Chinese Organ Networks: Liver

And so we come around to the Liver.  The Liver is a frickin' doozy.  Enough so that I'm actually procrastinating jumping into the meat of the matter, because I hardly know where to start.  This is an organ system rife with rich associations and layers of meaning that seem to shoot out in all directions like fresh green tendrils in springtime.  Stubbornly spreading up and out, against gravity, persevering against tough odds--namely the laws of physics, which luckily seem not to apply to living things.  Or rather, life finds the loopholes and bends said laws to its own benefit and makes of Newton and Descartes a gleeful mock.
                                                                          ^An ancient Etruscan bronze liver, probably used for divination instruction and practice

As usual, the macrocosmic position of the organ reveals much of its nature.  We saw how in a sense the Gallbladder marks the beginning of the new year, as yang (light, warmth) makes its return--as yet unfelt, perhaps, but influential all the same.  To the Liver falls the task of continuing the what the Gallbladder has initiated.  The Gallbladder's job was romantic--the spark in the dark, setting things off with a little explosion; the Liver's is decidedly less so.  The Liver doesn't take that critical first step back towards the light, but rather the equally critical second step.  It plods forward, against the flow, against gravity.  It perseveres.  Its animal symbol is the ox: the creature best suited to long, hard labor.  The ox wants and needs something to push against.

Labor...pushing...if this is all sounding suspiciously feminine, it's not a coincidence.  The Liver is the organ most closely associated with womanhood, most obviously through the blood, which the Liver is said to store.  "Women are blood, men are qi," goes a Chinese medicine saying.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.  We aren't finished with the ox.  Could there be a more specific connection between oxen and women?  Here's a hint: take a look at a picture of an ox head or skull.  Georgia' O'Keeffe was on top of this one (though she chose a ram, the effect is much the same.)  The relation of head and horns is strikingly similar to that of womb and ovaries via the Fallopian tubes.  Women, in some sense, have the power of oxen: to push, to persevere, to plod forward and continue the endless work.  Masculine energy is more apt to come in bursts; men are often good initiators and warriors, hunters, whereas women keep the ball rolling.  Hormonally, women may be better suited to traditional "women's work"--not just the obvious maternal activities but such slow, methodical, careful work as weaving, spinning, seed-sorting, knitting.  It's not just a matter of culture.  Women are rich in blood, which in Chinese medicine also means certain hormones, and this hormonal reality shapes much of physical, psychological reality.

Of course it's not just women who benefit from the ability to push, to go against the flow.  This type of sustained work is at the heart of self-cultivation practices, from martial arts to meditation and everything in between (Tai Qi and Qi Gong and genuine Hatha Yoga tend to fall towards the center of this spectrum).  The Chinese sagely ideal is of wu wei, effortless action; but in order to achieve such a state of skill it is necessary to train intensively.  The archetypal Zen master who flows so artfully through life does not achieve their mastery except through rigorous training.

There's yet another feminine connection to be made.  The Liver's cosmological time is most of January and the beginning of February, a period which overlaps (even if it doesn't completely correspond) with the Western astrological sign of Aquarius.  At first glance the associations are disparate; the Liver with blood and femininity and Aquarius with water, creativity, prophetic change.  Symbols take us deeper, however.  The traditional shorthand for Aquarius is a double squiggle, like two letter M's nested on top of one another.  Now it is an interesting fact that the word for "mother" in virtually every language begins with or contains the "m" sound.  mother, mama, mom, mu, ma, aama, maman...there are probably exceptions, but I can't come up with any.  Infants seem hardwired to make the "m" sound in relation to their mothers.  The letter M even look like a couple of a pair of bent legs, spread, as in a reclining birthing position.  Aquarius is also classified as an air sign; we'll soon see how air or wind relates to the Liver.

