This Character was an Elephant, Now it's the Key to Zang Xiang

"If you rotate this 90 degrees, you can see it - an elephant. Tail here, head and tusks there." In her class on the Five Elements and the Images of the Organs, Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée shows how the character 象 began as a picture of an elephant. Yet, by the time the classics were written, elephants had vanished from China. People could only see representations. So 象 became "image" - not a copy, but the pattern behind what appears. In the Yi Jing: "Heaven creates the image. Earth creates the form." This is Zang Xiang (臟象) - the study of how each organ expresses an image of qi's movement…