Can the Heart Get Cancer? Why the Heart Never Gets Cancer — Doctor Ni Haixia on the Yellow Emperor’s Classic: the Twelve Organs as Court Officials, the Six-Six Festival Doctrine, and the 24 Solar Terms

Opening: Epidemic fever “incurable”? Zhang Zhongjing settled it with one dose

This lecture picks up where the previous chapter — the Yin Yang Bie Lun (Distinctive Discussion of Yin and Yang) — ended. The text says that febrile epidemic disease (wen bing, warm disease) is incurable: the patient dies within ten days. Hearing this, Doctor Ni first gives his audience a reassurance pill:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: When the Yellow Emperor and Qi Bo were conversing, people died of epidemic fever. Zhang Zhongjing solved it. How could epidemic febrile disease possibly kill people? When we reach the Shang Han Lun and the Jin Gui, you will see — one dose is enough. One dose is enough.

In one sentence, epidemic fever is overturned from “a death sentence” to “a minor illness.” That is Doctor Ni’s consistent confidence: with classical formulas in hand, even a plague is a matter of one dose.

The emperor moves his twelve organs into court: who is who? The Ling Lan Mi Dian Lun

After chapter seven ends, we enter chapter eight — the Ling Lan Mi Dian Lun (Treatise on the Mysterious Orchid and Secret Archive). This chapter is written in a particularly amusing way: the Yellow Emperor asks about “the twelve organs serving in mutual function — how do they rank in honor and baseness?” The functions of the twelve organs are set into a royal court, to see who corresponds to whom and who is honored and who is base.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Of course Qi Bo was currying favor with the emperor. When the emperor asked again, he said: the heart is the official of the sovereign; spirit and intelligence issue from it. The spirit of the heart may seem like nothing — you hear it and forget it, roughly understand its function — but actually there is consciousness inside it.

The heart is the sovereign: the candle is hollow inside, hiding true water

Why is the heart considered fire? Doctor Ni’s metaphor is earthy and vivid — light a candle and look:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Pay attention: our heart is fire. Look at a candle: the wick is here, the flame burns above — doesn’t it look similar? The middle is empty. If you have never looked at a flame, now that flashlight beams are rare, light a candle and look — the middle is empty. The center of the fire is hollow, because true water is hidden inside. The flame is hollow in the middle — and it is the same in human affairs: you should be “inner-empty,” a clear and honest person. “Teacher, why am I always deceived?” Look — there are two kinds of people who cannot be deceived: the deaf and the blind. The deaf cannot hear, so they can only watch with their eyes how you do things; the blind cannot see beauty and ugliness, so they can only listen with their ears and hear with their heart — these people are never cheated. Instead it is the people with good eyes and good ears who get deceived. So we must be inner-empty: having good eyes and ears is fine, but be inner-empty — think of nothing, treat your body as a blank sheet, and when you listen, your emptiness makes you clear.

This stroke is at once about the Way and about medicine — the heart governs spirit, and within the spirit hides true water, whose source is the kidney:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: The spirit inside the heart originates from the kidneys. Western medicine thinks the first organ formed in the body is the heart; Chinese medicine says no — it is water. With water, membranes are born, and then the heart. After you become pregnant, at first there is no heartbeat; only two weeks later can it be detected — so was it not a person before those two weeks? It is because the membranes had not yet formed. Before the membranes there was water, and that was still life.

The lung is the official of the prime minister: the sovereign’s teacher, in charge of all regulation

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: The lung is the official of the prime minister; regulation and control issue from it. All the regulation in the body — what the spleen should do, what the heart should do, what the gallbladder should do, what the liver should do, what the kidney should do — is managed by the lung. Because the lung is highest, it models itself on Heaven. The lung is Qi Bo, the emperor is the sovereign, and the lung is the sovereign’s teacher.

The liver is the general, the gallbladder the upright official: without gallbladder qi, you cannot decide

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: The liver is the official of the general; strategy and planning issue from it — the liver is like a general, able to fight, able to devise plans. The gallbladder is the official of the upright; judgment and decision issue from it. When normal, you have gallbladder qi; when gallbladder qi is insufficient, you cannot make decisions. The liver is here, the gallbladder is there — both are Wood: this is the yin wood, this is the yang wood.

The liver belongs to Wood, and Wood opens into the eyes — vision is governed by the liver. But Doctor Ni adds an important reminder: poor vision has two kinds, and you should not blame the liver for all of them:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: The liver governs the eyes. If you have vision problems today, one kind is simply that the eyes cannot see clearly, just blurry — that does not necessarily mean the liver or gallbladder has a problem. For example, wearing glasses for nearsightedness: because as a child you loved lying in bed reading Zuo Zhuan and martial-arts novels and ruined your eyes; now children play on computers and video games and become nearsighted — this is not an internal-organ disease. When the liver truly has a problem, the eyes degenerate — that degeneration is a liver problem; or insect-like shadows appear inside, or you see mosquitoes — floaters — and for those we must start from the liver.

