wu hsing
cnw
Chinese thought to come up with a syncretic and systematic explanation of the
universe, the changes that occur in the universe, and the relation of the human
world to the physical and divine worlds. Their thought focused on two
inventions, both designed to explain the changing world in much the same way
Aristotle's four causes were designed as a universal explanatory framework for
explaining change. The first of these inventions, the principles of yin and
yang, opposite forces of change which complement and cyclically give rise to one
another, operated through the physical mechanism of "the five material agents,"
or wu-hsing .
These five material agents are wood-fire-earth-metal-water and are grouped
either in the order by which they produce one another (wood gives rise to fire,
fire gives rise to earth, earth gives rise to metal, metal gives rise to water,
water gives rise to earth, etc.) or the order by which they are conquered by one
another: fire is conquered by water, water is conquered by earth, earth is
conquered by wood, wood is conquered by metal, and metal is conquered by fire,
etc. Each of these orders can be used to explain the progression of change in
just about everything. When the modern western physicist talks about the
unification of the five forces (electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force,
gravity, color force), that person is not conceiving these five forces as
spilling into or conquering one another; this physicist would consider it absurd
to apply any of these forces to anything other than mechanical or atomic
physics. The five agents, however, is a metaphysical explanation of the
progression of change that is meant to be applied to every phenomenon one
encounters in this changing universe: politics, ethics, music, biology, time,
seasons, history, etc.
Associated with the agent wood is the season spring, fire is summer, metal is
autumn, and water is winter. The color green is the color of the wood agent, red
the color of fire, yellow the color of earth, white the color of metal, and
black the color of water. In human anatomy, the spleen is ruled by wood, the
lungs by fire, the heart by earth, the liver by metal, and the kidneys by water.
If one has a disease of the liver, it is because the liver is being overcome by
a fire agent or pathogen—since fire is overcome by water, one would treat the
liver pathogen with a water agent. See how the system works?
One could endlessly list how the various categories of phenomenon fit into
this schema. What is important to understand is that the five agents explain
everything including the progress of change in the universe. And the progress
that interests most human beings is history since human history paradoxically
appears to be both in human control and out of human control. The Han thinkers
began to reinterpret Chinese history and dynastic successions by reverting to
this model of the five agents; dynastic successions could be explained by using
either the order by which the agents produce one another or the order by which
they are overcome by one another. In the early Han the latter model was adopted,
which aligned the Han dynasty with the agent earth. Since the color associated
with earth as yellow, the Han emperors adopted yellow as their imperial color.
With the overthrow of the Han by Wang Mang, the former model was adopted and
lasted as the standard model to this day. Every dynasty associated itself with a
particular agent according to this model and adopted the colors appropriate to
that agent. What this system did was make history a coherent whole; it also made
the future predictable.
Richard Hooker