Spleen

The Spleen meridian (Zu Tai Yin Pi Jing) is one of the twelve principal channels of Chinese medicine, the network along which qi is held to circulate through the body. It is a Yin channel, paired with the Spleen, and belongs to the phase of Earth in the five-phase (wu xing) scheme.

Function in the tradition

In the theory of the channels this meridian is concerned with the transforming of food into qi and blood, the yin partner of the Stomach. The twelve principal channels are arranged in yin-yang pairs and in a daily cycle through which qi is said to pass from one to the next, and the points along them are those used in acupuncture and related therapies.

The meridian is described here as a concept of traditional Chinese medicine, a system of ideas and practice with a long documented history, rather than as an anatomical structure of Western physiology.

The Daily Cycle and the Earth Pair

In the Ziwu Liuzhu timetable, worked out in the Jin and Yuan periods of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from the older Neijing idea of sequential qi circulation, the Spleen channel governs nine to eleven in the morning, directly following the Stomach. The two are paired as the Earth phase's yin and yang channels and are together called houtian zhi ben, the root of postnatal qi, the source from which food and drink are transformed into what sustains the rest of the body; where the Stomach is said to receive and ripen what is eaten, the Spleen is said to complete the transformation and move the refined product upward to the Lung and Heart.

The Spleen channel is the sharpest illustration in the whole system of a translation problem that runs through Chinese medicine, and it is worth stating plainly because a great deal of confusion in English follows from it. The Chinese term is pi, and what the tradition describes under that name has almost nothing in common with the organ a Western anatomist calls the spleen. Pi is described as governing transformation and transportation, the extraction of usable qi from food and its distribution, and as holding the blood within the vessels. An anatomist's spleen filters blood and is part of the immune system.

The two were joined by nineteenth and twentieth century translators who mapped the eleven zangfu onto the nearest Western organ names, and the mapping has been criticised ever since by scholars and by practitioners. Some modern writers now render the term as Spleen with a capital letter, or leave it as pi, precisely so that a reader does not import the wrong anatomy.

The atlas keeps the conventional English name because it is the one the sources use, and records the caveat here. When this page says the Spleen governs transformation, it is reporting a claim of Chinese medicine about pi. It is not making an anatomical or physiological statement about the organ of the same name, and it is not clinical guidance of any kind.

The channel itself rises from the big toe along the inner leg to the chest, and pairs with the Stomach in the Earth phase.