YINYANG WUXING

YINYANG WUXING . Yinyang (umbral and bright) and wuxing (Five Phases: water, fire, wood, metal, and earth) are the core concepts of traditional Chinese cosmology. This cosmology perceives the universe as an organic whole, in which the spiritual, natural, and human worlds are ordered into a single, infinitely interconnected system. Modern scholars retrospectively call it correlative cosmology, since it is based on "correlative thinking."

Correlative thinking is by no means uniquely Chinese; it has appeared in all civilizations and still underlies the operations of language and serves as one of the building blocks of thought. Chinese cosmology is a distinctive and extraordinary elaboration of such a mode of thinking. It groups phenomena into heuristic or analogistic categories, within and among which relationships are held to be relatively regular and predictable. Eventually, all things in the universe are categorized and correlated, and everything affects everything else. Entities, processes, and classes of phenomena found in the human world (the human body, behavior, morality, the sociopolitical order, and historical change) are set in correspondence to various entities, processes, and classes of phenomena in nature (time, space, the movements of heavenly bodies, seasonal change, plants and animals, etc.).

This elaborate classification and correlation structure is based on various numerical systems, such as interlaced pairs (correlated to yinyang ), sets of fours (correlated to the four directions and four seasons, and further divided into twelve months, twelve Earthly Branches, and jieqi seasonal nodes), sets of fives (correlated to wuxing or Five Phases), and sets of eights (correlated to the Eight Trigrams). While these numeral systems had different origins and represented divergent ways of classification and correlation building, the systems of yinyang and wuxing were combined and used to synthesize all other systems into an elaborate and coherent cosmology. Therefore the Chinese have used yinyang and wuxing as a general term to refer to this cosmology as a whole and the correlative thinking beneath it.

Origin and Development

The words yin and yang first appeared in texts of the Warring States period (403–221 bce), with their root meanings of "a hillside in shade" and "a hillside in sunlight," or, by extension, "cool" and "warm." A reference to a physician named Ho, in his speech dated 541 bce, shows the first link of yin and yang to the six qi, the energetic fluids in the atmosphere and inside of the body. With this linkage to the qi, yin and yang acquired cosmological meaning. By the third century bce, a wide variety of dualistic phenomena were being characterized in terms of yin and yang, as demonstrated in a comprehensive list (see Table 1) from an excavated text from Mawangdui.

The chain shown in Table 1 could go on infinitely, until everything is paired and divided accordingly. More often the yang chain is superior to the yin chain, but the two are mutually dependent. The use of the terms yin and yang, with their connotations of the changing ratio of shadow and sunshine on a hillside during the course of a day, aptly suited the Chinese concept of dualism, which was never absolute or antagonistic. Chinese culture tends to treat opposites as relativistic and complementary, while the West treats them as conflicting. Coolness exists only relatively to its complement, warmth—a minister is yin in relation to his ruler, but yang in relation to his wife. The yin of winter moves inevitably to the yang of summer, and back again: each contains the germ of the other.

Wuxing, the categories of five, also appeared during the Warring States period. Like yingyang, these categories had ancient roots. They may derive from astronomical considerations of the five visible planets, or from the numerology of the magic squares (a 3 × 3 grid arrangement of the integers 1 through 9, with 5 at the center; each row, column, and diagonal yields a sum of 15), or more likely, from the ancient spatial concepts of the four quarters of the world and four cardinal directions, with a fifth, the center, added to the four.

Towards the end of the Warring States period and during the first empires immediately following (221 bce–220 ce), yinyang and wuxing were integrated and elevated to become the core system for synthesizing the divergent classification systems. From their initial appearance as loosely defined and unsystematically used terms, and through the long process of synthesis and standardization, these concepts went through many changes. Their meanings varied in different historical periods, as well as in different applications during the same period. For example, the Chinese term wuxing literarily means five "goings," "doings," or "conducts." The Confucians used the term to refer to the Five Virtues (benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and sagehood), rather than water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. At the same time, the set of water, fire, wood, metal, and earth were called by different terms, including wuxing, wucai (Five Materials), wude (Five Powers), and wuwei (Five Positions).

This is why the translation of these concepts is extremely controversial. While yin and yang are left untranslated, wuxing has many translations: formerly as Five Elements, and then as Five Materials, Five Forces, Five Agents, Five Entities, Five Powers, Five Processes, or Five Phases ("Five Phases" has gained increasing acceptance). But the term is only appropriate from the Han (206 bce–220 ce) onward, referring to cosmic cycles; using "Five Phases" to translate wuxing in pre-Han sources poses the danger of anachronism. Scholars more often prefer to leave wuxing untranslated, so that its exact meaning can be determined by the specific historical period and context.

Like yinyang, the term wuxing was used to classify phenomena that shared a common attribute (see Table 2). Although lacking the apparent inevitability found in the binary oppositions of yinyang, the classification of phenomena into categories of five spread widely throughout Chinese civilization. Medical practitioners described Five Viscera, musical experts worked with a scale of Five Tones, political theorists spoke of Five Powers of dynastic transmission, religious specialists named Five Gods.