The gallbladder also governs the eyes, and in a strange way — the gallbladder is like a pouch; if the pouch flips over, you see things reversed:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: A child vomits violently; the parents do not know there is water trapped in the middle, the medicine is poured in, and the child keeps vomiting; when the vomiting is too severe, the pouch flips over. At that point, B is seen as D. So when the gallbladder has a problem, things appear reversed. At the time I wondered why I always saw things backwards — that was a gallbladder problem.

Dan zhong, spleen and stomach, large intestine, small intestine, kidney: officials in their places

The twelve officials come out one by one, and Doctor Ni gives each a plain-language translation:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Dan zhong is the official of the envoy; joy issues from it — this refers to the eunuchs, and the court entertainers, the singers and dancers. The spleen and stomach are the officials of the granary; the five flavors issue from them — they are in charge of the ministry of agriculture. The large intestine is the official of transmission; change and transformation issue from it. The small intestine is the official of reception; transformation of substances issues from it. The kidney is the official of vigorous work; skill and cleverness issue from it — a master carver or craftsman, a painter, that kind of skill.

San jiao is the irrigation official: when the oil net breaks, water swells up inside the san jiao

Of all the officials, Doctor Ni explains san jiao in the most detail, because it is the easiest to talk about vaguely:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: San jiao is the official of the irrigation channels; the water passages issue from it. San jiao originates where the kidneys are — the thirteenth vertebra, between the kidneys; its earliest root is in that area. San jiao travels upward into the diaphragm; that is the great division — above the diaphragm is the upper jiao, from the diaphragm to the navel is the middle jiao, and below the navel to the lower abdomen is the lower jiao. How is the character “jiao” written? It has the flesh radical, because between the organs there are many oily networks connecting them — oil is inside the networks, and water runs fast only when there is oil: for fast metabolism, water needs oil to slip along. The oil in san jiao comes from the spleen, so san jiao is tightly bound to the spleen; in fact san jiao is related to all the organs. When the spleen has a problem, the oil is gone, and water swells up inside the san jiao. So san jiao is the irrigation official — besides the heat of kidney yang, there is also the spleen’s oil, and water runs fast through the body.

The bladder is the official of the provincial capital: not a single drop wasted

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: The bladder is the official of the provincial capital; fluids are stored there, and when qi transforms them, they can be excreted. Now you understand the bladder: qi transformation lets it out — because the bladder clings to the small intestine; when qi transforms, urine is expelled. But before it is expelled, there is a portion of good water that must go to the liver — so a normal person should not waste a single drop of water.

Why the heart never gets cancer: cancer cells passing through the heart die like moths in a flame

After the twelve officials, we reach the heaviest line — “None of these twelve officials may fail one another; when the sovereign is clear, all below are at peace.” Why is the heart so important? Because the heart is originally not subject to disease:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: You have heard of liver cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, spleen cancer, skin cancer — cancer of every kind, but you never hear of heart cancer. The heart has no cancer. Why? The heart is the official of the sovereign; it is originally not subject to disease. The reason? Because the heart is hot — the heart beats unceasingly. If you have nothing to do tonight, hold your hand like this and feel how hot it gets, hotter and hotter — but that is heat you deliberately created. Your heart needs no deliberation; it beats your whole life, all day long, beating for a lifetime — imagine how hot that is. So the heart is fire: all viruses and cancer cells circulating in the blood must pass through the heart — when they pass through, it is like moths flying into a flame; usually the moment they pass through the fire, every one of them is killed.

Following this reasoning, Doctor Ni also points out the root of cancer:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: When severe cancer appears, the interior is always cold. If we can make the whole body as hot as the heart, the cancer cells are killed. We do not need to manufacture some poison to kill cancer cells — how could you kill so precisely, killing only the bad and not the good? Poison will not obey that well.

Why does chemotherapy fail? Doctor Ni tells a story that sends chills down the spine:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: If you do chemotherapy, it is as if four kidnappers have taken more than a hundred schoolchildren hostage and are demanding ransom. Our special forces go in — and besides the four kidnappers, all one hundred-plus schoolchildren are killed. Then why train such special forces? Anybody could do that; you do not need special forces — that is Western medicine. Chinese medicine is not like that: Chinese medicine changes the environment. The heart inside the body is extremely hot; all the blood vessels reach the whole body, down to the feet, beside the fingers and toes — all hot. Cancer cells go in wanting to change the environment into one where they can survive and normal cells cannot — that is the virus’s idea. If you go along with that idea, how could chemotherapy ever cure anything?

