Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The Lung as a Zang Organ

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The Lung as a Zang Organ

In the Chinese scheme the Lung is one of the five zang, the solid storing organs, and it belongs to the Metal phase with the Large Intestine as its paired fu organ. The correspondences the tradition attaches to it are consistent and worth setting out together, because the pattern repeats for every zang: an element, a season, a paired hollow organ, an emotion, a sense orifice, a tissue and a direction.

For the Lung these are autumn, grief among the emotions, the nose as its orifice, the skin and body hair as its tissue, and the west. The tradition describes it as governing qi and respiration, as controlling the diffusing and descending of fluids, and as the organ most exposed to external influences because it opens directly to the outside.

That last point carries a structural consequence. Because the Lung is described as the most superficial of the zang and as connected to the skin, the tradition treats the skin and the lungs as one defensive layer rather than two, and its account of illness arriving from outside begins there.

The atlas records the western planetary rulership of the lungs by Mercury in a separate article. The two schemes were built independently, and this page holds both rather than reconciling them. Nothing in either account is a statement about pulmonary function or a substitute for a clinician.

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