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.
bù zhèng zhī cháng
The sixth of the eight categories. Its paragraph gives each qi a kind of made thing rather than a season: 厥陰所至爲生化，少陰所至爲榮化，太陰所至爲濡化，少陽所至爲茂化，陽明所至爲堅化，太陽所至爲藏化，布政之常也. The six are the six outcomes as they appear in what has been produced — bloomed, softened, flourishing, hardened, stored. Where 氣化之常 said what the qi was doing, 布政之常 says what has been done: the same year read from its results. The word 政 is what a ruler does in the world, and the passage borrows it for the qi without strain.
suǒ shēng bìng
The second half of the formula: 是主肺所生病者 — what governs the diseases the lung generates. Where 是動 gives the symptoms of the conduit, 所生病 gives the disorders of the organ and of the substance it holds: for the lung, coughing and rising qi; for the spleen, swelling and diarrhoea; for the kidney, dryness of the mouth and pain of the spine. Later commentators read the pair as channel disease and organ disease, and the reading has governed practice ever since.
shì dòng
The first half of the chapter's double formula. 是動則病… — when this moves, the disease is… — introduces the symptoms produced by the channel as a conduit: swelling, pain, heat, stiffness along its course. The second half, 是主…所生病者, introduces the diseases of the organ the channel belongs to. The distinction between them, debated for a thousand years, is the chapter's chief contribution to clinical method.
liǎng jīng xiāng bó
The chapter's definition of spirit: 故生之來謂之精，兩精相搏謂之神 — what comes with life is essence, and when the two essences join it is called spirit. The two are the essences of father and mother, or of yin and yang; the point is that spirit is not a substance added from outside but the product of a union. From it the chapter derives hun, po, heart, intention, will, thought, deliberation and wisdom in one unbroken chain.
xié zhī suǒ còu
The chapter's governing sentence, and one of the most quoted lines in Chinese medicine: where the evil gathers, the qi there is vacuous. It is not a statement about the strength of the evil but about the empty place it finds — and the chapter demonstrates it by explaining every remaining sign of wind water as evil gathering where yin is vacuous.
bái yín
A white discharge, named here as the other outcome of the same excess that produces sinew flaccidity. The chapter's grammar is worth noticing: the slackening of the ancestral sinews has two results, and this is the second.
bái hàn
The sweat that closes the reverting-yin passage, and the only treatment in the chapter's second half that is not needling. The one yin governs; true emptiness makes the heart ache; counterflow qi lodges and presses; white sweat breaks out. The instruction is to regulate the food and harmonise the medicine, and to treat at the lower transport points. Commentators differ on what white means — a sweat pale and cold from depletion, or a loan-graph for the sweat of the po — and the base text simply has the one word, so the reading is left open here.
wàng mèng
The wild dreams that follow the reversal of scant qi, and the sign that the spirit has lost its ground. The chapter says 是以少氣之厥，令人妄夢，其極至迷 — so the reversal of scant qi makes a man dream wildly, and at its extreme he is utterly confused. This is not the same as the five viscera' dreams that follow: those have a viscus to name, a colour, a season, and a corresponding dream; this one has no viscus, only a deficiency of qi and a spirit that will not stay in place. The sequence is exact: scant qi, then reversal, then wild dreaming, then at the extreme confusion. It is the point at which a dream stops being a sign and becomes a symptom of the spirit.
zhì yì
One of the four things the chapter says a physician must take into account, and the reason the chapter ends as it does. Wang Bing glosses it as observing whether the will and intention are askew or upright — because a patient who is bound to ghosts and spirits, or who loathes the needle, or who will not permit treatment at all, is part of the prognosis. The last sentence of the chapter is not a complaint about difficult patients; it is a statement about what treatment requires.
fēng
Wind is the qi that moves, and chapter 42 gives it the epithet later medicine never let go of: 風者，百病之長也 — wind is the chief of the hundred diseases. The chapter's whole method is to show that one agent produces many diseases, and that the difference lies in where it lodges: in the skin, in a conduit, in a store, in the head, or behind a particular manner of living.
láo fēng
The third case: wind taken after exertion, lodged below the lung. It stiffens the neck, dims the sight, brings up matter like snivel, and makes the person loathe wind and shiver. Its outcome is counted in days — three if the great yang can draw the essence up, five in middle years, seven when the essence is not sound — and if the matter like pus is not brought up, the lung is injured and the person dies.
jiǔ fēng
Wind that has entered a body opened by drink: fever, lassitude, profuse sweating, aversion to wind and shortness of breath. The treatment the chapter gives is the earliest surviving formula for it — ze xie and zhu, ten parts each, with mi xian five parts, a three-finger pinch taken after the meal. Two of the three drain and dry; the point is to empty the damp that wine has left behind.