Chinese Organ Networks: The Bladder

This is the final installment of the first set of four articles on Chinese organ networks.  I have posted these in quick succession, so if you are interested in reading them all and are not caught up, I recommend going back to the article on the Heart and working your way through the Small Intestine and the Kidney before tackling the Bladder.  (If that sounds like an improbable route through the body, you’ll trust have to take my word for it that you’ll arrive eventually.)  

The Bladder is the counterpart to the Kidney, but whereas the Kidney was all about storing essence, the Bladder is about moving it around and transforming it.  First, though, a little bit on nomenclature.  As with all of the organ networks, the Bladder network refers to the anatomical bladder but is not limited to that structure.  The Chinese concept of the Bladder can be said to include the prostate (and perhaps the uterus) and the perineum, that muscular space between anus and genitalia.   

Each organ network is associated with a hexagram, that is a set of six stacked horizontal lines, each of which is either whole or broken.  Hexagrams are the language of the I Ching (Yi Jing in the Pinyin system of romanization), the famous oracle and symbolic alphabet--and one of the oldest books in the world.  Each of its 64 hexagrams is composed of two trigrams.  Each trigram has three lines,each of which can be either whole (yang) or broken (yin); 2 times 2 times 2 gives 8 different trigrams.  8 times 8 gives the 64 hexagrams.  To start understanding a hexagram and begin conversing with this fascinating and boundless cosmological sourcebook, it is only really necessary to have a basic sense of the nature of the 8 trigrams.  The simplest are named Qian and Kun, and are composed of three yang lines and three yin lines, respectively.  Thus Qian is the most yang trigram and represents the sky or heaven, while Kun is the most yin and represents the earth.  In this basic polarity, the sky is light, clear, masculine, while the earth is dark, opaque, feminine.  Sky rises; earth sinks.  This is really all you need to know about the I Ching to understand the hexagram called Pi, the key to the Bladder network.  

Pi is composed of Qian (the sky trigram) on top and Kun (the earth trigram) below.  Since sky wants to ascend and earth descend, this is a picture of separation: different things going different ways.  If sky were below and earth above, the tendency would be for them to unite in joyous union.  But that is not the case here.  A common translation for Pi is, indeed, “separation;” when consulting the I Ching as an oracle, Pi is considered “the biggest ‘no’ you can get” (according to Dr. Fruehauf).  How is this the key to the Bladder?  Well, the bladder is all about saying “no.”  This plays out in two different ways.

The first has to do with the surface of the body.  Our surface--our skin--is what separates us from the outside world, and our first line of defense against invading pathogens.  In the Small Intestine article we talked about the inner boundary; here, we are dealing with the outer one.  Strange as it may seem, this is the realm of the Bladder (if not the bladder).  It is the Bladder’s job to keep the surface sealed tight, telling invading bugs and unwelcome climatic influences a resounding “no” and slamming the door in their face.  

The second way that the Bladder says “no” is in regard to the watery essence discussed below, in the Kidney section.  The Kidney stored that essence, and now the Bladder has to utilize it.  This means, first of all, not squandering it.  The Bladder is the stopper that keeps jing from leaking out; in the somewhat male-centric world of classical Chinese medicine, the Bladder “just says no” to--amongst other things--ejaculation.  In women, the corresponding action would be to limit the menstrual flow and preserve juicy essence that way.  In both sexes, this is accomplished through strengthening and making use of the perineal muscles to tone and control sexual activity.  In Taoist sexual yoga (for lack of a better term; some have called it “sexual kung fu”), this practice of restraint is the foundation.  The second step, and the other major role of the Bladder, is to sent this essence up the spine and to the head.  This sounds exceedingly odd to most Western ears, but the idea of transmuting sexual energy to enhance the quality of consciousness and promote longevity is one common to other Asian cultures.  (Does anyone know if there are other traditions that advocate similar methods of sexual control and transmutation?  Anything native American?) The idea is closely related to the Indian one of Kundalini energy that lives coiled like a snake at the base of the spine and can be awoken and ascended through the various chakras to the cranium.  Indeed, the Bladder is associated with the spine and with straightness (or, yes, with erectness).  

