Chinese medicine does not count the brain among the twelve organs of its main scheme, and where it places it instead is revealing. The brain belongs to a small separate class, the qi heng zhi fu, usually rendered the curious or extraordinary organs, which also holds the marrow, the bones, the vessels, the gallbladder and the uterus. The class is defined by a contradiction: these are items shaped like the hollow yang organs but functioning like the solid yin ones, storing rather than transmitting, so they fit neither category.
What the tradition does with the brain is stranger still to a modern reader. The Inner Canon calls it the sea of marrow and describes it as filled and maintained by the Kidney, which stores the essence from which marrow is made. Cognition and consciousness, however, are not assigned to it. Those belong to the Heart, which houses the shen, with aspects distributed among the other four yin organs.
Later writers were not all comfortable with this. The seventeenth century physician Li Shizhen wrote that the brain is the dwelling of the original spirit, and the question of where the mind sits was argued within the tradition after Jesuit anatomical works began circulating in China.
The western planetary scheme this atlas records elsewhere gives the brain to the Moon. The two systems are separate, they were not built from each other, and the atlas does not merge them.