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.
sè mài
What the emperors of high antiquity prized and what the former teacher handed down. The chapter says three things about them: that they are the essential point of prognosis; that colour answers to the sun and pulse to the moon; and that the changes of colour answer to the pulses of the four seasons. Yang Shangshan explains the pairing by yin and yang — colour shows outwardly and so is yang and answers to the sun; the blood of the pulse is seen inwardly and so is yin and answers to the moon. Wang Bing explains it by timing: the correspondence fixes the period of the prognostication.
guī jǔ héng quán
Chapter 17's way of saying that a pulse has a shape appropriate to its season: spring answers to the compasses (round and smooth), summer to the square (full and square), autumn to the balance beam (level and light), winter to the weight (sunken and heavy). The four instruments are the vocabulary of a workshop applied to a wrist: each season's pulse is not merely different in degree, it is different in kind, and each can be measured against its own instrument. The pair 權衡 recurs elsewhere in the book as weighing in the abstract sense of judging.
bèi huà
Earth in its even state, and the phase whose even name is the name of its own work. 土曰備化 — earth is called complete transformation — and its 紀 runs: 備化之紀，氣恊天休，德流四政，五化齊脩，其氣平，其性順，其用高下，其化豐滿，其類土，其政安靜，其候溽蒸，其令濕，其藏脾，脾其畏風，其主口，其榖稷，其果棗，其實肉，其應長夏，其蟲倮，其畜牛，其色黄，其養肉，其病否，其味甘，其音宫，其物膚，其數五. Its opening pair is the largest claim any of the five makes: 氣恊天休，德流四政 — its qi answers to the bounty of heaven, and its virtue runs through the governance of all four quarters. Its five transformations are not merely level or even but 齊脩, all of them ordered together, which is why the year-rites of the earth are the ones that hold the other four. Its viscus is the spleen, its season the long summer, its number five, the number of the centre; when it falls short it is 卑監, low and confined (called 減化, the diminishing transformation), and when it goes to excess 敦阜, mounded high (called 廣化, the widening one).
bái hēi féi shòu
The four variables by which the chapter grades a patient before it grades the needle. The question is put at the turn of the chapter: pale or dark, fat or thin, small or tall — does each have its own number? The answers that follow sort men into the fat, the thin, the ordinary, the strong-boned and the infant, and give each a depth and a speed. 白黑 is complexion and 肥瘦 is flesh, and the chapter joins them into one compound because together they name what the physician must look at before choosing a needle; the whole second half of the chapter is the elaboration of that one question.
shù shù
Regimen governed by number — measured breathing, diet and practice rather than indulgence. The phrase is deliberately technical: what is recommended is a discipline that can be kept or broken, not an attitude.
rèn mài
The vessel running up the front of the body. In this chapter it 'opens' (通) when the heavenly water arrives and 'empties' (虛) at seven sevens: the vessel is what carries the schedule, not what sets it.
luàn jīng
The third and worst of chapter 26's three named mistakes: treating when the moon's rim is empty throws the channels into disorder. The chapter does not stop at the name — it lists what the disorder consists of: yin and yang cross, true qi and evil can no longer be distinguished, the evil sinks and lodges, the outside empties while the inside falls into disorder, and the licentious evil rises. It is the only one of the three in which the damage is described as self-perpetuating.
luò mài
The vessels that branch from the channels. The chapter uses them to explain one of its six kinds of sleeplessness: when the lung's connecting vessels turn counter and cannot follow the channels up and down, they lodge in the channel, but because disease of the connecting vessels is slight, the person rises and rests as usual and only the breathing gives it away.
róng wèi
The two directions of one thing: what flows inward to nourish, and what circles outward to guard. The site carries the halves separately, as 榮氣 (id 1036) and 衛氣 (id 219); chapter 58 carries the pair, and it carries it five times, always in the same way — not as two substances doing two jobs but as one movement that is either going on or has stopped. The chapter's grammar for it is small and exact. Where they run, nothing needs saying. Where they are checked, they overflow the wrong way round — 榮衛稽留，衛散榮溢，氣竭血著 — and the body reads hot without and short of breath within. Where they do not move at all it suppurates, and the pus eats inward through marrow and outward through the great flesh behind the knee. Where they cannot lodge — 積寒留舍，榮衛不居 — cold has taken the place they should be standing in, and the flesh rolls, the sinews shorten, the inside becomes bone impediment and the outside becomes insensitivity. The remedy given is equally small: 疾冩無怠，以通榮衛, drain promptly without slackening, to put the construction and defence back in motion. Note the graph: the chapter writes it once with water on either side, 滎, which this site reads róng, taking it for the same word; chapter 44's 滎 is the brook point and stays xíng.
róng qì
The nourishing qi, paired with the defence qi. This chapter's use of the pair is unusually tidy: it takes one complaint — flesh that has stopped answering — and divides it, numbness to construction qi and loss of use to defence qi, then states what happens when both are vacuous. It also leaves the crux untouched: the defence qi is called replete in one clause and vacuous in the next, and the site transcribes both as they stand.
luán jié
The joints drawn up and unable to open — what the chapter says will happen to the person with bone impediment. It is the last link in a chain: withered kidney fat, marrow that does not fill, cold that reaches the bone, and finally the joints.
jīn luán
The sinews drawn up and not letting go — the third of the three signs chapter 48 names together as 癇瘛筋攣, and the one that says what the pulling acts upon. Both occurrences in the chapter come from opposite pulses, a heart pulse full and large and a liver pulse small and tight.