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 wù
Heart loathes heat, lung cold, liver wind, spleen dampness, kidney dryness. Five lines, and the shortest complete statement in the book that an organ can have a preference. Heat damages the heart, certainly, but the word chosen is the word for what a person cannot bear — and the chapter's next-of-kin, chapter 22, uses the same facts the other way round: the kidney suffers dryness, so give it acrid to moisten it. Between them the two chapters turn climate into advice.
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 yùn
The five phases taken as a calendar. They succeed one another, each presiding in its turn, and when the appointed day is reached the ring begins again — 如環無端, like a ring without end. Note what this chapter asks of them: not what the five phases are, but whether a physician can tell which is in charge and whether it has come early or late. Later books build the enormous system of 五運六氣 on this word; here it is still a way of keeping time.
wǔ yùn liù qì
The two reckonings together. The five circuits run on the ten heavenly stems: 甲己土、乙庚金、丙辛水、丁壬木、戊癸火, with 太少 marking excess and deficit; the six qi run on the twelve earthly branches, two years to each. The chapter's opening question puts them side by side: 五運、六氣之應見，六化之正，六變之紀，何如？ and the sixty-year table answers by giving both for every year — 甲子、甲午歲。上少陰火，中太宫土運，下陽明金. When the two agree the table says 天符 or 歲會 or 同正; when they do not, it counts the difference. The phrase in the passage on 盛衰 is the chapter's own summary of what it has been doing for sixty years.
wǔ lèi
The five orders of living creature, and the rule that decides which of them thrives in a given year: 六氣五類，有相勝制也。同者盛之，異者衰之. The classes are 毛、羽、倮、介、鱗 — hairy, feathered, naked, shelled, scaled — and each belongs to one of the five phases, so that a year's qi is answered by the creatures whose phase it is or whose phase it overcomes. The chapter works this out twice: once in general, where it says that what resembles the qi flourishes and what differs from it declines, and once creature by creature, under each of the six 司天 and each of the six 在泉, where it names which is quiet, which breeds, and which does not come to term. This is the chapter's answer to why child-bearing is uneven in a year — 歲有胎孕不育，治之不全 — and its answer is that the same year's qi does not fall on the five alike.
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 shèng
The overcoming sequence among the five phases, named in chapter 25 as one of the things a physician must be able to hold, and illustrated in the chapter's most quotable five clauses. The term itself appears in the phrase 五勝更立 — the conquests set each other up in turn — and the illustration follows shortly after: wood is felled by metal, fire quenched by water, earth opened by wood, metal flawed by fire, water cut off by earth. This site keeps sheng as 'conquest' rather than 'overcoming' because the chapter is describing what happens when two phases meet, not a hierarchy.
wǔ cháng
The five standing measures — whatever five things the chapter takes as given and established before it begins. The text is unusual in naming them and then never saying what they are: 考建五常 is the fourth of four opening clauses and the chapter moves straight past it to the question. What the word does is set the register: the business in hand is the ordering of the year by fixed measures, not the treatment of a patient, and that is why the answer, when it comes, is about images rather than numbers.
wǔ bìng
The chapter explains its own term in the last four characters: a viscus is depleted, and the others gather into the empty place. Essence qi gathering in the heart gives unstoppable joy; in the lung, grief; in the liver, anxiety; in the spleen, fearfulness; in the kidney, terror. This is not possession but crowding — the sound organ's qi has somewhere to be, the depleted one's has none, so everything flows into it, and the patient's mood is decided by which organ is being crowded. It is one of the few places in the book where a state of mind is given a purely mechanical cause.
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 jué
The chapter's rule for starting an examination, and one of the few places in the Canon where the method is stated rather than simply used. 王冰：五決，謂以五藏之脈，為決生死之綱紀也。And the chapter says outright that the five decisions are the five pulses. Before any of that, it says, establish the mother — the qi that ought to be in season — since only then can one tell which qi is the evil and which is the right.