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 xíng zhì
The chapter's most quoted passage, and the book's clearest piece of social medicine: five ways of living, each with its own site of disease and its own treatment. Body at ease with mind embittered makes disease in the vessels; both at ease makes it in the flesh; body labouring with mind at ease makes it in the sinews; both embittered makes it in the throat; a body repeatedly frightened makes it in numbness. The principle the list rests on is that treatment is chosen for the tissue and not for the complaint, and the treatments run outward to inward — cautery, then needle and stone, then heat and traction, then drugs, then rubbing and wine. The fifth case is the one to notice: it is the only one attributed to what happened to a person rather than to how they lived.
wǔ gǔ
The closing maxim of chapter 22 is the sentence every later diet book quotes: potent drugs attack the evil, the five grains nourish, the five fruits assist, the five domestic animals benefit, the five vegetables fill out. Note what the sentence is not saying — it is not a hierarchy in which medicine is base and food noble. Both are needed; they are aimed at different things. The list that follows assigns a grain, a fruit, an animal and a vegetable to each viscus by flavour, which is the same principle as everything earlier in the chapter, applied to the kitchen.
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.
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 fǎ
The five requirements chapter 25 sets for anyone who would use a needle: govern the spirit, know how to nourish the body, know true drugs from false, regulate the size of the stone, and know the examination of depots, viscera, blood and qi. Three of the five are not about needling at all, which is the surprise the chapter is built around. It adds that the five are established together and each has its own priority — so the list is not a checklist but an order of dependence, with the governance of the spirit at the top of it.
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 bì
What ten days of decoction was meant to drive out, together with the eight winds. Wang Bing names the five by tissue: the obstructions of skin, flesh, sinew, bone and vessel. The Newly Collated edition corrects him on his source — the passage he quotes as from the Discourse on Obstruction is not in that chapter, and should be attributed to the Discourse on Wind, with the list of obstructions quoted separately. The site's own entry on 痺 follows the definition given in Suwen 10: blood that moves and cannot return to its hollow.
wǔ yù
The five kinds of pent-up qi, and the five ways out. 木鬱逹之，火鬱發之，土鬱奪之，金鬱泄之，水鬱折之，然調其氣，過者折之，以其畏也，所謂冩之 — each element gets a different verb, which is the point: wood is to be opened up, fire let out, earth taken away, metal drained, water bent aside. The treatment follows what the element does when it is stuck. Each of the five also has its own paragraph earlier in the chapter, saying when it breaks out and what it does to the weather and to men, so that the last page of the chapter is a coda to a passage hundreds of graphs long.
wǔ xīng
The five wandering stars as a single set: Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus and Mercury, one to each of the five circuits. The chapter uses them one at a time throughout its ten tables and names them together once, in the question that opens its last movement — whether the planets answer to a sudden change as well as to the settled course of the year. The answer is no, and the reason is that they move by what they receive from heaven: 應常不應卒, they answer to the constant and not to the sudden. What follows is the chapter's account of how a star is read — by its halting, its size, its colour, and the direction it takes.
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 jìn
One flavour is forbidden for each of five illnesses, and the reason is always spatial: acrid moves into qi, so where qi is ill do not eat acrid; salty moves into blood, so where blood is ill do not eat salty; bitter into bone, sweet into flesh, sour into sinew. The flavour is not harmful in itself — it is harmful because it goes where the trouble already is and adds to it. Then the chapter generalises in four words: five prohibitions, let none be eaten to excess. The illness names the place; the excess makes the harm.
wǔ mài
The chapter closes with the five pulses and the season each answers to: liver string-like, heart hooked, spleen intermittent, lung downy, kidney stony. Four of these are the images chapter 18 gave for the pulses of the four seasons, and the fifth — 代, the intermittent pulse — belongs to earth, which has no season of its own and so takes the turning points between them. That is the whole claim: a pulse is an image, and the image tells you which season the body is living in.