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.
wǔ jié
The five joints are the five named needling methods of chapter 75: 振埃, 發矇, 去爪, 徹衣, 解惑. Huang Di asks whether needling has five joints and Qi Bo answers with the list; the chapter then takes each in turn, giving its meaning in one line and its technique after. 振埃 shakes off the dust — needle the outer channels for yang disease; 發矇 opens the blind — needle the transport of the fu for fu disease; 去爪 removes the claw — needle the joints and the network vessels of the limbs; 徹衣 pierces the clothes — drain all the extraordinary transports of the yang; 解惑 unties confusion — know how to tune yin and yang and shift what is full into what is empty. The word 節 is the chapter's own: each method is a segment with a beginning and an end, and the five together are the whole of the needling art rather than five tricks.
wǔ zǒu
The five movements are the second of the chapter's flavour tables and the complement of the first. 五味 says where a flavour enters — sour to the liver, pungent to the lung, bitter to the heart, sweet to the spleen, salty to the kidney. 五走 says where it then runs: 酸走筋，辛走氣，苦走血，鹹走骨，甘走肉. The two lists are not the same and the difference is the point: a flavour enters an organ but travels in a tissue, which is why the chapter can go on to forbid sour food to a sinew disease and salty food to a bone disease. 走 is the chapter's verb for that second movement, and it is the reason the five prohibitions of 五裁 can be stated at all.
wǔ tài
The five postures are the five human types of chapter 72: the greater yin, the lesser yin, the greater yang, the lesser yang, and the man of yin and yang at peace. The word is not 形 or 體 but 態 — bearing, the way a man carries what is inside him. Shao Shi gives each type twice: first by temper, then by body. The greater yin man is greedy and unfeeling, 下齊湛湛，好内而惡出; the lesser yin man is small-greedy and treacherous, pleased at another's loss; the greater yang man talks of great affairs and cannot do them; the lesser yang man is conceited and likes office; the man of peace is quiet, yielding, and 譚而不治 — he talks and does not govern. The second pass gives the body that goes with each: 黮黮然黑色 for the greater yin, 清然竊然 for the lesser yin, 軒軒儲儲 for the greater yang, a man who stands looking up and walks shaking for the lesser yang, and for the man of peace the string of adverbs that ends 衆人皆曰君子. Needling follows the type: drain the full, fill the empty, and above all do not rob a man of the yin he has little of.
wǔ fǔ
Chapter 17's second anatomy. Having said that the five depots are what keeps the interior (中之守), the chapter turns round and says they are also the body's strength (身之强), and lists five places where that strength shows: the head is the storehouse of brightness, the back of the chest, the loins of the kidney, the knees of the sinews, the bones of marrow. Each has its own way of failing — the drooping head, the bent back, the loins that cannot turn, the knees that must lean, the bones that tremble. Note that these are 府, not 藏: places where something is kept and can be inspected.
wǔ shū
The five transport points of a channel, matched one by one to the five changes of the viscera. The arithmetic is explicit: five viscera, five changes each, five transports each, twenty-five transports answering the five seasons. What makes the passage unusual is the correspondence it builds rather than the anatomy it assumes — the store governs winter and the well is needled in winter; colour governs spring and the spring point in spring; the season governs summer and the stream in summer; tone governs long summer and the river then; flavour governs autumn and the sea in autumn. A transport is thus not only a place but a season, and the same five points are read twice, once by position and once by calendar. The chapter adds the source points as a sixth for the palaces, and the count becomes thirty-six.
wǔ bīng
The comparison that opens the chapter and gives it its argument. The Yellow Emperor protests that a needle is a small thing, and Qi Bo answers with a question: what in the world is greater? Only the five weapons — and the five weapons are the preparation for death, not the implement of life. The move is rhetorical and exact at once: the weapons are larger, but their office is to kill, while the needle, smaller than any of them, is the instrument by which the state is governed and the people kept alive. The chapter then raises the stakes: a man is the counterweight of heaven and earth, and cannot be left out of the reckoning. The five weapons are therefore not an aside about war but the measure against which the needle's worth is taken.
jū
A 疽 is the deep, flat, slow sore, as against the 癰 that rises, reddens and comes to a head. The chapter gives the mechanism before the names: 寒邪客於經絡之中則血泣，血泣則不通，不通則衛氣歸之，不得復反，故癰腫；寒氣化爲𤍠，𤍠勝則腐肉，肉腐則爲膿 — cold lodges in the network vessels, the blood congeals, the defending qi gathers and cannot return, and there is swelling; then cold turns to heat, heat rots the flesh, and the flesh rots into pus. What makes a sore a 疽 rather than a 癰 is depth and place: the chapter then names fifteen of them by the site they rise from — throat, neck, shoulder, armpit, chest, breast, flank, thigh, rump, knee — and fixes a term for each, with a deadline. 疽 is thus the chapter's unit of classification, and the reason the chapter can say 凡此數氣者，其發無常處，而有常名也.
ròu còu
The interstices of the flesh — the fine spaces between skin and muscle that Suwen 3 treats as the body's outer door. When the yang qi is pure and still they close and refuse the wind, so that even a great wind or a virulent poison cannot do harm; when they are open, dampness lingers in them and cold qi follows them in, and what lodges there becomes fistula, abscess or malaria. The chapter's last paragraph writes the same word 湊理, and the two forms are kept side by side.
sì mò
The four ends are the hands and feet, and the chapter gives them a function rather than a location: they are where yin and yang meet, and the great network vessels spread into them. Because qi returns there, a blockage at the centre does not stop the ring — it reroutes it through the streets. This is the chapter's answer to how the circuit survives an obstruction: the extremities are not a terminus but a turning point.
sì jí
The hands and feet, and in this chapter the place where oedema shows first and worst. The word is used twice: once as a symptom (the four extremities are tight and stir the centre) and once as a treatment (move the four extremities gently). That movement from symptom to prescription is the method of the whole passage — the limbs are what the disease does to, and the limbs are what you move in order to undo it.
sì hǎi
The four reservoirs of the body, named by analogy with the earth's four seas. The chapter's move is exact: the twelve channels are to the body what the twelve rivers are to the land, and since rivers all run into seas the body must have seas too — the sea of marrow in the brain, of blood in the surge vessel, of qi in the chest centre, and of water and grain in the stomach. Each has an upper and a lower transport point, and each when surplus or short gives its own signs. The scheme is the whole chapter, and its interest is that it treats the viscera as a watershed rather than as a bureaucracy.
sì jiē
The four streets are the great roads of qi, set against the four ends: 四末 is where yin and yang meet, 四街 is the course they travel. The image is a city's crossroads — not one channel but a place where several arrive and pass on. It is not the same as 氣街, the single qi street at the groin: that is one site, this is a network in four quarters. The pair explains the chapter's closing figure, the ring without an end.