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 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.
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 luàn
Five states, every one of them produced by evil crossing a line it should not cross. Entering yang it makes mania; entering yin, obstruction; striking yang, disease of the crown of the head; striking yin, loss of voice. Then two more, which are the same rule read from the other side: yang going into yin makes quiet, yin coming out to yang makes anger. What the chapter is really giving is a way to place an illness by its manner — the raving patient and the silent one are on opposite sides of one line, and so are the quiet one and the furious one.
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 guò
The five errors are the chapter's spine, and they are numbered as they arise. The first is to treat a man without asking whether he was once honoured and has fallen, or once rich and has grown poor; no evil has struck him, yet the illness is born within — 脱營 and 失精 — and the physician, finding nothing in the viscera and no change in the form, does not know its name. The second is not to ask of food and dwelling, of sudden joy and sudden hardship, and not to know supplement from drain. The third is to be skilled at the pulse and not to know the way, lacking the matching of kinds and the Congrong. The fourth is to be unable to be stern, unable to stir the spirit, soft and yielding outwardly, until the constant is lost. The fifth is to know neither end nor beginning, to ask nothing of what brought the illness on, and to speak only of the day of death. All five come, the chapter says at the close of the count, of receiving the art without penetrating it and of not understanding human affairs.
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 zhěn
The five examinations of the five viscera, and the chapter's way of saying that a dream is not a diagnosis. The five viscera each print their own dream when their qi is deficient, but the chapter closes the passage with 此皆五藏氣虛，陽氣有餘，陰氣不足，合之五診，調之陰陽，以在經脉 — all these are deficiency of the five viscera, with yang in excess and yin insufficient; join them to the five examinations, tune yin and yang, and seek it in the channels. So the dream is one sign among five, to be checked against the pulse, the colour, the sound and the qi, and then treated in the channels. The entry is the counterweight to the dream list: it forbids reading a dream alone.
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.