So our picture of the Bladder is quite specific and limited in scope: it is the organ network that seals the surface, preventing invasion from without and essence leakage from within, and pressurizes or pumps a form of that essence up the spine and out to the surface.  Its action is one of cold squeezing.  With the emphasis on the spine and the surface and the obvious association with urine, who but the monkey should be the representative animal here.  Half erect (seemingly halfway between animals and human); known for playing with their pee; absurd in their half dignity or ridiculous in their playfulness.  Monkeys are a virtual symbol of immaturity: not fully evolved into human, but partway there.  And maturity--sexual and spiritual--has much to do with the Bladder.  

In terms of the sacred geography of ancient China, it is the border lands that go with the Bladder network.  During the Warring States period, these areas were ruled by semi-independent vassals who, like “monkey kings,” ran things the way they wanted to in exchange for supporting the central power in times of need.  

This wraps up the first set of four organ networks.  I shouldn’t neglect to mention that these four--Heart, Small Intestine, Bladder, and Kidney--are the four associated with the Heavenly realm, as best understood in the fire organs.  In the coming few months, I will be tackling the organs of the Human realm: Pericardium, Triple Burner, Liver and Gallbladder.  Stay tuned!  As always, questions and comments are most welcome.  

Chinese organ networks: The Kidney

Welcome to the next installment of Chinese organ networks.  Just to be extremely clear in giving credit where credit is due, virtually all the material in this post and in the whole series on each of the 12 organs comes from Dr. Heiner Fruehauf’s Chinese cosmology class at NCNM.  This series is in part a project for that class, a way for me to integrate the material by presenting it to the public eye.  The other things I have chosen to do for the project is a large-scale rendition of the “organ clock,” a 12 sectioned wheel that lays out the organs along with various symbols associated with them.  It is a multivalent calendar and a reference sheet for the organ networks.  It will also look extremely cool when I am finally finished putting in all the hexagrams, animals, Chinese characters and other symbols.  I will upload a photo as it develops.

In preparing this batch of organ network posts, I had do decide whether to proceed in the order of the organ clock or to switch it up slightly.  It made sense to present the Heart first (although it is actually associated with the fifth month of the Chinese character) and the Small Intestine afterwards because of their relationship, but this is also the order on the clock.  With the next two organs, the Bladder and Kidney, I am reversing the clock order and discussing the Kidney first because it is the more essential organ, the archetype of its water phase-element, and the Bladder is best understood in the context of water in general and the Kidney in particular.  So here we go: the Kidney.

At the heart of the Kidney network is a string of associations that I will simply spout out here and unpack as we go along: kidney-water-storage-lowness-north-winter-black-essence-sticky.  We could add more: humility-fear-awe; bones-ears-lower body; determination-memory.  Chinese medicine, like other traditional medicines of the world, works this way, through interlocking resonances.  This makes it hard to explain one part without the whole, but then, once the whole is sketched out, all the parts fit in beautifully.  Once fully fleshed-out, such a system gives rise to great explanatory and, ultimately, clinical power.

The kidney is the organ most closely associated with winter.  The phase-element (one of 5 stages in cycle of nature, which proceeds from water to wood to fire to earth to metal and back to water) of winter is water.  Not the water that courses and rushes, overwhelms, or even refreshes on a sunny day, but the deep, salty, source water we come from.  The ocean.  This water is what we rest in, what connects us to vastness, to the past of our ancestors and, through our own bodily “waters” to our genetic futures.  The key qualities of water in this sense--let’s call it Water--are its depth and lowness.  It seeks always the lowest place and quietly fills it up.  Winter is Water season because of this inward, downward turning.  In yin-yang terms, yang has long since peaked (at midsummer) and declined (during autumn) and now yin rules: the passive, dark, quiet, interior side of nature.  Summer was fire; winter is water.  What nature is doing at this time may be passive, but it is not nothing: rather, she is biding her time and stowing away her resources, for out of the stillness and depth of winter’s Water will spring the new year’s woody growth.  But in order for this to happen, Water must fulfill its function of storage.  At this time of year, the upper parts of plants have died off, and their life force descends into their roots or lies waiting in seeds.  Humans mirror this activity in taking the fruits of our agricultural labors, gathering them up, and preserving them.  It makes sense, then, that the scent associated with Water would be that of fermentation; I picture crocks of kim chee ripening underground, or barrels of miso quietly bubbling in a dank basement.  This is storage, holding the seed of new (yang) growth in the root cellar until the time is ripe. 

