The female viscera · pin zang

In brief

The complement of 牡藏, and the larger half of the division: three viscera to two. Spleen, lung and kidney are female stores, and the reasons are not stated but can be read off the sequence that follows — earth that receives and transforms, metal that gathers and stores, water that closes and hides. The chapter then does something the scheme does not require: it gives the female three viscera exactly the same fivefold apparatus as the male two, so that each has a colour, a season, a tone, a flavour and a pair of days. The point of the pairing is not hierarchy but the count: five viscera, five changes, five transports, twenty-five in all. 牝 and 牡 are the only words in the chapter that sort the viscera by sex, and they are dropped as soon as the count is made.