When the sovereign is clear, all below are at peace: keep your spirits up, don’t run for president

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: When the sovereign is clear, all below are at peace; nurturing life in this way brings longevity, and you live out your years without danger. So we must protect the heart, keep the mood open and happy, and not get too angry. The heart governs spirit; the spirit should be at ease, not too ambitious — here I am doing fine in Taiwan, but no, I must run for president; a healthy person suddenly dreams of running for president — isn’t that asking for trouble? Then you cannot sleep at night, and the heart develops problems — because you are doing something you fundamentally cannot accomplish, like a madman.

Conversely, when the sovereign is unclear — when the heart has a problem — it affects the other twelve organs: the pathways are blocked and closed, and the body is severely harmed. Here Doctor Ni takes a sharp swipe at a batch of Western drugs:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: This is the place where we no longer use Western medicine. Very many Western drugs can injure the tissue of the heart, and some injure the spirit of the heart. Take insomnia — we know insomnia is caused by the heart, the spirit not staying put. You use sleeping pills to control it; the spirit does not return, it is only forcibly put to sleep, which makes the loss of spirit more severe and affects the other organs. Many painkillers were pulled from the market after injuring the heart — like the famous Fen-Phen diet pills in America, and the old Vioxx, a painkiller for rheumatoid arthritis; both are off the market now. Why? The heart was injured.

In the Chinese-medicine view, protecting the heart rests on three things: following the seasons and the solar terms (spring growth, summer flourishing, autumn harvest, winter storage), and emotionally keeping the mood pleasant rather than depressed.

The elusive numbers begin with the smallest fraction: one wrong first step, and everything after goes wrong

On page 62, the line “The elusive numbers are born from the smallest fraction; the smallest fraction begins with measure” becomes Doctor Ni’s first lesson in scholarship and in medicine:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Born from the smallest fraction — for any theory, any medicine, when you enter its domain, the foundation at the very beginning is what matters most. If your first step goes wrong, everything after goes wrong, and keeps going wrong. In Chinese medicine, if what you learn is correct, you stay correct from the start and do not waste much time in unnecessary places. So the importance of the beginning is what this passage is about.

Liu Jie Cang Xiang Lun: six-six festivals, nine-nine reckonings — the arithmetic of Heaven

On page 64 we enter chapter nine, the Liu Jie Cang Xiang Lun (Treatise on the Six-Six Festivals and the Visceral Manifestations). The Yellow Emperor asks: Heaven completes one year by the six-six festivals, and man meets it by the nine-nine reckonings; man has 365 joints responding to the nine fields of Heaven and Earth. This is the “arithmetic” of Heaven and Earth:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Six-six festivals and nine-nine reckonings — one is the measure of Heaven, one is the number of qi. The measure of Heaven tells the movement of the sun and moon; the number of qi records the work of transformation and generation. Heaven takes six-six as its festivals, Earth meets it by nine-nine reckonings. Heaven has ten days — what we call the ten Heavenly Stems, jia, yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, gui — and after six complete cycles comes a full jia cycle. Why six jia? The Heavenly Stems are ten, the Earthly Branches are twelve, and the least common multiple of ten and twelve is sixty — six consecutive jia cycles make sixty days; that is called six jia. Six jia completes the year: six times six is three hundred and sixty days — one sui, one year. The extra days beyond three hundred in the year are gathered together every four years and become a leap month.

Nine orifices connect to Heaven’s qi: the seven openings of the face plus urination and defecation are the boundary between man and Heaven

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Since ancient times, what connects to Heaven is the root of life, and that root is yin and yang. The numbers of qi on the body — the measure of Heaven and the number of qi — the nine provinces and nine orifices all connect to Heaven’s qi. The places where man and Heaven and Earth meet are called the nine orifices: the face has seven openings, plus urination and defecation — whether you sit on the toilet, up and down you are still within Heaven and Earth; you cannot urinate into outer space, you do not have that much power. So where man meets Heaven, all of it connects to Heaven’s qi.

The numbers on the human body are five on one side and three on the other:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: “Its birth is five, its qi is three.” “Birth is five” means the five elements of yin-yang and the five phases — wood, fire, earth, metal, water; those are five numbers. Qi has three qi-numbers — the exterior, the half-exterior-half-interior, and the interior. Our body must pass through these three passes. If you live in a cold region and go to a restaurant, you find the building strangely designed: the door has an entry foyer, one door, then a second door before you walk in — is that crazy? No: that is the half-exterior-half-interior; the cold outside will not come in, at most it reaches there. Three makes Heaven, three makes Earth, three makes man; three times three makes the number nine. Among Heaven and Earth there are eight directions, plus the center — nine positions. Four form-viscera and five spirit-viscera — the five viscera of wood, fire, earth, metal and water — combine into nine viscera, responding to the nine directions of Heaven and Earth.

