We may be talking about different characters. The character I’m talking about is from Chapter 5 (and others) in the Neijing Suwen, 肉 rou4. It is a picture of a carcass hanging from a pole. So it could very well include the fascia/connective tissue, but also most definitely includes the muscle. It is debatable where to put the fascia and connective tissue, I’ve heard arguments for Liver but also for Triple Warmer. The same could be said of adipose. Its interesting to think about, but the important thing that I like to take away is that the role of Earth is that of containment. In this way the Spleen/Earth contains the blood in the blood vessels: too much of this causes vasoconstriction, too little and you have vasodilation. Whether it is fascia or muscle or just flesh is arguable, but the idea is the same. My sense is that fascia and adipose are rather different from flesh and muscle, so i’m going to stand by my original translation, but am interested to hear about classical references to fascia and adipose.

thank you for your comment,
brandon

You stated, “In CM, we say that the ‘Earth rules the muscles’ and in the SSH case this clearly relates to the smooth muscle of the vasculature losing its ability to contract.”

That’s a common TCM mistranslation of the classical Chinese character for flesh. The correct translation of the character for flesh means fascia/adipose tissue. It doesn’t mean muscle. In other words, Wood rules the muscles/tendons/ligaments and Earth rules the flesh (fascia/adipose tissue).

So, in your example, you could say that the vasculature loses its ability to contract (or expand) due to the hardening of its fascia.