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.
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 shí jiǔ cì
The set of fifty-nine points used to treat severe heat disease. Chapter 32 gives the number twice and the list never, because the list belongs to chapter 61 and to the Lingshu. Both mentions are attached to the severe case, which makes the fifty-needling set the heavy measure of the chapter: the ordinary prescriptions needle one or two channels, and only a disease that has gone deep gets the full set.
jué hàn
The sign the chapter gives for the end of the greater yang: 其色白，絶汗乃出，出則死矣. It is not ordinary sweating — the tradition describes it as sweat like oil or like beads, that comes out and does not run. It is the one sign in the chapter given as a threshold: before it, dying; when it appears, death. It is also the only one of the chapter's signs whose name later medicine kept.
xì
The fine quality: a pulse thin in calibre but still distinct, distinguished from faint by being clear rather than weak. In this book it almost always appears with deep: 脉當沉而細 is what an interior illness should look like, 尺寸俱沉細 is Taiyin, 沉細 in a cold body means death within a day. It also joins string, hollow and slow in the pulse of summerheat stroke, and deep-fine with fever and no sweat names spasm.
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.