People would be well advised to heed this rhythm of nature, to honor the winter season by slowing down, conserving their energy, resting and recharging.  But we also need to do so on a smaller time-scale: nighttime is our daily winter, the time when yang (fire) descends into the embrace of yin (water).  Our society’s epidemic of insomnia and anxiety is one reflection of a deep imbalance here: our stores are depleted.  Without a healthy amount of water down below, there’s nothing to keep the fire of the heart-mind (the Kidney’s partner in the Shaoyin layer, from the perspective of the 6 layers/conformations model) from flaring out of control.  So our minds race, hearts palpitate.  But the relationship between fire and water is not quite what it sounds like.  It isn’t that the Kidney’s water somehow quenches the fire; rather, and somewhat counterintuitively, the water of the Kidney feeds the fire.  Water is not the right word to express this aspect of the kidney’s substance; fat or oil is more like it, or wax.  A candle flame sputters and flares when the wax has burned low; our consciousness reacts similarly when our energy reserves are depleted.  In order to keep the flame steady, we need to assure it that there is adequate fuel waiting in the tank.  

In naturopathic medicine there is much talk of adrenal depletion; the adrenal glands are situated directly on top of the kidneys, and their function is very much part of the sphere of the Chinese Kidney.  The adrenals can shift us into and out of the fight-or-flight adrenaline/cortisol response, i.e. they dictate whether it is appropriate to rev up the afterburners, to “burn the candle at both ends,” as it is sometimes necessary to do in order to overcome a challenge.  With the stresses of modern life, however, many of us are stuck in this sympathetic nervous system/adrenal stress response mode most of the time.  Our waxy, watery reserves are in jeopardy as we fuel the fire with endless cups of coffee, late nights, adrenaline-junkie behavior.  The antidote is as simple as “nourish, rest and relax,” but who has time for that?  Indeed, who even really knows how to get out of the careening, adrenaline-fueled vehicle that thrills us even as it hurtles us towards the cliff of burnout, nervous breakdown, thyroid crash?

equals

Perhaps the most apt modern metaphor for the Kidney is a battery.  Throughout life we run off both the “post-natal” energy we derive from food and drink and from the air, and the “pre-natal” energy stored in the Kidney.  Even without taxing lifestyles, the Kidney energy slows drains as we age.  This is reflected in some of the common ailments of old age: back pain, knee pain, hearing loss, greying of hair, thinning of bones.  All of these aspects of anatomy and physiology are associated with the Kidney: the lower parts of the body, the bones and teeth, the luster and color of head hair, the ears.  And perhaps the most essential of all: the gonads.  The Chinese word for kidney, “shen,” also means testicle, and to a great extent the sexual functions (of males especially) fall under the realm of the Kidney network.  Semen, the very water of life, sticky, fatty, precious, is the quintessential kidney substance, the closest physical correlate of kidney essence, jing.  There is no quicker way for men to deplete our jing, the very essence of kidney water, than by overindulging in ejaculatory sex.  Nutritionally, we can understand this when we consider that semen contains large amounts of precious nutrients like zinc and omega-3 fatty acids.  It is the final, distilled end product of nutrition, a form of energy so concentrated that it has condensed into a physical substance.  Taoist longevity practices teach techniques for conserving semen, while using kidney-tonifying substances to supplement the jing.  Following the logic of our string of associations, such substances are sticky, dark or black (the color of water and winter), heavy.  Steamed Rehmannia root, an extremely dense and sticky sweet black root, is the classic example from the Chinese pharmacopeia; Ayurvedic tradition uses different terminology but could be said to tonify the Kidney using Shilajit, a highly revered, black, tarry substance that oozes from cracks in the Himalayas during the summer.  The origins of Shilajit are uncertain; it may actually be an extremely condensed form of decomposed plant matter.  It resonates with the Kidney by this fact of its being rotted down, concentrated, as well as by its blackness, stickiness, and heaviness.  Good quality Shilajit is even said to smell like cow urine; it also bears a certain resemblance to crude oil.  A partial list of ailments Shilajit treats: weak bones and fractures, diabetes, infertility, impotence.  Kidneys indeed.

