. Both are recorded here; the chapter only requires that it be a complete frame, since the point is that nothing falls outside it.
liù yuán
The name the chapter gives, in its last sentence, to the six qi that stand above the three yin and three yang — wind, heat, damp, minister fire, dryness, cold. 所謂本也，是謂六元: what has just been called the root is called the six origins. The two words are the point of the line. Earlier in the chapter the same six were listed as 天之陰陽, the yin and yang of heaven, with the three yin and three yang serving them (三陰三陽，上奉之); here the relation is turned the other way up, and the six are what the three yin and three yang are the branches of. 《說文》 has 元，始也, which is why 本 and 元 — root and source — can be said of the same six in one sentence.
liù yuán zhèng jì
The name the chapter gives itself. 六元 are the six qi — 少陽、陽明、太陽、厥陰、少陰、太陰 — each of which is the 元, the beginning, of the years it governs; 正紀 is the regular record of what those years do, set against the irregularity that the chapter calls 邪氣化. The phrase closes the whole discourse, spoken as a thing to be sealed: 請藏之靈蘭之室，署曰六元正紀，非齋戒不敢示. It is therefore both the title and the colophon: the chapter begins by asking after 六化六變 and ends by naming the book it has written.
liù fǔ
The chapter names five of them — stomach, large intestine, small intestine, triple burner, bladder — and then speaks of six. The sixth has to be the gallbladder, which is the reason the gallbladder is also listed among the six extraordinary constant palaces: it is counted twice, once by shape and once by behaviour. Their rule is the opposite of the organs' — they can be filled but never full.
liù mài
The chapter's own name for the six channels read at the wrist, and the point at which its two answers meet. The first answer names them one by one and gives each its pulse-shape at the hand great yin; the second gives them their places in a family and then runs them in pairs. What makes them 'six' rather than 'six separate things' is the sentence that follows the list: 此六脉者，乍陰乍陽，交屬相并，繆通五藏，合於陰陽 — they are now yin, now yang, they join and belong to one another, and they thread the five viscera in crisscross. So no pulse belongs to one viscus, and no viscus is read from one pulse. The rule for reading them is given last: 先至爲主，後至爲客 — what arrives first is host, what arrives after is guest. The six are therefore a system with a time-order, not a list of correspondences.
liù qì
The six qi that govern the six positions from above, and the reason the year is divisible by six while the phases are five: fire is counted twice, as sovereign and as minister. Each of the six has a root, a tip, and a qi seen in the middle, and the chapter's whole apparatus — the ring of the six, the six steps, the six positions with something bearing down under each — is built to place them. The six are also what the chapter measures: the beginning and end of the six qi, early and late, is the question that produces the four years of ke.
liù huà
The six transformations: what each of the six qi brings about. The chapter gives them twice and names them once. First as a verb, in six clauses — 厥陰司天，其化以風；少陰司天，其化以熱；太陰司天，其化以濕；少陽司天，其化以火；陽明司天，其化以燥；太陽司天，其化以寒 — and then as a settled product, each qi given four faces: 厥陰司天爲風化，在泉爲酸化，司氣爲蒼化，間氣爲動化. The name 六化 stands at the end of those six paragraphs, in the sentence that says what the list is for: 故治病者，必明六化分治，五味五色所生，五藏所宜，乃可以言盈虚，病生之緒也. Nothing in this chapter sets 化 against 變; the pairing of the two belongs to the discourse before it.