While living in Kathmandu, I would get a cold almost every month. Normally I get a sniffle once or twice a year and figured it was the ever-present smog of Nepal’s fast expanding capital that made the difference. Of course, the heavy, hazy air didn’t exactly encourage me to get outside much for exercise, so I had that working against me as well. Eventually I noticed a third factor that seemed to be the decisive one. I lived near a popular ex-pat restaurant that served some of the city’s more palatable pizza. When I got tired of the ubiquitous daal-bhaat (rice and soupy lentils with just enough vegetables and chutneys to lend each hand-scooped mouthful some flavor) I would sometimes treat myself at the pizza place (the Roadhouse Cafe in Bhatbhateni). What struck me after a few months was that my head colds would come on reliably the day after the pizza. This shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise, given that I was in Nepal to study Ayurvedic medicine, and it is elementary in Ayurveda that cheese is a phlegm-forming, kapha sort of food that will tend to cause colds, cough, and congestion. This knowledge may have slowed me down, but it didn’t stop me; I ate at the roadhouse quite a few times over the course of my tenure in Nepal, and while I didn’t get sick every time, it happened at least once or twice more. (I did at least get smarter about it make sure to antidote the yak cheese with plenty of black pepper and other pungent digestives).
What this little anecdote points to, besides the minor perils of ex-pat living, is the role of the lymph in immunity. The lymph ducts form a sort of subterranean waterway that parallels the more familiar blood vessels, shadowing them through the streets and avenues of our bodies like a network of sewer tunnels. Their job is to transport fats and oils (which are absorbed through a different mechanism from protein and carbs) as well as the white blood cells that constitute the various branches of our immune army. Unlike blood vessels, they don’t have a heart to pump their contents along, but rely on the movement of our bodies to keep them from stagnating. My little Kathmandu vignette is a perfect example of how to gum up the lymph: not much exercise, immune burden from environmental toxins, and then the kicker, a sudden load of fat. When my lymph vessels filled with sticky cheese metabolites, the already under-siege immune cells got stuck in the muck. The resulting colds can be seen not just as viral issue due in part to low immunity but also as the body’s way of clearing out the excess kapha--the dense, damp, phlegmatic humor--by melting it. The fact that I felt like the dead for a couple days was a small price for my system to pay for clearing out the traffic jam in the immune highway system.
And now for the ever-so-smooth transition to Chinese Medicine...
Like sewers, the lymphatic ducts work best when they’re empty. The Daoist tradition is well aware of the value of this kind of emptiness: what else makes a cup useful, or a room? This kind of strategic emptiness allows for another quality that is closely associated with the Dao: flow. If we stay unimpeded, keeping our vessels empty, we make room for flow to happen. Here philosophy and its sister, medicine, are imitating nature; those in pursuit of flow or Dao (“the way”) have long looked to water as a model. Water is that whose movement is effortless--always flowing by the path of least resistance--and completely efficient; moving water is focused, relentless, and ultimately able to overpower harder substances such as rock. Water embodies wu wei, the Daoist ideal of non-action. According to this teaching, the highest form of action comes from a still place of masterful non-effort. Wu wei is exhibited by the martial artist who turns an opponent’s attack against him and sends him flying with a barely perceptible motion, or an athlete “in the zone” whose every movement becomes fluid, instinctual, and highly effective. Being “in the zone” means being in the flow of things, in other words, being like water.
All this watery talk so far, and still no mention of any Chinese organ! I have, I admit, been putting off introducing the unlikely-sounding Triple Warmer (or Triple Heater, or Three Burners), it being an “organ” that requires some explanation. Unlike the Spleen, the Bladder, or even the Pericardium, the Triple Warmer has no clear anatomical correlate. Its name refers to the three” “burning spaces” in the body, the zones of metabolic fire that causes our bodily water to circulate. This probably isn’t a bad way to sum up the Triple Warmer’s function: the fire in the water. Some more on the water half of this equation, before we delve into the more firey side.
