Gān (肝) — Liver / Wood
General of the body — wood phase
Gān (肝) — the liver, paired with the wood phase. The Suwen calls the liver 'the general' (jiāng jūn, 將軍), responsible for the strategising and free-flowing direction of qi throughout the body. It stores blood, governs the smooth flow of qi (so that constraint of the liver-qi produces stagnation, the most common pattern in TCM internal medicine), and rules the sinews and the eyes. It corresponds to spring, the eastern direction, the colour green, the sour taste, and the emotion of anger. Lingshu 8 pairs the liver with the hun (魂) — the ethereal soul, that which travels in dreams and survives death to return to the ancestors. The liver-hun is therefore both the organ of strategic planning in waking life and the substrate of the life that continues after the body dies. We render the rendered point at the anatomical-right liver-region landmark (x=0.42, y=0.36).
Point 3 of 5 in Five Phases (Wuxing) at the Five Zang Organs
Cross-tradition overlaps
No overlapping points are registered for this point.
Sources
Huangdi Neijing — Suwen, ch. 8 (Ling lan mi dian lun) (primary_canonical)
“The liver is the office of the general — strategy issues from it.”
Huangdi Neijing — Lingshu, ch. 8 (Ben shen) (primary_canonical)
“The liver houses the hun.”