Hello this is Danny Blythe from the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine looking at the functions of the triple burner. This is for Chinese medicine students only please pause and read this. So unlike the other organs there's no Western equivalent to the triple burner.
In actual fact the Chinese medicine idea of the organs and the Western medicine one are so different that the connections are not useful anyway. The name is three or triple. And this character here which represents fire at the bottom and a pheasant on the top being roasted.
So to roast and hence a roaster or a burner. It's said in the classic of difficulties to have a name but no form and it's sometimes likened to the lymphatic system but this only represents a very small part of what the triple burner does. So it represents a three-fold division of the body into three parts of the abdomen.
It enables the passage of Yuan Qi and it controls the water passages and the excretion of fluids. So let's look at those in a bit more detail. So the upper burner above the diaphragm consists of the lung, the heart and the pericardium and it's in charge of the dispersal of body fluids predominantly by the lung. and the release of sweat and the upper burner is said to be dominated by the zongqi and it's likened to being a mist.
The body fluids are very light like a mist or a spray. The middle burner is from the umbilicus to the diaphragm. It contains the spleen, the stomach, the gallbladder and sometimes the liver although this is quite often put in the lower jowl.
It's likened to a muddy pool and this character here means a foam or a froth and to ferment or to macerate or to simmer. So it's where digestion, the rotting and ripening of food happens. the digestive juices are.
This middle burner is said to be dominated by Ying Qi. The lower burner from the pubic bone up to the umbilicus contains the kidney, the bladder, the intestines and the uterus and it's likened to being a drainage ditch. This character has water and to sell so it can be a canal or a trade route on a river or a sluice or a drainage ditch. So this is where the intestines do their job of separating clean and dirty and where urines and stool are eliminated and it's said to be dominated by the Yuan Chi. So that's the triple burner as a threefold division of the body.
The second function is that it enables the passage and division of the Yuan Chi. So the Yuan Chi is the kidney Jing or essence manifest and it acts as a catalyst for qi transformation. So when at the beginning of the course you learnt about zong qi being transformed into zhen qi or gu qi into blood with the kidneys as a catalyst it's the yuan.
Yuan Chi that acts as that catalyst. It also controls Chi transformation in terms of sweat being eliminated from the body, the Chi transformation of food in the middle burner, and the Chi transformation of fluids being eliminated by the bladder in the lower burner. So the triple burner allows the free passage and the entering and exiting of the Yuan Chi, not only through the three burners and through the...
the organs but through all the body cavities and the channels. So function three is really a continuation of this. It controls the water passages and the excretion of fluids. So opening up the passages and irrigation. So this as we said in the upper jowl is the sweat, in the middle jowl is the digestive juices, and in the lower jowl is the urination and the qi transformation.
So you can remember this by remembering triple burn x, triple the threefold division, burn like transformation the yuan qi, and X the excretion of fluids. So in Su Wen chapter eight, talks about the triple burners responsible for opening up passages and irrigation, the regulation of fluid stems from it. So this is the triple burner as a subject.
This character has water on the left and on the right to divide or break up. So the original meaning was to allow water to flow freely by removing blockages. This character here is the drink. ditch that we already talked about so and this is a possessive and the official so it's the official of keeping the free flow of the drainage ditches or sluices this is water and this is down the way so the water passages or the waterways emit from it so that's a very brief introduction to the triple burner