The male viscera · mu zang

In brief

The chapter’s way of sorting the five viscera by sex rather than by phase. Liver and heart are male stores; spleen, lung and kidney are female. The division is neither anatomical nor moral: it marks which two of the five belong with the generating, outward, yang half of the cycle and which three with the receiving, storing, yin half. What follows confirms the reading, because each viscus is then given its colour, season, tone, flavour and day in an unbroken series, and the male pair heads it. The vocabulary is borrowed from breeding — 牡 is a bull, 牝 a cow — and the borrowing is deliberate: the five stores are being treated here as stock, each with a season and a yield, which is exactly what the five changes need them to be.