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 qì
The five qi — the five as they govern the year, and in the chapter's closing line the five as they take their turn. The rule the chapter ends on is the plainest thing in it: 五氣更立，各有所先，非其位則邪，當其位則正. Out of its place a qi is evil; in its proper place it is correct. The same rule has already been given for the pulse (不當其位者病，迭移其位者病，失守其位者危) and for the five directions, where each qi is told what it generates, what it harms and what overcomes that harm.
wǔ qì suǒ bìng
The longest entry in the chapter and the one the clinic has used most: for each viscus, the symptom that is properly its own. The heart gives belching, the lung coughing, the liver talking, the spleen swallowing, the kidney yawning and sneezing — and then the list runs past its own heading, because what the five qi do cannot be said without the organs they pass through. Read it as a set of signs an organ puts out, not as a set of named diseases: the chapter is telling you what each one looks like when it is disordered.
wǔ fāng
The frame of the chapter. Each region gets land and water first, then dwelling and diet, then the illness that follows, then the one therapy that answers it: the stone needle in the east, potent drugs in the west, cautery in the north, the nine needles in the south, guiding and pressing in the centre. Wang Bing aligns four of them with the seasons — east with spring, west with autumn, north with winter, south with summer — and the centre with the virtue of earth. What is distinctive here is not the fivefold scheme, common enough in this literature, but that each region contributes one method and nothing else.
wǔ shí wǔ xū
The two lists with which the chapter ends, and the surprise it leaves on. Both lists are fatal: a surging pulse, hot skin, swollen abdomen, no passage front or back, oppression and dimmed vision are the five repletions; a fine pulse, cold skin, scant qi, draining front and back, and food and drink not entering are the five emptinesses. Yet the Emperor has noticed that people sometimes survive them, and the answer is a pair of small physical events rather than a treatment: if gruel reaches the stomach and the draining stops, the empty one lives; if the body sweats and the bowels move, the replete one lives. After a chapter that has counted months and days to the hour, the last word is about whether a mouthful of gruel goes down.
wǔ láo
The most quotable entry in the chapter and the one that has aged best: long looking injures the blood, long lying the qi, long sitting the flesh, long standing the bone, long walking the sinews. Nothing here is violent. The claim is that a posture kept long enough wears out the tissue it belongs to, which is why the list reads like a description of trades rather than of accidents. Chapter 21 had already stated the principle in a single word — overuse; this entry gives it five applications and says which tissue pays.
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 yí
The fifth of the five divisions of 生化, and the one that makes the year's qi into a rule for living. The sentence that names it runs: 根于外者亦五，故生化之别，有五氣、五味、五色、五類、五宜也 — what is rooted outside falls into five, so the differences of generation and transformation come out as five qi, five flavours, five colours, five classes and five suitabilities. The chapter has already used the word before this, in the paragraph on the classes: 五類衰盛，各隨其氣之所宜也 — each of the five classes flourishes or declines according to what its own qi is suited to. So 五宜 is the same judgement seen from the creature's side: not what the year does, but what the year suits, and therefore what may be preserved, carried to term or treated. It is the last term of the chapter's apparatus and the quietest: 宜 is not a cause, only a fit.
wǔ yīn
The five notes — 宫商角徵羽 — and the fifth term in the series by which chapter 54 sets the nine needles against the numbers of the world: one to heaven, two to earth, three to man, four to the seasons, five to the tones, six to the pitch-pipes, seven to the stars, eight to the winds, nine to the wilds. The chapter does more than list them. 人聲應音 puts a person's voice against the tones, 五聲應五音六律 sets the five voices against the tones and the pipes together, and 以候宫商角徴羽 makes the five of them something to be watched for in a patient. The number is the point: five of nine, in a count that runs from the sky down to the body and back.
wǔ huà
The five transformations of a year — 生、長、化、收、藏 — which this chapter uses to say what condition the year is in. Each of the five even circuits is given it with a different predicate: 敷和之紀…五化宣平, 升明之紀…五化均衡, 備化之紀…五化齊脩, 審平之紀…五化宣明, 靜順之紀…五化咸整. The five predicates are the whole judgement of the year in one word each: the five transformations spread and level, or even in measure, or ordered together, or bright and open, or all of them complete. Below the even circuits the term is not used again — when a circuit falls short or goes to excess, the chapter names the single transformation that fails (化氣乃揚、化氣乃昌、長氣不宣), because a broken year is described by which step broke rather than by the five together.
wǔ shù
The five points on each channel where the qi is conveyed, named by what it does there: 所出爲井，所溜爲滎，所注爲腧，所行爲經，所以爲合 — it issues at the well, slips at the gushing, pours at the transport, moves at the river, and joins at the sea. Five viscera take five each, five times five and twenty-five; the six palaces take six each, six times six and thirty-six. The chapter's claim is that all twenty-seven qi travel through these points, so the whole body's traffic is read and treated on the forearm, the hand, the leg and the foot.
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.