              ^^ Kidney territory: Shilajit bubbling away quietly in the basement.  According to Ayurveda, Shilajit needs to be processed with triphala.  Singh Durbar Vaidyakhana, Kathmandu.  

The Kidney’s animal totem is a bird, either a chicken or an owl.  The chicken is a “slave bird,” as humble as they come, who stays low to the ground selflessly provides eggs.  The more mysterious owl’s night vision is symbolic for the mystical ability of the Kidney to “see in the dark.”

Emotionally, the healthy Kidney ought to manifest humility and awe, and the watery ability to “go with the flow.”  Pathologically, then, arrogance and rigidity can be seen as Kidney pathology.  The Kidney’s chief virtue is said to be zhi, determination or will power.  Kidney people (people who strongly express the positive qualities of the Kidney) include shamans, diviners, physicians, and artisans.  All of these paths carry a certain risk of arrogance, but it is only in making themselves low like water can true mastery be achieved in any of them.  

Chinese Organ Networks: The Small Intestine

Last time, while updating essays I’d originally written for class and adapting them for blogging purposes, I found myself digressing at some length about the heart.  Not the heart, as in the four-chambered muscular blood pump, but the Heart, the emperor of the organs, the one that receives the divine mandate and provides sacred connection to the source.  The Heart is one of four organ networks that we covered this term in Dr. Fruehauf’s Chinese Cosmology course.  Our final project for the quarter is an open-ended integration of the material.  I didn’t even realize it at the time, but it makes perfect sense for me to use this blog for that assignment, and that assignment for this blog.  I’ve already covered the Heart; today’s topic is the Small Intestine, and in the next few days I will be posting on the Bladder and Kidney as well.  Next quarter I’ll tackle the organs we’re learning about one by one, rather than saving them all for finals week.  By summer’s end, if all goes according to plan, I will have covered all 12 organ networks and completed the cycle. 

The Small Intestine

In the organ clock/calendar, the Small Intestine follow on the heels of the Heart.  Within the body, the SI is the Heart’s zang-fu partner, meaning that it is the hollow organ paired with the solid Heart.  While the zang, solid organs, are full of essence but empty of contents, the fu organs are the reverse: they serve as conduits for physical matter--in this case, digesting food--but they don’t store essential things like blood or shen (spirit/consciousness) or the sticky, concentrated life-stuff of the kidneys, called jing.  What unites the Heart and Small Intestine, then?  Both are fire organs, imperial fire organs to be specific (as the fire element is split into two sub-types, at least partly so that the 6 organ pairs can be neatly matched with the 5 basic phase elements).  Fire is code for the immaterial realm, for spirit; it is the most exalted of the elements.  We discussed the Heart’s firiness; the Small Intestine’s is of a complementary sort.  What the Heart decrees, the Small Intestine carries out.  The Heart-emperor is ever sequestered in his royal chambers, secreted away in the innermost part of the palace, and she must depend on his cabinet of ministers to accomplish anything material.  Closest to her physically is the Pericardium or Heart Protector, but it is the Small Intestine who is most aligned in function.  For the Small Intestine is the High Priest, the minister in charge of sacrifice: that is, of receiving and then giving away.  This is, after all, its physiological function, to “sort” through the half-digested mass it receives, pluck the nutritive pearls from the muck, and let the rest go.  This function operates on the symbolic realm as well as the physical, digestive one, so that it is the Small Intestine’s duty to discriminate between what is useful to the us--to the Heart’s mandate--and what is useless.  It is a gatekeeper of sorts, since it determines what will be allowed to enter the body and what will stay on the outside.  It is important to keep in mind that the digestive tract is not actually part of the body’s interior, but rather a convoluted extension of the outside world that stretches between mouth and anus.  This fact is recognized in the Chinese system by the fact that the Small Intestine is paired with the Bladder in yet another class of pairing to form the Tai Yang layer.  This is the outermost level of physiology, that of our boundary.  The Bladder has to do with the more obvious boundary, the skin surface, while the Small Intestine governs the inner boundary.  It is essential to health that the Small Intestine maintain its tight seal between interior and exterior, otherwise particles that the body does not know how to handle will seep in.  This phenomenon is called “leaky gut syndrome” and has become a widespread problem within the last generation or two; it leads to a cascade of auto-immune reactions triggered by unrecognizable, not-fully-broken-down molecules that ought to have been stopped at the border.  

