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Taoist Organ Clock
The Chinese day has twelve double hours, each named by an earthly branch, and classical medicine gives each to one of the twelve channels in turn, from the Gallbladder at midnight to the Heart at noon. The clock reads the period for your place and moment, opens any of the twelve, and keeps a note of the hour if you wish.
A study instrument for a traditional theory. It does not diagnose or advise, and the organs are categories of classical medicine, not anatomy.
Setting the clock to your time and place
The tradition
The organ clock divides the day into the twelve double hours of the Chinese day, each named by an earthly branch, and gives each to one of the twelve primary channels in turn. It belongs to the family of methods called ziwu liuzhu 子午流注, 'the ebb and flow from midnight to midday', which time acupuncture by the hours. The assignment charted here, Lung at the yin hour (3–5) through to Liver at the chou hour (1–3), is the one Yang Jizhou's Zhenjiu dacheng of 1601 sets out in a seven-character verse.
The order of the channels is far older than the clock. Lingshu 16 traces the nutritive qi from the Hand Taiyin (Lung) through all twelve channels to the Foot Jueyin (Liver) and back to the Lung; the clock lays that circuit on the hours of the day. The organs are the zang and fu of classical medicine, functional systems with offices of their own in Suwen 8, not the organs of anatomy.
Reading the instrument
- The dial is a twenty-four-hour clock with midnight at the top and noon at the bottom. Each sector is a double hour: its earthly branch on the inner ring, its organ in Chinese and English on the outer, the band beneath in the colour of its phase.
- The hand shows the moment read, on the place's own clock or, if you choose, on local solar time, which sets noon at the moment the Sun crosses the meridian there. The crimson sector is the period the hand is in.
- Choose any sector, or any period in the list, to open its channel: full name by limb and level, its direction in the rule of Lingshu 38, its phase, its paired channel and its office in Suwen 8.
- Notes kept in the journal are saved with the period and the moment they were written, and nothing is inferred from them.
Where it descends from
- Lingshu, chapter 16 (Ying qi)
- The course of the nutritive qi through the twelve channels, from the Lung round to the Liver.
- Lingshu, chapters 10 and 38
- The names of the channels by limb and level, and the rule of their directions: hand yin from the organs to the hand, hand yang from the hand to the head, foot yang from the head to the foot, foot yin from the foot to the abdomen.
- Suwen, chapter 8 (Linglan midian lun)
- The twelve officials: the office of each organ, from the Heart as sovereign to the Bladder as reservoir.
- Zhenjiu dacheng (Yang Jizhou, 1601)
- The verse that gives each channel its earthly branch, 肺寅大卯胃辰宮…, the source of the two-hour periods as charted.
What this does not claim
This is a study instrument for a traditional theory. It does not diagnose, predict or recommend anything, and waking or feeling unwell at a given hour says nothing about an organ. The organs here are categories of classical Chinese medicine and do not correspond one to one with anatomical organs. Modern charts read the clock on civil time; older practice reckoned the double hours from the Sun at the place, which can differ from the clock by more than an hour. Neither reckoning is offered as more than a convention.
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