Lungs

The lungs are given to Mercury in the western scheme, as the organs that mediate between the body and the air and that make speech possible, Mercury being the planet of exchange and of the voice. In the Chinese scheme the lung, fei, belongs to the metal phase, is paired with the large intestine, governs qi and respiration and the dispersal of fluids, and is associated with grief and with the sense of smell; it is called the delicate organ because it is the first to be reached by external influences. Both schemes make the lungs the boundary between inside and outside, which is not surprising given what breathing is, but they draw quite different consequences from it, and the resemblance should not be taken for a shared origin.

Ayurveda locates two active subdoshas in the chest: Prana Vata, already noted for the brain, which also governs the breath's rhythm, and Kledaka Kapha, which moistens what is inhaled. A genuine and often overlooked medical history belongs to the lungs specifically: the thirteenth-century physician Ibn al-Nafis, working in Cairo, described the pulmonary circulation, blood passing from the right side of the heart through the lungs to the left, roughly three centuries before William Harvey's description of the circulation as a whole is generally credited in European medicine, a discovery lost to the West until his manuscript was rediscovered in the twentieth century.

Sources Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly with The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical WritingsDominik Wujastyk

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.