Five Elements

Wood, fire, earth, metal, water: the Chinese five elements (五行, wuxing) are the shared working vocabulary of acupuncture, feng shui, Bazi, and Chinese dietary theory — and almost every English speaker first meets them under a name that misleads. Xing (行) is a verb: to move, to act, to walk. What the system actually names is five phases of change — five kinds of process that generate and restrain one another in two closed loops. This page lays out the five phases in full, the generating and overcoming cycles, the season-direction-organ correspondences that make the system usable, and why “elements” is a translation to handle with care.