I mentioned the archetype of the High Priest; it is the Small Intestine’s role to maintain ritual propriety, a healthy sense of the sacred.  Yet within this seriousness should be a certain levity, the humor that makes the guru’s harsh instruction not only bearable but wonderful.  Founder of modern 5 Element acupuncture J.R. Worsley must have intuited this aspect of the Small Intestine, since he speaks about the “court jester” in relation to the S.I.  Here we have the flipside of the High Priest: instead of levity within seriousness, we have a certain sacredness within jesting.  Either way--whether as holy fool or twinkly-eyed priest--this is healthy Small Intestine territory.  Conversely, Small Intestine pathology can take the form of a lack of propriety, as in someone who doesn’t know when to stop joking or for whom nothing is sacred.  

(photo: Small Intestine symbolism run amok?)

Every organ is associated with a feature of ancient China’s geography.  The Small Intestine’s correlative is Mount Song, an appropriately sacred mountain in the heart of China that is best known in the West as the site of the Shaolin temple of kung fu movie fame.  It is also one of the five mountains most revered by Taoists.  Getting closer to the real significance of this geography, however, is the fact that Mount Song is the mythical point of entrance to the underworld.  Somewhere on the mountain, a tunnel leads away from the bright light (tai yang) of the outside world, down into the dark, into hidden places where who knows what all monsters may lurk.  In the body, the Small Intestine is indeed a difficult region to know; as with the Mines of Moria, it’s a long way from either opening to this winding and narrow passageway.  As such, it’s a good place indeed for monsters to lurk: this is prime terrain for parasites who would prefer not to be ousted by the simple expedient of a laxative or emetic.  Undiagnosed parasitic infections may represent a major slice of the causal pie for patients of chronic disease, especially those who suffer from difficult to diagnose, harder to treat problems involving “brain fog,” chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and a host of other murky symptoms.  Dr. Fruehauf has done a good deal of work in this area and has re-introduced the concept of Gu syndrome, parasitic illness in which the pathogen has established itself so well in the body that it is like oil that’s seeped into a sack of flour.  And yet there may be another dimension to parasites, those feared and reviled little (and not-so-little) gut-dwelling fiends.  We have evolved alongside parasites, and while they may not be our friends exactly, it is possible that the relationship is sometimes more symbiotic than we would like to admit.  Ironically, while systemic infections like candidiasis are associated with leaky-gut syndrome and auto-immune havoc, other parasites may have the opposite effect on our immune systems.  By giving our defenses something to react to, they set a baseline of comparison.  Basically, when they are filled with squirming wormlets, our intestines are less likely to freak out at the bits of protein that more and more people are allergic to.

The animal representing the Small Intestine is the sheep or goat (oddly, the Chinese term doesn’t distinguish between the two).  It makes sense to imagine here the wild ancestor of both of these ruminants, something like the Bharal that Peter Matthiessen describes in The Snow Leopard.  This is a hardy creature that depends for survival on its digestive capacity.  Goats can eat almost anything, as anyone who’s ever spent time around them learns when they feel a tell-tale tug at their shirttail or leather shoe.  Their small intestines are extremely well-developed, and it seems to me they carry themselves with just the right blend of humor and dignity, too.  

Double Whammy! Yin Yang Theory and the Chinese Heart

OK, I'll admit right off the bat that this post involves some pretty heavy recycling of school assignments.  But then, what I write for school and what I write outside of it (or would given the time) are tending to converge.  I take this as a good sign.  

Without further ado then, here are a couple of short pieces on foundational aspects of Chinese medicine.  Oh, and I should say that the second piece owes a great deal to Dr. Heiner Fruehauf, whose life's work has centered around excavating and reviving the classical Chinese medical cosmology in all its glory.  

