wǔ zǒu
Also rendered: The five courses (plain, and it sounds like a meal) · The five destinations (clear, and it loses the running) · The five movements (the site's convention, keeping 走)
Reviewed · 2026-10-26
At a glance
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.
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.
| This site | the five movements | where each flavour runs |
| Literal | five goings | exact, and unidiomatic |
| Clinical | the five tissues each flavour reaches | clear, and it explains 五裁 |
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