Once upon a time in ancient China, the land was plagued by floods. Throughout the countryside, crops were ruined, people homes were destroyed, and disease ran rampant. In short, life was hard for the ancestral Han people--hard and soggy. Enter a man named Gun. Charged with controlling the floods, he labored for nine years building dikes and dams. But all to no avail. At the end of his life's work, the floodwaters swept it all away. The fields continued to flood, and water snakes slithered through the stagnant waters. Times were hard. Enter Gun's son, Yu. Yu took it upon himself to pick up where his father left off, and though only four days married, he heard the call to work and left home one day to control the floods. Day after day he worked, sleeping and eating with the common people as he joined in with and organized their labor. Instead of building dikes and dams, Yu dug drainage ditches, diverting the run-off from the great river into the fields. Rice thrived in the carefully-irrigated paddies. One day the course of his work took him past his house, where he could not fail to notice that his wife was in labor. He called through the doorway on his way past: "I'm sorry, honey, the flood's out of control, I can't stop to rest now." On he labored, digging, diverting, directing. Months passed and years; one day he passed by his house again and heard his son calling his name. "Not now," replied. "There's too much work to be done!" On and on he went, slowly transforming the soggy terrain of China's heartland into a fertile, productive, and flood-free cradle of civilization. One final time he passed his home, and heard his son's voice again: it had changed, and its deep tone reminded him of his uncle's. Tirelessly, he kept working. By the tie the floods were finally managed once and for all, he had been at it for thirteen years.
* * *
The myth of Yu the Great, as he came to be known, is an archetypal one in Chinese culture. It is a parable that teaches the value of hard work and dedication, to be sure. But hidden amongst the symbols of the story is the essence of an organ system. For the story of the Great Yu is the story of the Spleen. Working tirelessly to dry the pernicious waters, making the ground fertile. This is the Spleen's role* on a physical level. It must regulate the waters to make nourishment possible. But, just as Yu slowly but surely changed the flood-plagued terrain into a productive home for the Chinese people, the Spleen is also about radical change. Like a snake shedding its skin, the Spleen goes largely unnoticed while doing the most miraculous work of all: that of radical transformation.
On the level of the digestion, the physiological process most closely associated with the Spleen, we accomplish a small scale version of this miracle all the time. The Stomach may break down what we eat into small particles, but it falls to the Spleen to release the energy latent in the matter. To the Spleen, whose hexagram is made up of six yang lines and that therefore represents pure yang energy, food is just crystallized sunlight; whatever the nature of the original food, the healthy Spleen--and a correspondingly healthy digestion--will find the essence of it and use it as fuel for transformation.
This transformation is a sort of patterning: the Spleen is responsible for maintaining the basic pattern of who we are, holding everything in place and in right relation; when someone suffers from so-called Spleen qi deficiency, prolapsed organs is one possible result. So the Spleen provides our basic patterning, but it also allows for periodic re-patterning. Take another feature of the Snake: its sinuousness. Snakes move by oscillating their bodies in a sort of sine wave, and indeed leave such patterns in their wake. There is a clue here to the Spleen's affinity for resonance, the power of vibration and sound to shape matter. The Jin Jing school of Qi Gong makes use of this principle in one of its core practices, that of shaking. Vibrating the body and tuning into different physical and energetic levels or 'frequencies' allows the shaker to generate heat, literally loosening the bonds between molecules. What's solid moves towards liquid, liquid towards gas. After twenty minutes or so of focused, directed shaking, the body is primed for transformation. Another illustration of the patterning power of vibration comes from music. We have probably all experienced music's power to transform our mood and state of mind or to transport us, even. A still more dramatic use of sound waves is to literally reshape matter, as happens in the field of cymatics--the study of the effects of sound on matter. The image below (from the work of Hans Jenny and other pioneering cymaticists as described at http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_cymatics.htm) shows patterns created in sand by simple sound waves.
Sometimes--most of the time--subtle is more powerful than gross. Like Yu the Great, the Spleen may not take much credit, but as the driving energetic force behind the transformation of matter, it sure gets a lot done behind the scenes.
