gū zàng
Also rendered: the solitary viscus (Literal; keeps both aloneness and centrality) · the lone depot (Wiseman-style — depot for 藏, but depot reads as a building) · the isolated organ (Too modern: 藏 is not an organ in the anatomical sense) · gu zang (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The spleen, and the reason it cannot be read like the others. Liver, heart, lung and kidney each take a season — spring, summer, autumn, winter — and each therefore has a pulse shape that should appear when its season comes round. The spleen takes none; it is earth, standing at the centre, and its office is to irrigate the four quarters. That is why its normal state cannot be seen in the pulse at all: it is distributed among the other four rather than present in its own right. Only its disorder shows — arriving like flowing water when it exceeds, like a bird’s beak when it falls short.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Wiseman & Feng | lone depot | Their 藏 is consistently depot. |
| Unschuld | the solitary depot | Keeps 孤 as solitary. |
| This site | the solitary viscus | 孤 in 說文 is 無父 — without a counterpart — and that is precisely the point the chapter makes: the other four have seasons to pair with, this one does not, and so its healthy state is by definition invisible. Depot is defensible as a rendering of 藏 but it is a warehouse, and what is at issue here is a viscus that gives rather than keeps — it irrigates the four quarters. Viscus keeps it in the body and lets the irrigation image stand. |
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