The Large Intestine is one of the six fu and the yang partner of the Lung in the Metal phase. That pairing is the least obvious of the six to a modern reader, and the tradition's reasoning for it is structural rather than functional: the two channels connect at the hand, they share the phase, and the classics describe both organs as concerned with letting go, one of air and one of solid waste. Later writers extend the parallel to grief, the emotion assigned to the Metal phase, and to the difficulty of releasing what is finished.
The function itself is described briefly and without much elaboration. The Large Intestine receives what the Small Intestine has rejected, reabsorbs the fluid from it and passes on the residue. It is one of the plainer entries in the scheme.
Its channel, by contrast, is among the most used in practice and carries Hegu, the single most needled point in the world, which the classical literature associates with the face and head rather than with the bowel. That mismatch between an organ's modest description and its channel's prominence is common in this system and is treated on the Meridian page.
The western scheme places the large intestine under Scorpio and Virgo in different sources. Neither tradition's account is asserted here as physiology, and nothing in this entry is guidance.