On Yin and Yang

Yin and Yang represent opposites--cold and hot, dark and bright, moist and dry, female and male, water and fire--and yet they are not opposing forces per se.  As with the sexes, they only make sense in terms of each other.  The Book of Genesis notwithstanding, would we be talking about ‘male’ if they weren’t a contrasting category, ‘female?’  Without cold we know no hot; light exists only in contrast to darkness.  These pairs are poles, defining a world between them.

 The characters for yin and yang contain the radical for ‘hill,’ so that Yin is the shady and Yang the sunny side of the same hill.  And clearly, the idea of a one-sided hill is absurd.  Yin and Yang define each other, need each other, and--more than this--they create each other, as the night births the day and the day the night, onwards in the eternal cycle of expansion and contraction.  The seasons and their five phases are a precise elaboration of this process, and everything in nature reflects reflects Yin and Yang through its organoleptic qualities.  New shoots in springtime are charged with yang emerging from the watery, yin stillness of winter.  Taproots gather and store yin, preparing for a future growth cycle (yang).  Bright colors, pungent taste, spikes--these outward, unsubtle qualities smack of the force of yang; softness, sweetness or blandness, downy leaves are all manifestations of yin.  As the Dao De Jing Chapter 39 tells us, “the humble is the root of the noble/the low is the foundation of the high.”  And lest the high should become proud, it must recall that it will lower itself again in time.  The tallest stone guard tower eventually becomes sand for children to shape into castles of their own, for the tide to fold into its embrace, for oysters to coat with pearly layers.  Pearls to royal necklaces, to be interred and dissolved back into the soil.    

On the Nature of Traditional Medicine: The Example of the Heart

We may argue over whether it is more of an art or a science, but medicine is certainly not a subject that stands in isolation.  Rather, a given culture’s medicine is a reflection of that culture’s ontology--their (often implicit) assumptions about the nature of reality--and their epistemology--their ideas about what constitutes knowledge and how that knowledge can be gleaned.  While modern biomedicine may claim for itself the status of “objective,” it is subject to all the limitations of its parent sciences of biology, chemistry, physics, etc., most notably their reductionist and materialist biases.  Actually, as modern medicine is an applied as opposed to a pure science, it tends to lag behind the scientific cutting edge by a generation or more, so that even events as distant as the quantum mechanical and relativistic revolution in physics in the early 20th Century have still not been thoroughly absorbed into the medical fold.  Rather, most of modern medicine operates on Newtonian assumptions about the nature of matter and its “laws.”  

The various strands of Chinese medicine no more stand alone than do their modern, biomedical counterparts.  In the worldview of ancient China, medicine was on a continuum with philosophy, part of an intellectual-spiritual complex that also includes astrology, feng shui, and the harmonizing, meaning-fixing practices that we tend to separate out from the rest of life and label “religion.”  This is to say that, as in most traditional cultures, there was in classical China no firm division between religion and philosophy, art and science, or science and religion.  All these disciplines, if it even makes sense to speak of them as distinct entities, shared a common cosmological understanding and used a symbolic language based in a system of associations or resonances linking microcosm and macrocosm.  In this system, the world bounded by the human skin is as a reflection of the world outside of it.  Humanity is not so much a part of nature as she is a distillation or crystallization of the universe, as in Blake’s “world in a grain of sand.”  Thus our organs each correspond to a network of constellations (the celestial level) and features of China’s geography (the terrestrial level) as well as to specific animals, sounds, and a whole host of other elements of reality as the ancients experienced it.  Every aspect of the medicine is informed by this rich network of correspondences and by the metaphorical language it gives rise to; nothing is merely what we measure it to be but rather an information-dense chunk of the universe whose nature can be inferred from its qualities and characteristics.  

