Five phases

Meaning

The five phases, wǔxíng, are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. The word 行 xíng means to walk, to go, to act: the phases are not five substances the world is built from but five moments of change, the way a thing sprouts, flourishes, turns, gathers itself in and rests before it sprouts again. Chinese thought reads them in the seasons and the directions, the hours and the colours, the virtues and the temperaments, always as movements in relation to one another.

Two cycles join them. In the generating cycle (相生 xiāngshēng) each phase feeds the next: Wood feeds Fire as fuel feeds a flame, Fire leaves Earth behind as ash, Earth bears Metal in its veins, Metal gathers Water as dew gathers on cold metal, and Water feeds Wood as rain feeds a forest. In the controlling cycle (相剋 xiāngkè) each phase checks the one two steps ahead: Wood breaks up Earth with its roots, Earth holds Water within its banks, Water puts out Fire, Fire melts Metal, and Metal cuts Wood.

Neither cycle is good or bad. What feeds can also smother, and what checks also gives shape: an axe makes a tree into a beam. The tradition looks for balance, and reads too much or too little of a phase as something to work with, never as a verdict. With yin and yang the phases make the frame of the whole of Chinese cosmology: Wood and Fire are the rising, yang half of the cycle, Metal and Water its gathering, yin half, and Earth stands at the turning points between them.

In practice

• In BaZi, each of the eight characters of a birth has its phase, and so has each stem hidden in a branch. Ulune counts them and shows the balance of the five; the phase of the Day Master, the stem of the day, is the one every other phase is read against: the same phase, the phase it produces, the one it controls, the one that controls it, the one that produces it.
• In Chinese astrology, each animal has a fixed phase (the Horse is Fire, the Rat is Water) and each year adds the phase of its stem: 2026 is a year of the Fire Horse. Counted from Lichun, about 4 February, years ending in 4 and 5 are Wood years, 6 and 7 Fire, 8 and 9 Earth, 0 and 1 Metal, 2 and 3 Water.
• In Feng Shui, each of the eight directions and each of the nine stars has its phase, and the Flying Stars of a home are read partly by how the phase of the mountain star meets the phase of the water star in each of its parts.
• Reading a balance: a phase that is missing is an invitation, not a flaw. The tradition suggests bringing it in through what it stands for, rest and quiet for Water, plans and green places for Wood, rather than through anything to buy.

Across traditions

• Western astrology has four elements, fire, earth, air and water, received from Empedocles and read as qualities, hot or cold, dry or wet. The Chinese phases are processes rather than qualities; Wood and Metal have no Western twin, as air has no Chinese one.
• Chinese astronomy names the five visible planets after the phases: Jupiter is the Wood star (木星 mùxīng), Mars the Fire star, Saturn the Earth star, Venus the Metal star and Mercury the Water star.
• India counts five great elements, the pañca mahābhūta: earth, water, fire, air and space. Japan knows both lists: the Buddhist godai (earth, water, fire, wind and void) and the Chinese phases, which its almanacs call gogyō.

Origin and history

The oldest list is in “The Great Plan” (洪範 Hóng fàn), a chapter of the Book of Documents that tradition sets at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty and most scholars date to the Warring States period (5th–3rd centuries BC). It names water, fire, wood, metal and earth by what they do: water soaks and descends, fire blazes upwards, wood bends and straightens, metal yields and changes, earth is sown and reaped. In the 3rd century BC Zou Yan (鄒衍), as Sima Qian later told it, read the rise and fall of dynasties as the turning of the phases, and the Lüshi Chunqiu (c. 239 BC) set them against the months, colours and directions of a ruler’s year.

Under the Han dynasty the scheme became the common frame of learning. The Huainanzi (139 BC) and the essays attributed to Dong Zhongshu (c. 179–104 BC) spell out the generating and controlling orders; astronomers, physicians, musicians and diviners all used them, and around 600 Xiao Ji (蕭吉) gathered their lore in the Wuxing Dayi, the Great Meaning of the Five Phases. Western translators long called them the “five elements”, after Europe’s four; many sinologists today prefer “phases” or “agents”, to keep the sense of movement, and Ulune follows them.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes each phase from the classical tables, the same in its three Chinese languages: each Heavenly Stem and each Earthly Branch has its phase, each stem hidden in a branch its own, each trigram and each of the nine stars theirs.

In BaZi the balance is counted on nine points for four pillars: one for each visible stem, the Day Master included, and each hidden stem by its weight, those of the month’s branch twice for the season. From about 2.5 of the nine points Ulune reads much of a phase, under half a point little of it, and says so as a suggestion. The pages draw each phase in its colour: Wood green, Fire red, Earth ochre, Metal a white-grey and Water a deep blue, the tradition’s green, red, yellow, white and black, tuned so that each reads in both themes.

Correspondences