More than just categories for classification, yinyang and wuxing explain the changes in all the phenomena and interactions among them. Things within the same category affect one another through resonance, because they share the same kind of qi. For example, if a ruler acts benevolently during the months of spring, the qi of the wood phase that is thus engendered will encourage the growth of plans. If, on the contrary, during the spring months he inappropriately engages in war and punishment, thus generating the metallic qi of autumn, then the springtime growth of plants will be hindered.

Yinyang and wuxing are seen as existing in interactive cycles of succession, through which things in different categories interact and transform one another. These cycles are regular and predictable, various permutations of the pair and the set of five formed cyclical orders to be applied in specific circumstances. Yin and yang were used to describe cyclical dualistic phenomena, such as the shifting proportions of sunlight and darkness throughout the solar year and the waxing and waning of the seasons. The Five Phases exist in various kinds of cycles, and the two most common and widely used were the mutual conquest and mutual generation cycles. In the former, water conquers fire (extinguishing), fire conquers metal (melting), metal conquers wood (chopping), wood conquers earth (plowing), and earth conquers water (damming). In the latter, wood generates fire (burning), fire generates earth (ash), earth generates metal (ore), metal generates water (melting), and water generates wood (irrigation). The conquest cycle was applied to, for example, the sequential planting and harvesting of crops throughout the growing year, and the generation cycle was applied to the succession of the seasons.

The inventor of the yinyang and wuxing system remains unknown. Traditionally, the invention was attributed to Zou Yan (fourth century bce), the believed founder of a school of "naturalist" philosophy called yinyang and wuxing jia, a philosophical system that combines science and magic. But archaeological discoveries in the last decades of the twentieth century provided a body of new sources challenging this attribution. Some scholars identified affiliations of yinyang and wuxing with other philosophical schools, such as Confucianism. But many others found ample evidence in the new sources that the cosmology originated from the world outside of philosophical schools, the world of technical tradition occupied by court historians, astronomers, diviners, physicians, and music masters. Scholars have been debating whether the cosmology originated from technical professions and later was adopted and synthesized by philosophers, or whether it entered the technical world from philosophy. But whether the technical tradition and philosophy had such a clear distinction in the Warring States period is itself a debatable question. Even if they were differentiated, they both were overwhelmingly concerned with politics, history, and morality, rather than pure technical or philosophical speculations.

Significance in Chinese Civilization

Yinyang and wuxing have played a significant role in Chinese civilization; as a twentieth-century Chinese scholar put it, they are "the law of Chinese thinking." During the formation of the first empires, yinyang and wuxing formed the cosmological foundation for the imperial ideology. Zou Yan and his followers used the conquest cycle of Five Phases to articulate their theory of dynastic transmission. According to this theory, a

dynasty that was ruled by the power of the wood phase would be conquered by a new ruling house associated with metal, which in turn would be conquered by a dynasty of fire. For the rise of each new dynasty, heaven would show favorable signs to verify its legitimacy. The sign would be yellow for a dynasty ruled by the power of earth, and green for a dynasty of wood. Accordingly, Zou Yan arranged ancient history in such a cycle of conquest and predicted that a new dynasty of water, in black color, was due to rise. The first empire of Qin (221–206 bce) adopted this theory and claimed the phase water and the ritual color black.

This imperial ideology was by no means a homogenous one. Yinyang and wuxing provided the shared discourse for political debates and struggles throughout the Han dynasty. The dispute over the two cycles of the Five Phases, conquest and generation, articulated the competition between two concepts of sovereignty and two ways of government. The conquest cycle represented a sovereignty based on force and punishment, and the generation cycle represented one based on ethical principles, rituals, and hierarchies. Confucian philosopher Dong Zhongshu (179–104 bce) rejected the implication of Zou Yan's theory that there are different ways of government, each legitimate. He stated that a change of government would serve only to illuminate the Dao of heaven, rectifying the deviations from it by the preceding dynasty. Dong's followers further used the generation cycle of Five Phases to explain dynastic transmission, thus shifting the ground for imperial sovereignty from conquering force to nurturing morality. This system of dynastic transmission and imperial symbolism was adopted by Wang Mang in establishing the New Dynasty (Xin, 9–23 ce), and was continued by the later Han (25–220 ce) and all dynasties of the remaining imperial history.

Outside of political ideology, yinyang and wuxing were fully integrated into every domain of Chinese culture and the

everyday practice of the people, becoming a common property of Chinese philosophy, religion, medicine, and science as a whole. Yinyang and wuxing were used by court historians, astronomers, diviners, ritual experts, physicians, and music masters in predicting, planning, and checking government functions. By ordering time, space, body, and all phenomena into a single predictable order, the state used this cosmology as the means of creating a tightly integrated order and of controlling the actual daily practice of administration. Yinyang and wuxing also penetrated a wide terrain of technical, mantic, and religious practice; they were integrated into the calendar, medicine, and divination, and were used to order the daily affairs of the populace in marriage, funerals, rituals, travel, diet, healing, trade, house building, farming, hunting, and the making of food, wine, and clothing. Even after the introduction of modern science and the decline of yinyang and wuxing as a political ideology towards the end of the imperial era, yinyang and wuxing remained the conceptual foundation of popular religion, martial arts, geomancy, and traditional Chinese medicine, all of which are still operating today.

See Also

Daoism, overview article; Dong Zhongshu; Onmyōdō.

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