Another remarkable quality of water is that it connects things. We even define geographic areas in terms of their watersheds, a watershed being that area which is drained by a given river system. In theory, every drop of water that falls in a particular watershed ends up in the associated river. Seen more organically, the river with its branching tributaries reaches out to every bit of land around it, so that no patch of ground is far from a stream or rivulet. In the body, we see the arteries branching smaller and smaller in capillaries, until every cell is within spitting distance of life-giving blood supply (lymph works in a similar way). Water is that which connects things, binds them together; there’s no separating my water from your water, which is why the tribe downstream from the river-crappers goes to war every time. If the Triple Warmer has everything to do with flow in the system and with connection, we have good reason to look to beyond the lymph to the nervous system and, even more etherically, the endocrine system. These de-centralized networks govern the communication and the flow of information, through electrochemical impulses and hormones, respectively; they affect everything that impacts our other systems and affects them back in turn.
Before I lose you or get lost myself in a thicket of anatomical jargon, let me return to the thread. By way--naturally--of a digression. Our last organ system was the Pericardium, which corresponded to the autumnal equinox, when the darkness overpowers the light. With this shift we are now in the dark half of the yearly cycle, the realm of yin. And although the Triple Warmer’s month (the 10th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, if you’re counting) is not yet at the darkest time of year, it can be said to be the most yin month of all. It is the time when nature dies back, life returns into the earth to rest. It is the stillest hour of night, before even the faintest stirrings of dawn. The next month will be even darker, deeper into the winter and the night, and yet it is that darkest month that contains the seed of light. On December 22nd, the light is already returning, and on Christmas we unknowing pagans still celebrate this return with candles and feasting. But here in Triple Warmer time we aren’t yet there. Accordingly, the Yi Jing (I Ching) ‘tidal’ hexagram for this month consists of all yin lines. This fits in very well with all our talk of wateriness. Yin yields, is dark and cool, like water. Finally, now, we’re ready to bring fire into the fold. For just as extreme yin contains the seed of yang at winter solstice, we can see stillness as the greatest strength. It’s wu wei again. In vigorous movement, energy is active, at the surface. Usually, too, it’s in the process of being spent: we speak of burning calories, and burning is exactly what we’re doing. (The other side of this is that we’re burning something, and that ‘something’ may not be as replaceable as we tend to assume). In stillness, on the other hand, that same energy is latent. In this view, darkness is simply hiding light, or the potential for light. A store of concentrated fuel. If this sounds awfully familiar, it may be because this was the focus of the Kidney article a couple of months ago: the Kidney as battery. The Triple Warmer overlaps with the Kidney here as an organ responsible for husbanding bodily reserve fuel and parceling it out as appropriate.
Late to make her entrance, our representative animal this time is the pig. The humble pig, so intelligent and clean--or is it dumb and dirty? So...naked. So oddly human-like; our bodies will often accept pig parts in transplants. And, above all, so good at doing so little. The pig is a symbol of wu wei: doing so little, and doing it so well. Out of this porcine lassitude comes tremendous abundance: litter after litter of chubby little squealers, while the mama sow herself grows hugely fat. This is perhaps the greatest talent of pig-kind: they make fat from almost anything. In a world where fat was not so abundant as it is now (at least to the privileged classes, including more and more Chinese, with their prodigious appetite for pork), this ability must have seemed to verge on the miraculous. It helps explain the pig’s status in China as a symbol of prosperity and plenty. In this light, the following tidbit from the 16th Century herbal compilation Ben Cao Gang Mu may make more sense: “for skinniness disease...the fat of the pig’s kidneys.” The fat of the kidneys is nothing other than leaf lard, which until the ill-omened dawn of the Crisco era was the preferred fat for making pastry here in America. This fat from around the pig’s kidneys surely contains the adrenal gland itself; when we have leaf-lard pie crust, we are feasting on an aspect of the wu wei organ of the wu wei animal. Provided that the pigs in question are allowed to do nothing in their inimitable way, outdoors, wallowing and rooting and doing that nothing that pigs love to do. Factory pig fat doesn't have the magic. So slow down, get in the flow--and get to baking with yon leaf lard. Your Triple Warmer will thank you.
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