                                         (Another metaphor for the heart ? >>)

To take an example, the Chinese conception of the heart includes all of 

these layers of context and resonant associations.   To begin with, a Chinese classical text states that “the heart is the human heart.”  We are dealing, then, with the organ that separates us from the beasts, that provides a home for our shen (spirit, consciousness).  The heart, as a zang or solid organ, is indeed an organ of storage, and as such is represented by a vessel.  However, he heart stores the immaterial spirit and not any physical substance; indeed, filling our hearts with material things gives rise to a pathological condition in which there is no room left for what matters.  So the heart is represented by an upside down vessel (as depicted in its I Ching hexagram).  This design for our innermost, essential organ allows it to shun what is material and fill up with immaterial shen as with a gas.  It is this shen that shines forth from its seat in the heart, radiating out in the face, with the light of consciousness.  This is the heart as life’s lamp.  The association of heart and face makes sense to us; we instinctively judge the state of someone’s spirit (or simply mood) based on what we see in their face.

As a complex composite formed over millennia, Chinese medicine includes layers of influences from different traditions, notably Daoism and Confucianism.  Daoism provides the esoteric and shamanistic parts; Confucianism lends it a pragmatically social dimension.  In the medicine, Confucianism is perhaps most visible in the theory of the 12 ministers.  Each organ is conceptualized as having a role in the government (the phrase "body politic" seems especially apt).  The heart, as will come as no surprise, is the emperor.  But unlike worldly emperors who seek power and prestige, the heart is the perfect spiritual leader, the one responsible for receiving the Mandate of Heaven.  The emperor, in classical China, is just such a one who the divine and human realms.  S/he need not actually do very much in the world, besides providing this all-important orientation and setting the example.  So with the heart.  If the heart is strong, the person's mission will be clear, and the other organs will naturally settle into their own, more worldly roles.  In case of a weak heart--and though we are talking about the Chinese heart, this also includes the physical organ--the other ministers may try and usurp its function.  The stomach, which mirrors the heart in certain respects, often attempts this, with the result that the affected person will follow his appetite around blindly and seek only to fill the vessel with the savors of material life.  

The heart’s elemental association is with fire.  In Chinese cosmology, the five phases or elements are not conceived of as substances per se, but rather as stages of a continuously-unfolding process.  They relate directly to the seasons of the year.  Briefly, water relates to winter, the time of inwardness and storage.  Wood, the energy of new growth springing forth, follows water and bursts forth out of its stillness with the advent of springtime.  Wood, new yang rising, matures into fire, the stage of flourishing and maturity.  Fire’s time is midsummer, when the world is alive with color and heat and the yang has reached its full manifestation.  At just this moment (summer solstice), as yang climaxes, there begins the return of the yin; the days start to get imperceptibly shorter.  Now is the time of the earth phase, when (in the climate of Northern China, at least, as in New England) nature seems to hang still for a moment and the golden perfection of late summer reigns.  In addition to this late summer time of stillness and peace, Earth also represents the center, if each other element is associated with a cardinal direction, and the transitional time between the seasons.  Finally, the year’s expansion collects and condenses back inward in the autumn.  This is the time of the metal phase, the harvest, the time of reaping what is valuable and letting the rest go.  Metal’s purity and sharpness is well represented by the crisp, clear, brilliant days of fall.  Metal, new yin, matures into water, yin at its fullest, and we are back in the realm of winter.  

But here, with the heart, we are in the fire phase.  Even more key here than the flourishing of yang is the idea of the return of yin: at the peak of outward expression the seeds of an inward turning germinate.  The heart, in all its sacred firyness, is just as much about forsaking the upward climb and looking in, down, towards the source.  In terms of the day it is high noon, the point when the long descent to nightfall begins though much light and warmth remain.  

The animal associated with the heart is the horse: noble, beautiful, powerful and graceful; yet proud, needing to be controlled, dangerous.  The message implicit here is that we must master the horses of our hearts, to direct them and not be run around by our desires and ego.  At its best, the horse is a symbol of sacrifice, as in mythical horses who ride themselves to death for their masters.  In Chinese myth, the perfect picture of the heart is the horse so devoted that she gallops until she sweats blood: the very fluid of the heart oozing from her pores.  

The symbolism of this organ, one of twelve in the Chinese system, spreads deep and wide.  There are meaningful associations with the geography of ancient China, with I Ching hexagrams and stellar constellation, as well as a great deal of medical theory.  But it is in the nature of this kind of holographic system that every part contains the whole, so that the simple image of an empty earthen vessel shining like a lamp, of a blood-sweating horse, or of the moment of summer solstice convey the meaning of the organ.