Chinese cosmology does not build the world from four elements, as the Greeks did, but from two forces and five phases. The phases are not stuffs but movements — ways things change into one another — and the whole of nature, from the seasons to the organs of the body, can be sorted by them.
Yin and yang
Yin and yang began as the shady and the sunny sides of a hill. They became the two poles of everything: dark and light, cold and hot, still and moving, receptive and active, earth and heaven. Neither is good or bad; each holds the seed of the other and turns into it at its extreme, as noon turns towards night and winter towards spring. The black-and-white taijitu is the familiar picture of their turning.
The five phases
The five phases, wuxing, are wood, fire, earth, metal and water. The scholar Zou Yan (c. 305–240 BCE), of the Jixia academy in the state of Qi, joined them with yin and yang into one system; his writings are lost, but Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian describes his "more than 100,000 words" on their changes. Each phase gathers a family of things:
| Phase | Season | Direction | Colour | Planet |
|---|
| Wood | Spring | East | Green-blue | Jupiter |
| Fire | Summer | South | Red | Mars |
| Earth | Late summer | Centre | Yellow | Saturn |
| Metal | Autumn | West | White | Venus |
| Water | Winter | North | Black | Mercury |
The Chinese names of the five visible planets are still the phases: Mars is the "fire star", Venus the "metal star".
The two cycles
What makes the system work is that the phases act on one another in two fixed orders.
Generation, the "mother and child" cycle:
- wood feeds fire;
- fire makes earth, of its ash;
- earth bears metal in its rocks;
- metal gathers water, as dew forms on cold metal;
- water nourishes wood.
Overcoming, the "grandfather and grandchild" cycle:
- wood holds and breaks earth with its roots;
- earth dams water;
- water quenches fire;
- fire melts metal;
- metal cuts wood.
Every phase is mother to one, child of another, conqueror of a third and conquered by a fourth. Physicians used this to explain how an illness in one organ passes to another; astrologers, to judge whether the phases in a birth chart help or harm the self; feng shui, to choose what to place where.
Five and four
The Greek elements and the Chinese phases overlap but do not match. China has wood and metal where Greece has air; Greece has no centre. Comparing them, as the Elements tool does, is a good lesson in how differently two civilisations divided the same world.
Exercise
Draw the five phases as a pentagon, in the order wood, fire, earth, metal, water. Join each to the next with an arrow: that is the cycle of generation. Then join each to the one two steps on: the five-pointed star you have drawn is the cycle of overcoming. Check it against the diagram in the Four Pillars tool.