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.
pìn zàng
The complement of 牡藏, and the larger half of the division: three viscera to two. Spleen, lung and kidney are female stores, and the reasons are not stated but can be read off the sequence that follows — earth that receives and transforms, metal that gathers and stores, water that closes and hides. The chapter then does something the scheme does not require: it gives the female three viscera exactly the same fivefold apparatus as the male two, so that each has a colour, a season, a tone, a flavour and a pair of days. The point of the pairing is not hierarchy but the count: five viscera, five changes, five transports, twenty-five in all. 牝 and 牡 are the only words in the chapter that sort the viscera by sex, and they are dropped as soon as the count is made.
shí wǔ bù zú
The second tally, and the one that makes the chapter a whole. Where the twelve were mostly states of excess, the fifteen are all lodgings of counterflow qi, and mostly in the palaces and the odd structures rather than the five stores: heart, lung, liver, spleen, kidney, bladder, stomach, large intestine, small intestine, gallbladder, the genitals, the neck, the shin, the thighs and arms, and the membrane of the bladder. Each has its dream — mountains and fire, flying with strange metal, a forest, a ruined house in a storm, a deep pool, walking, eating, fields, a crowded market, fighting and mutilation, intercourse, decapitation, walking unable to advance, bowing and rising, urine and stool. The rule closes it: supplement, and it stops. Excess is drained, deficiency supplemented, and the two counts together are the chapter.
wǔ shí yíng
The chapter's measure of the pulse, and the earliest passage in the book to make a count of beats into a measure of organ depletion. 一日一夜五十營，以營五藏之精 — in a day and a night the qi makes fifty circuits and so carries the essence of the five zang. The test is to hold the vessel mouth and count: fifty beats without one interruption means all five receive qi; forty with one means one is empty; thirty, twenty, ten, and less than ten mean two, three, four and five. The arithmetic is exact and the conclusion is not therapeutic but prognostic: 子之短期，要在終始, and the pulse that foretells the short term is 乍數乍疏, now frequent and now sparse. The number fifty is the one the Han calendars gave the body; what matters here is that it can be counted at the wrist.
wǔ zhǔ
Heart governs the vessels, lung the skin, liver the sinews, spleen the flesh, kidney the bone. This entry is the other half of the one above it: five lines say what each viscus stores — a faculty — and these five say what it rules over — a tissue. Read together they are the book's shortest account of what a viscus is: not a pump or a sack but something that holds a power and is answerable for a material. Every later account of the sinews, the skin or the bone as belonging somewhere goes back to these ten lines.
wǔ sè
The chapter's colour table, and the whole of its visual method. Five colours mean death — green like dead grass, yellow like unripe bitter orange, black like soot, red like clotted spoilt blood, white like dry bone — and five mean life: kingfisher feather, cock's comb, crab's belly, lard, crow's feather. What separates them is not hue but whether the colour gleams through, as cinnabar gleams through white silk. The last rule follows from that: any face with yellow left in it does not die, because the earth qi is still there.
wǔ nì
The chapter's two lists of five, and the hinge on which its prognosis turns. The first belongs to abscess: a white eye with a green cast and a shrunken pupil, vomiting after medicine, severe abdominal pain and thirst, an unusable shoulder and neck, a broken voice and a ruined complexion. The second belongs to illness in general: a distended belly with fever and a large pulse, a drumming belly with clear discharge from the four limbs and a large pulse, nosebleed that will not stop with a large pulse, cough with blood in the urine and wasting with a small and taut pulse, cough and wasting with fever and a small rapid pulse. Beyond these five the course is 順. The chapter then gives the times: fifteen days for the first set, less than a season for the second. 逆 here is not simply bad but reversed — the pulse and the body moving in opposite directions.
wǔ cái
The five cuttings are the chapter's dietary prohibitions, and the word is a tailor's. 病在筋，無食酸；病在氣，無食辛；病在骨，無食鹹；病在血，無食苦；病在肉，無食甘 — the five follow the five movements exactly, forbidding each flavour to the tissue it runs in. But the chapter does not stop at prohibition: 口嗜而欲食之，不可多也，必自裁也 — what the mouth craves may still be eaten, only not much, and the patient must cut it for himself. 裁 is therefore the whole teaching: not abstinence but measure, and the measure taken by the man who wants the food.
wǔ duó
The five states in which depletion is already established: flesh and form gone; after great loss of blood; after great sweating; after great draining downward; and after childbirth or great haemorrhage. The chapter only lists them and then closes with four words — 此皆不可寫, none of these may be drained. So the five are not five diseases but a prohibition list. 奪 is the operative graph: not a depletion that is coming, but one that has already been taken, so that a reducing needle would rob a robbed man.
wǔ bù
The five divisions of the five viscera, and the condition in which they can no longer be read. The chapter says 五部隔無徵 — the five divisions are cut off and show no sign — and then describes what that feels like to the physician: 若居曠野，若伏空室，緜緜乎屬不滿日, like a man in a waste, like one crouching in an empty room, drawn out thin and hardly lasting the day. The five divisions are the regions by which the viscera are located and read; when they are blocked, the signs that should appear at the surface do not appear, and the pulse gives nothing to hold. The phrase 別五中部 later in the chapter is the same scheme narrowed to the middle: the physician must still distinguish the five parts.
wǔ fā
The five eruptions are the chapter's shortest table and its most compressed: 陰病發於骨，陽病發於血，以味發於氣。陽病發於冬，陰病發於夏. Two axes are folded into one line. By substance: yin disease breaks out in bone, yang disease in blood, and disease from flavour in qi. By season: yang disease breaks out in winter and yin disease in summer — the reverse of what a reader expects, and the reason the line is worth keeping. The chapter gives no explanation, and the omission is characteristic: 五發 stands between 五裁 and 五邪 as one more grid, a set of correspondences to be used rather than argued.
wǔ yè
Sweat belongs to the heart, snivel to the lung, tears to the liver, spittle to the spleen, sputum to the kidney. Few lines in the book have been more used and few are harder to defend: these are not fluids an organ secretes in any anatomical sense. They are what escapes when that organ stops holding — the heart letting go of sweat, the lung of snivel — which is why the same list turns up in later books among the signs of depletion. As anatomy it is wrong; as a description of what leaks, it is exact.
wǔ yuè
The five inspections. The chapter's first sentence names them without listing them: needling has five offices and five inspections, by which the five qi are watched. What follows supplies the list — nose for lung, eye for liver, lip for spleen, tongue for heart, ear for kidney — and then the colours that appear at each. The graph 閲 is a gate inspection, and it fixes the logic: the depots are not seen directly but reviewed at the openings, as a gatekeeper reviews what passes. The chapter's other half, 五使, names the same five as envoys sent out by the depots, so that the same list is read once from inside and once from the threshold.