The question usually arrives in someone’s first month, and it is a fair one: were the five phases attached to these five fists afterwards, to make the system look tidy?
Fair, because the five phases get used as a filing cabinet for everything. Medicine, music, food, dynasties. Anything that comes in fives can be sorted into them, and plenty that does not come in fives gets trimmed until it fits.
The five fists were not filed. The names describe which way the force runs.
A note on the word first, since five elements is what the books on the shelf say. Element is a weak translation of xing. A xing is closer to a phase, a movement, a tendency in motion than to a substance sitting in a jar, which is why water can be a xing while a glass of water is not. That is a longer argument than this piece needs. Here all you need is that a phase is a direction of movement, and a direction of movement is exactly what a strike has.
Where this comes from: I come out of the Che branch of Shanxi Xingyi, Shang generation. I started on basics at fifteen at home with an old teacher, Zhang Yuren, who put me forward to Che Xiangqian in Taigu. By the protocol of the door, one of his disciples took me as a student, Che being well on in years by then, but the boxing came from Che’s own hands. Branches differ on plenty. What follows is how it comes down in mine.
What each one actually does
Pi splits. The lead hand rises and bores out, the palm turns over, and the force comes down. It presses forward and down at the same time, the way an axe goes into wood along the grain rather than bouncing off it. Metal in this system is contraction and descent, the autumn quality, everything drawing down and in. Same direction. The body walks forward while the force travels down, and both have to be there. Take the forward out and you are just hammering the floor. Beng is the easy one to recognise, the closest of the five to what most people already mean by a punch: one line, straight out, no curve. (The usual English, crushing fist, has students squeezing something. Nothing gets squeezed.) Wood is the phase of straight growth, the shoot coming up through the soil rather than going around it.
Except that the shoot grows upward and Beng travels forward. I read wood as straight and let the up-or-forward question go by. Convenient, and I know it.
Zuan drills. The hand turns over from underneath and spirals up along a rising arc, and it is filed under water.
Which is the wider seam of the two. Water descends. That is its listed nature: it soaks downward, it finds the low ground. Zuan goes up. The traditional answer is that water blocked will turn over and climb, that a spring rises out of the ground under its own pressure, so water can bore upward too. I have always found that answer a bit laboured, and I have never found a better one. Possibly I have not read enough.
Pao lifts with one hand and strikes with the other, and fire opening outward has no first and second in it, so everything hangs on the two arriving in the same instant. Beginners make it two beats, block and then hit, and what comes out is a parry with a straight punch behind it, which is a useful thing to own and a different technique.
Heng is the ugliest of the five to watch and the hardest to teach. Its force goes sideways: it wraps and it turns, inside to outside or outside to in, with very little travel. Stand beside someone doing it well and you often cannot see what happened. Earth sits in the centre and carries the other four, and Heng holds the same position among the fists, because the turn between one fist finishing and the next one starting usually has crossing force in it. Which is where the old argument comes from, that Heng is the mother of the other four and hides inside all of them. I have heard several versions. Some people hold that line, others say Heng is one of five and should not be promoted above its siblings, and I do not have a settled view. What is not in dispute is that a beginner can fake Heng for a long time without knowing it, because the movement is small enough that being wrong feels like being right. Someone has to watch you.
There is a line in the manuals, worded slightly differently from edition to edition, pairing each fist with an image: axe, arrow, lightning, cannon, pellet. People point at it and say, well, there are your metaphors. They are, and what they picture is shape. The phase pairing is doing another job, sorting the five by the direction their force travels.
Generating: the drilling order
Metal generates water, water wood, wood fire, fire earth, earth metal. On paper that is a ring of arrows. In practice it is a question of whether one movement can catch the end of the last one.
Pi finishes low and in front, which is where Zuan starts, so the join is free. Zuan has brought the force up, so sending it forward from there gives you Beng. Beng goes straight, and straight lines get met from the side, at which point the force has to turn over and lift, and lifting while striking is Pao. Pao throws force out to the outside, where it will scatter if nothing gathers it, and gathering it back across is Heng. Heng wraps to the end of its travel and drops, and dropping is Pi again.
That is why it is the cheapest order for partner work. Nobody has to stop and reset a stance between repetitions.
Overcoming: the answers
Pi answers Beng, Beng answers Heng, Heng answers Zuan, Zuan answers Pao, Pao answers Pi.
Look at the paths and it explains itself. Beng arrives on a straight line and Pi comes down on top of that line, metal cutting wood. Heng works across, so Beng declines to go around with it and drives straight up the middle, wood breaking earth. Zuan needs to rise, and crossing force wraps the elbow from the side so it cannot, earth damming water. Pao opens, and an opening has a gap in the middle of it for Zuan to climb through, water putting out fire. Pi falls from above onto Pao, which is already lifting, and gets caught and blown open, fire melting metal.
Elegant on paper, much less obedient in a room. The advantage exists only if the distance, the timing and the angle all arrive together, and if they do not, the fist with the theoretical advantage eats the other one. Treating the cycle as a set of keys is taking the diagram too literally.
One more thing, because that section reads like a list of answers. Work this with someone who knows what they are doing, agree on how hard before anyone moves, and keep it in the room. None of it is worth finding out about on a footpath.
Something unrelated
The five fists are all verbs. The twelve animal forms are all animals. One art, two naming systems, and nothing in between them. I have never seen an explanation of that which holds up, and my guess is that the two halves came from different people at different times and were put under one roof afterwards. It has no bearing on anybody’s practice. It just bothers me.
The organ pairing, and what I will not say about it
The manuals push the same classification one step further onto the body: lungs with metal and Pi, liver with wood and Beng, kidneys with water and Zuan, heart with fire and Pao, spleen with earth and Heng. People turn up having read a page somewhere that has converted this into a treatment plan. I teach the pairing as part of the vocabulary and leave it there. Training will do for you roughly what exercise does for you, and in Australia a health claim about a martial art is a claim under consumer law rather than a manner of speaking. Anyone carrying a condition sees a doctor first.
Checking whether someone has it
You do not need to ask what they know about the five phases. Watch where the force goes. There are people who have trained a good while and what comes out is five hand shapes and one force.
That is fixable, and slow. You stop running forms, go back to single movements, and walk each one again.