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 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.
wǔ fēng
The winds of the five viscera, by contrast with the eight winds of the directions. Suwen 4 opens with the contrast: heaven has eight winds, the channels have five winds. The eight belong to the quarters of the sky and come from outside; the five belong to the viscera and are what those eight become once they have entered — 八風發邪，以爲經風，觸五藏。The chapter never names the five one by one, and it does not need to: it had already given each viscus its quarter, its colour, its orifice and its number, and the five winds are those five, moved.
qū shù
The transport points along the flank, needled in the chapter's treatment of the full, large, urgent malaria pulse. The chapter names them in two near-parallel lines that differ in detail — five of them beside, versus five of them with the back transport points — and the base text even writes the number two ways. The site keeps the two lines as they stand.
jū
A 疽 is the deep, flat, slow sore, as against the 癰 that rises, reddens and comes to a head. The chapter gives the mechanism before the names: 寒邪客於經絡之中則血泣，血泣則不通，不通則衛氣歸之，不得復反，故癰腫；寒氣化爲𤍠，𤍠勝則腐肉，肉腐則爲膿 — cold lodges in the network vessels, the blood congeals, the defending qi gathers and cannot return, and there is swelling; then cold turns to heat, heat rots the flesh, and the flesh rots into pus. What makes a sore a 疽 rather than a 癰 is depth and place: the chapter then names fifteen of them by the site they rise from — throat, neck, shoulder, armpit, chest, breast, flank, thigh, rump, knee — and fixes a term for each, with a deadline. 疽 is thus the chapter's unit of classification, and the reason the chapter can say 凡此數氣者，其發無常處，而有常名也.
ròu còu
The interstices of the flesh — the fine spaces between skin and muscle that Suwen 3 treats as the body's outer door. When the yang qi is pure and still they close and refuse the wind, so that even a great wind or a virulent poison cannot do harm; when they are open, dampness lingers in them and cold qi follows them in, and what lodges there becomes fistula, abscess or malaria. The chapter's last paragraph writes the same word 湊理, and the two forms are kept side by side.
fú
The autumn pulse. It is named for where the qi rides — near the skin — and for how it leaves: it arrives urgently and scatters. The season is the one in which the myriad things are gathered in, and the lung, metal of the west, is the viscus that matches. Excess is a pulse that feels hairy, hard in the middle and empty at both edges, and it brings counterflow qi and a smouldering pain between the shoulders. Deficiency is a pulse that is merely hairy and faint, and it brings panting, scant breath, coughing, blood in the qi above, and a sound in the chest below.