In its richness and generosity, Chinese Cosmology gives another equally fertile symbol for the Spleen. Our animal friend this time is the snake, among the most fascinating of animal symbols, for it represents both unity/eternity--as depicted in the uroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail--and of duality. You've heard of the forked tongue; did you know about the forked penis? Indeed. Snakes are well known to be dual, duplicitous. In genesis it is the snake that turns Adam and Eve onto the knowledge of twoness and condemns them to mortality. There is no going back from twoness to undifferentiated unity. A deeply ambivalent frequency; a scary one. Change. Transformation. Who can say they are truly comfortable with it?* * *
As this is the final organ network article, it's a good time to take a step back and consider the Spleen in the context of the organ clock as a whole. The Spleen's is the position on the clock that must get us from the Stomach (all material) to the Heart (all spirit). The Stomach's hexagram was a picture of a bucket sitting right side up. The Heart's is an upside down bucket or empty vessel. So the Spleen must be the position where the bucket flips and prepares to empty. It does so through the power of warmth and light (how else are we to dry the damp?); the hexagram here, which has nothing to do with a bucket at all, is Qian (heaven), also pronounced Gan (dry). It's one of two the bottlenecks (along with the Triple Warmer) in the journey through the organ positions, and as we'll see, there's a lot that can go wrong here. But if all goes smoothly, the Spleen is able to make the transition from filling to emptying, matter to energy, as quietly as a snake slipping out of its skin.
Actually, the entire cycle represented by the organ clock can be seen as a progression of the hexagram 'bucket' filling up and emptying back out. The cycle represented by the clock is happening all the time, on different scales: the hours of the day (two hours to each organ), the month of the year, and also a longer time-scale that assigns each organ a few year block. Through this lens, we can view life's journey as two or three trips around the clock. It's a pretty major trip, and there's a lot that goes on. But a lot of it has to do with our friend the bucket. Early in life we fill up the bucket, gaining resources, grounding into the material world, but eventually we have to make the transition from material to higher pursuits, not getting stuck here at the pivot point or bottleneck of the Spleen. If we make it through, we then use the resources we've marshaled as fuel to soar. Eventually we're out of gas, as it were, and must travel back through the bottleneck (with this aspect of the transition being represented by the Triple Warmer) and return to the material realm. Around and around we go, and where we stop, nobody knows. What we do know is the Spleen represents a key point, where the full bucket must flip upside down so it can start emptying again. It is a journey through the looking glass, from the gross into the subtle world, from matter to energy (sounds waves, again).
Most people have some trouble here, feeling their way into a world our culture values no more than it acknowledges, and yet we all eventually feel incomplete if we don't find our way through the looking glass of the Spleen. Ultimately, we must transform if we are not to stagnate; if we aren't willing to becomes butterflies, we have to remain worms. OK, caterpillars. But still. Spleen work is subtle and profound in the way of metamorphoses, but it is also mundane--patterns are about what we do every day, like the Great Yu. And appropriately enough, Yu holds the keys to the transformation we seek. Like him, we must dry the damp.
Physically, a damp spleen is a flooded field that can't provide nourishment and can't provide a ground for transformation. It's also (along with Liver Qi stagnation), one of the most common diagnoses in Chinese Medicine. In this time and place, at least, Spleen dampness is a nearly ubiquitous ailment. Partly the problem comes from the Stomach side: in our rush to feed, we literally don't slow down and chew carefully. We're not snakes who can digest things whole. Partly it comes from the other side, that of the unsure heights of spirit: we fear leaving the material realm. We may bog ourselves down with dampness as a way of hedging our bets, storing ballast against the crazy balloon flight up to the realm of the Heart.
I don't know. It's a theory!
*Footnote to the second paragraph: unlike the other organ networks, which at least have something do with the Western, anatomical organs' physiology, the Spleen is almost a total anomaly. If anything it would seem to be the pancreas that best corresponds to the Chinese Spleen's function of digestive transformation. Some indeed translate Pi as "spleen-pancreas" to cover their bases. From a Western perspective, though, the Spleen does hold large amount of red blood cells and platelets in reserve; as platelets are responsible for blood clotting, it may indeed by the Western spleen that's responsible for the Chinese Spleen's function of "holding the blood in the vessels." And as Gregory Sax points out, the unrecognized, under-appreciated but tirelessly laboring nature of the spleen fits right in with the Chinese concept! Ultimately, though, the question of the physical organ doesn't much matter; Chinese medicine is more interested in function than in structure. And in a very real sense, the Spleen function is one that occurs everywhere in the body (and out of it).
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