That's two liver-blood-femininity strings of association so far.  We've momentarily come up for air; time now to dive down and pull up one more set.  The Liver stores the blood, has everything to do with this vital substance.  What is the blood, on the level of micro-macrocosmic correspondences?  It is our vital water, our veins and arteries like rivulets and streams and great rivers.  They all flow into the sea, our great reservoir of blood, the Liver.  Another way to look at it: evolutionarily we come from the ocean.  Primitive sea creatures need no closed circulatory systems, but when we crawled out of the watery depths, we needed a way to bring some of that ocean with us.  The blood, and especially the Liver's blood reservoir, is that oceanic remnant.  It's noteworthy, too, that we're not talking about fresh water here.  The ocean is salty, and so is the blood.  Nor is the saltiness of either composed of simple sodium chloride, though that is the most prominent component of ocean and blood salts by weight.  The ocean contains hundreds of trace minerals in solution, and so does our blood.  Though nutritional science hasn't uncovered a physiological need for every such mineral, more and more are being found to be essential to health.  This is why unrefined sea salt (including salt mined from ancient sea beds) are so critical to health.  Remove all those essential trace minerals, and you compromise the quality of your internal ocean.

Another conceptual leap: the Liver and blood relate directly to Wind and the nervous system.  The most basic connection is to be found in the trigram Xun, The Gentle or Wind or The Subtle.  It shows a single yin line penetrating up through two steadfast yang lines.  It is yin moving upwards, and represents the pervasiveness of subtle influence.  This is how a breeze operates: it is gentle, but if it maintains a consistent direction it can be powerful in the long run.  But Xun is also a symbol for Wood, the upward growth of springtime.  It is the yin aspect of Wood, just as the Liver is the yin Wood organ (and the Gallbladder yang Wood, as represented by the trigram Zhen, with one yang line thrusting up below two of yin).  Wind, the force of movement and communication, is related to springtime.  Spring is, after all, the time when things are shaken up, when the "winds of change" blow.  That, roughly, is how the physiological force of Wind or Air is related to the Liver.  (An interesting contrast with Ayurveda here; in that system, Wind or Vata is more associated with the large intestine, and while it is closely related to the nervous system, the concept of blood and the liver is largely separate.  At least as far as I understand it.)

So the Liver is responsible for Wind, for proper movement.  Movement of what?  Of qi, primarily.  Of subtle energy, including perhaps the electro-chemical impulses that are the language of our nervous system.  Now it may be less surprising that trace mineral deficiencies have been implicated in a number of growing disorders including ADD and ADHD.  These can be viewed in terms of Wind; hypermobility; an ungrounded and in some sense overactive nervous system.  When our blood is not well fortified with the natural ocean's mineral spectrum, our Wood and with it our Wind go out of whack.  In our terms, its a Liver problem.

We've yet to look at the Confucian 12 officials system.  In it the role of the Liver is clear cut: it is the general.  It commands, strategizes, schemes.  Physiologically, the little-L liver sorts out thousands or millions of chemical reaction pathways, sending this here and that there and generally ironing out an operating plan for the Gallbladder to execute.  The Liver is resourceful.  As a commander it wants to win; it strives to live.  See?  It's not just the Chinese language that contains plenty of forgotten symbolic resonance.  The liver is the only organ that is capable of fully regenerating itself from a small fraction.  It's that (re)generative power of Wood.

Finally, the herbal side of the story.  The herb that best represents the upward and outward exuberance of Wood is none other than the familiar cinnamon (Chinese Gui Zhi (twigs) or Rou Gui (bark)).  Cinnamon was anciently classified in the Tang Ye Jing as a "Wood within Wood" herb, meaning that it is the essence of Wood.  Although modern TCM likes to treat the liver in terms of suppressing flaring liver yang with cold herbs and smoothing out the liver qi with herbs like Bupleurum (Chai Hu), much modern Liver pathology has more to do with cold in the blood.  Here our internal ocean gets frozen over, leading to blood deficiency and stasis, with signs like cold extremities, menstrual cramps with clotty bleeding, and sexual frigidity.  Bulldozing through the ice with qi-moving herbs won't work; we have to melt the ice.  Cinnamon gets into the blood layer (Jue Yin) and does just that, especially when combined with the star blood herb Dang Gui (Chinese Angelica).

Sources: as always with the Chinese Organ Networks series, virtually all the material for this post comes from Dr. Heiner's Fruehauf's Chinese Cosmology lectures at NCNM.  Hail the chief!

Chinese Organ Networks: Triple Warmer

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.