In traditional Chinese thought, natural phenomena can be classified into five elements, or phases: metal, wood, earth, water, fire (Chinese: 金 木 土 水 火). These Five Phases (五行 wǔxíng) are not materials as the names imply, rather they are metaphors for describing how interactions and relationships between phenomena. (Five phases is another way of translating 五行 - literally, "five go").

The doctrine of five phases describes both a generating (生 Sheng) cycle and an overcoming (克 Ke) cycle of interactions between the phases. In the generating cycle, wood generates fire; fire generates earth; earth generates metal; metal generates water; water generates wood. In the overcoming cycle, wood overcomes earth; earth overcomes water; water overcomes fire; fire overcomes metal; metal overcomes wood. The doctrine of five phases was employed in many fields of early Chinese thought, including seemingly disparate fields such as music, medicine, and military strategy.

Correlations among the Five Elements and other categories

The Yue Ling (Monthly Commands) and the Huai Nan Zi make the following correlations:

(See A History of Chinese Philosophy, Feng Yu-lan, Vol. II, p. 13)

Joseph Needham, in Science and Civilization in China, volume 2, pp. 262-23, adds many other sets of five that have been arranged to parallel the five so-called elements. Some of them are recorded below:

(corrected in 2004 Dec, not in accordance with Needham's book)

They also correlate to the 8 trigrams of the I Ching.

Note

Western parallels and contrasts, revolving instead around only four elements, called the "temperaments" or the four humours in Western physiology, psychology and pre-scientific medicine, from the time of the pre-Classical Greeks until the 18th century Enlightenment, also informed the historical study called alchemy that led to chemistry.

See also

• Tao
• Qi
• Qigong
• Hsing-i Ch'uan (Xingyiquan)
• Pushing hands
• Zang Fu theory