wǔ wù
Also rendered: the five aversions (Says what an organ recoils from) · the five hatreds (Too strong; 惡 here is milder than that) · what the five viscera dislike (Plainest, loses the noun) · wu wu (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
Heart loathes heat, lung cold, liver wind, spleen dampness, kidney dryness. Five lines, and the shortest complete statement in the book that an organ can have a preference. Heat damages the heart, certainly, but the word chosen is the word for what a person cannot bear — and the chapter’s next-of-kin, chapter 22, uses the same facts the other way round: the kidney suffers dryness, so give it acrid to moisten it. Between them the two chapters turn climate into advice.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Wiseman & Feng | the five [viscera] and what they dislike | They keep the verb and add the organ, letting the clause do the work. |
| Unschuld | the five [depots] and their aversions | He uses aversion, which carries the medical weight without sounding personal. |
| This site | the five aversions | 'Hatred' would make organs into enemies of the weather. Aversion is strong enough to be worth writing down and mild enough to be about a season. |
Search the glossary
Reading path
Guided routes through the corpus, each built on a handful of chapters and their key terms.
See all reading paths