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 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.
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.