Nearly every English book I hand a beginner still says five elements on the cover, and that is where most of the confusion I spend class time undoing starts.
Somebody gets to metal and asks whether that means the material, and if so why autumn is filed under it. Somebody else, usually an engineer, asks whether the whole thing is an early periodic table that got as far as five. Both are fair questions, and the word on the cover invited them.
What xing means
Xing is the ordinary Chinese word for walking, going, moving along. The same character turns up in the words for a journey, for conduct, for a business in operation. It is a word about motion, and wuxing is five ways of moving.
The oldest description that matters is in the Hongfan chapter of the Book of Documents, in my own rough rendering: of the five phases, the first is water, the second fire, the third wood, the fourth metal, the fifth earth; water soaks and descends, fire blazes and rises, wood bends and straightens, metal yields and is reshaped, earth takes sowing and reaping.
All five clauses are about doing and direction: what the thing does and which way it goes, never what it is made of. Yielding and being reshaped is the movement from loose to fixed, from what can still be changed into what has taken final form.
One thing I have never worked out: the Hongfan order, water fire wood metal earth, is neither the generating sequence nor the seasonal one, and I have not seen anybody account for it. So the passage is good evidence that the five are verbs and not much use for anything after that.
Five ways of moving
Wood is emergence. A seed swells under the ground all winter, then in spring pushes the soil aside and comes up, and that pressure, upward and outward and unwilling to stay put, is wood. Spring is wood, and early morning. It does not mean a tree: an old tree that has finished growing is not particularly full of wood; the sprout that broke ground last week is. In September I take a class outside and point at whatever has just broken bud, the plane trees and liquidambars along the street, leaves half out. Students six months in still reach for wood means timber the moment they sit down with a real chart, and what they read out is lifeless. When this layer will not go in, nothing stacked on it does either, and I go back and walk it again.
Fire is blazing and spreading, with no single direction. Heat, light, noise, activity, all of it going outward and thinning as it goes. Summer, and midday.
Earth is the hardest to teach, because it goes neither up nor down. Things pile on it and it holds them; things get buried in it and it breaks them down, and something else grows out of what is left. Carrying and transforming are two ends of one job. Some schools give it late summer, others the last eighteen days of each season; which I use depends on what I am counting.
Autumn here is largely a rumour. Most of what grows around Sydney is evergreen, the eucalypts shed bark rather than leaves whenever they like, and in late April it is still often warm enough to eat outside. A few inner west streets are planted with liquidambars that turn properly, and by June people who grew up with real seasons go and stand under them.
Growth stops, sap goes down, fruit closes and hardens and takes its shape: that closing and setting is metal. A blade is contraction at the far end of the scale, which is where the phase gets its cold reputation and why executions in imperial China waited for autumn. Pull in further and it goes away altogether, stored and left alone, which is water: winter, the seed lying in the ground doing nothing, the hours after dark.
What more metal actually asks for
So metal labels the gathering-in and water the storing-away. The substances belong to those categories as examples: a metal is cold, hard, holds a shape and takes an edge. The reasoning runs that way round, never the other.
When a chart wants more metal, it wants contracting behaviour: pulling the schedule in, closing off what was left half open. Buying something metal to wear is not in that range. I don’t sell that sort of thing and I don’t promise it does anything. Add-what-is-missing has a bigger problem under it anyway, covered in The Useful God and the Taboo God and Naming a Baby.
Directions work the same way. Wood east, fire south, metal west, water north was fitted to the heat and daylight of central China; below the equator fire sits north and water south, east and west holding. Reasoning in Why “Facing South” Fails in Australia.
The generating cycle
Anyone can memorise the order. Ask why, and you usually get this: timber burns, ash is earth, ore sits in the ground, metal melts into liquid, water makes plants grow.
All of that treats the five as materials, and the earth-to-metal step gives it away: it says nothing except that ore is buried in soil.
Read as tendencies the loop runs clean. Emergence pushed to its limit stops going up and starts going out in every direction, which is fire. Spreading ends, the heat spent, and what is left settles into the layer that holds things, which is earth. After holding and breaking down the movement turns inward and begins closing and setting, which is metal; closing at its limit becomes putting away, which is water; and stored long enough, what was stored wants out.
Laid end to end that is a year: spring wood, summer fire, the earth stretch, autumn metal, winter water. Set as a straight line, earth has to hold late summer; on the eighteen-day placement it spreads over the ends of the four seasons and the line will not join. That they lie over the seasons at all is my strongest reason for reading them as a sequence in time.
In Sydney the whole ring shifts by six months, so December is fire and June is water. Which parts swap and which stay put is in The Twenty-Four Solar Terms Below the Equator.
I don’t know which of the two came first. The material version is catchy enough to be a later mnemonic, but it could equally be the original, with the tendency reading a gloss added centuries later by people who wanted the system tidier than it was. I have not seen anything that settles it.
What the cycle looks like once it lands in a body is in The Five Fists and the Five Phases.
Restraint is the brake
The other cycle usually gets translated as destructive or conquest, which oversells it. Ke means to restrain, to keep in check.
Metal restrains wood: contraction holds down emergence, and growth stops when autumn arrives. Wood restrains earth: roots break up compacted ground. Earth restrains water: a bank holds back what would otherwise sink away. Water restrains fire, storage checking spread; fire restrains metal, heat loosening what had set hard.
Beginners read restraint as damage. A system with only generation in it accelerates until it comes apart: wood with nothing checking it grows until it is only growth, fire with nothing holding it burns itself out. Being held in check is often good news in a reading: when one phase runs very strong, I look for whether the phase that restrains it has any force left.
Elements, phases, agents
The translation came from early missionaries and sinologists with a ready-made frame to hand: the classical Western four, earth water air fire, four materials everything is made of. The Chinese set looked like the same with one more item.
The damage is in the word itself: an element in English is a constituent of matter, so the verb inside xing drops out in transit and five ways of moving arrive as five stuffs.
Most serious English writing now says five phases, some five agents. Phase carries the stage-in-a-cycle sense, agent the doing-something sense. Both are better than element, and phases is what I use.
Chinese lost some of it too. The two characters have been welded together so long that the motion in xing has worn out of everyday hearing, and plenty of native speakers picture five substances too, with no bad translation in front of them to tip them off.
How to tell whether someone has it
Don’t ask them to recite the two cycles; that takes ten minutes. Listen to what they mean when they say a chart needs more metal. Jewellery, and they are treating a phase as a material. A metal radical in a baby’s name at least means they are reading the character, though usually with the wrong phase in mind; that one I covered in Naming a Baby. Closing things off, pulling in, the quality autumn has, and they have got it.
Get this layer wrong and every step after it has to be walked again. In boxing it shows up fastest, because the punch just does not come out.