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.