Five Chinese Elements
| Wu Xing | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese | 五行 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | wǔxíng |
| Bopomofo | ㄨˇㄒㄧㄥˊ |
| Wade–Giles | wu3 hsing2 |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | ng5 hang4 |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Ngó͘-hân Ngó͘-hîng |
| Eastern Min | |
| Fuzhou BUC | Ngū-hèng |
The Wu Xing (Chinese: ; pinyin: Wǔ Xíng), also known as the Five Elements, Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, Five Processes, the Five Steps/Stages and the Five Planets is the short form of "Wǔ zhǒng liúxíng zhī qì" (五種流行之氣) or "the five types of chi dominating at different times". It is a fivefold conceptual scheme that many traditional Chinese fields used to explain a wide array of phenomena, from cosmic cycles to the interaction between internal organs, and from the succession of political regimes to the properties of medicinal drugs. The "Five Phases" are Wood ( mù), Fire ( huǒ), Earth ( tǔ), Metal ( jīn), and Water ( shuǐ). This order of presentation is known as the "mutual generation" (相生 xiāngshēng) sequence. In the order of "mutual overcoming" (相剋/相克 xiāngkè), they are Wood, Earth, Water, Fire, and Metal.
The system of five phases was used for describing interactions and relationships between phenomena. After it came to maturity in the second or first century BCE during the Han dynasty, this device was employed in many fields of early Chinese thought, including seemingly disparate fields such as geomancy or Feng shui, astrology, traditional Chinese medicine, music, military strategy, and martial arts. The system is still used as a reference in some forms of complementary and alternative medicine and martial arts.
Xing (Chinese: ) of 'Wu Xing' means moving; a planet is called a 'moving star'(Chinese: ) in Chinese. Wu Xing (Chinese: ) originally refers to the five major planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Mars) that create five dimensions of earth life. "Wu Xing" is also widely translated as Five Elements and this is used extensively by many including practitioners of Five Element acupuncture. This translation arose by false analogy with the Western system of the four elements. Whereas the classical Greek elements were concerned with substances or natural qualities, the Chinese xíng are "primarily concerned with process and change," hence the common translation as "phases" or "agents". By the same token, Mù is thought of as "Tree" rather than "Wood". The word 'element' is thus used within the context of Chinese medicine with a different meaning to its usual meaning.
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