Five days make one hou, three hou make one qi: where the 24 solar terms come from

On page 67, the Yellow Emperor asks what “qi” means. Qi Bo says this is what God has kept secret and the former masters transmitted. Doctor Ni translates it into plain language as usual:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Five days make one hou; three hou make one qi — three times five is fifteen, fifteen days. So the almanac divides the 365 days of the year into twenty-four solar terms; each term is two weeks, a qi of fifteen days. Solar terms — a term has an attribute, has qi. Spring Equinox, Grain Buds, Grain in Ear — these are names of solar terms. Six qi make one season: one qi is fifteen days, six times fifteen is ninety days — one season, three months; four seasons complete one sui, one year. Each of the four seasons follows its own ruler; the liver, heart, spleen, lung and kidney — the five phases succeed one another and all return to themselves; at the final day of the year’s terms the cycle begins again.

Then Doctor Ni lands this passage on a clinical iron rule:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: If you do not understand the waxing and waning of the solar terms, the rise and fall of the four seasons, and where deficiency and excess arise, you cannot be a doctor. When we treat disease we must always pay attention to the change of the solar terms — whether it is spring, summer or autumn now, we must adjust our pulse diagnosis accordingly; you cannot use one pulse as the main reading in every season regardless of the solar terms. That is wrong.

The five movements, excess and insufficiency: balanced qi is normal, and the main event is in the Yu Ji Zhen Zang Lun

The Yellow Emperor next asks about the five movements — wood, fire, earth, metal, water, circling without end — what to do about excess and insufficiency? Qi Bo’s reply is clever:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: The qi of the five phases coexist, each conquering what it conquers and each failing in its own post; deficiency, excess, excess and insufficiency — these are inevitable phenomena. Often Taipei has typhoons and such — those are phenomena of excess. The emperor asked about balanced qi — what is normal? Qi Bo said it is simple: when there is no excess, it is normal. And how to treat excess and insufficiency? Qi Bo said I already told you, I will not repeat it — this is in the nineteenth chapter of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, the Yu Ji Zhen Zang Lun (Treatise on the Jade Mechanism and the True Viscera); what happens when the solar terms are excessive is all discussed there.

The five-element conquests: when the spleen has a problem, why treat the liver

The emperor asks again: what is meant by “conquers”? Qi Bo answers: spring conquers late summer, late summer conquers winter, winter conquers summer, summer conquers autumn, autumn conquers spring — each names its viscus by its qi. It sounds like nothing much, but when Doctor Ni unpacks it, it is a great therapeutic rule:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: Spring, summer, late summer, autumn, winter — in this diagram I deliberately put the spleen in the center — the spleen rules the center; the changes between the solar terms all belong to the spleen. On the five-element diagram, spring conquering late summer is wood overcoming earth. Besides the cause of disease, there is a therapeutic rule in it: if one viscus is unwell — say the spleen has a problem — we treat the viscus it conquers. We know wood overcomes earth, spring conquers late summer, so when the spleen has a problem we treat the liver. When one viscus is unwell, we strengthen what it conquers, and that can calm the unwell viscus. That is its meaning. The surface meaning is that excessive liver qi harms the spleen; conversely, if the spleen has a problem, we can treat the liver.

Closing: how do we know a conquest? Seek its arrival — arriving before it should is called excess

On page 71, the emperor asks: how do we know a conquest? Qi Bo answers: seek its arrival — when we see its qi arrive, we know.

💬 Note from Doctor Ni: How do we hold position? What is called “conquering”? From the beginning — from spring: arriving before it should is what we call excess. Generally speaking, we start from the Spring Equinox…

The lecture ends with the thought just begun, and Doctor Ni has pushed open half the gate of the Liu Jie Cang Xiang Lun: the Ling Lan Mi Dian Lun puts each of the twelve organs in its place — the heart is the sovereign, when the sovereign is clear all below are at peace, and the secret of why the heart never gets cancer is heat. The Liu Jie Cang Xiang Lun then places the human body in the great coordinates of Heaven and Earth — the six-six festivals reckon the years, the nine orifices connect to Heaven’s qi, five days make one hou and three hou make one qi, the twenty-four solar terms circle round and round, treatment must follow the solar terms, and when one viscus is unwell you treat what it conquers. The next step is to follow Doctor Ni as he starts counting from the Spring Equinox and see how the numbers of qi move.

Compiled from Doctor Ni Haixia’s Ren Ji · Huang Di Nei Jing lecture series (Lecture Thirteen)