Introduction to Five-Phase Theory (Wu Xing)

Five-phase Theory, Five-Element Theory, Wu Xing, or The Five Phases as I prefer to call them, is part of an ancient collection of thought that came together in China between about 500BCE to 100BCE.

Although most people have never heard of it, Wu Xing as I’ll call it from now is just as important in the history of Chinese thought as Yin/Yang Theory and The Dao.

Wu Xing first entered my consciousness over 20 years ago when I started learning Tai Chi Chuan. Little did I know then the impact it would have on me and my life.

Wu Xing is most commonly translated into English as Five-Element Theory, but this is a bit misleading and really doesn’t capture its full flavour. In order to understand the theory better, I’ll begin with a historical and cultural overview to better contextualise it.

If you’re coming from a Western upbringing like I do, then getting to grips with Wu Xing is going to require entering a new way of thinking about and viewing the world. This is what is so challenging about the theory to begin with. But once your mind is open to this new world view, it opens up new vistas and perpectives on the world that really do practically guide us in living better as well as dealing better with the world we live in – in any context. So well worth the effort, in my humble opinion.

High level Differences between Chinese and Western Philosophy

The main difference between Chinese and Western philosophy is that Chinese philosophy isn’t really philosophy at all! In the West, philosophy means ‘the love of wisdom’ and it is a practise of seeking truth about ourselves and the world around us. Chinese ‘philosophy’ does, of course, seek an understanding of ourselves in the world, but the nature of the understanding is different. Chinese philosophy is fundamentally about how we find a path or way in life and it is through this active engagement in the world that understanding, knowledge, and wisdom arise.

From a psychological perspective, which is what I’ve been most interested in with Wu Xing, ‘psychology’ as a subject doesn’t really exist within Chinese thought. That’s because the heart is the mind and the mind is the heart. The functions that we in the west ascribe to psychology are, in the Chinese thought, just as much about the functions of the body as they are about the nature of the relationship with the world and its natural cycles. In Chinese thought, a person’s thoughts, emotions, and feelings, arise from the state of the whole “body-person” in relation to the world.

This relational view brings us really to the heart of the difference. In Chinese thought, everything is seen in terms of movement and change – transformation – and relationships. It is an inherently systemic way of viewing the world and out of that systemic view, appropriate action emerges.

So this relational world view teaches us to see how everything is in constant motion and change and then to accurately percieve those movements and patterns in relation to our selves and what we do.

The next important difference is in how we construct our reality. In the dominant schools of thought in the West, it is proposed that we make meaning ourselves, in our heads. There are variations to this but they aren’t really widely accepted as valid in our culture. This means that we tend to assume that the information we receive through our senses from the world around us isn’t meaningful, but that the brain and therefore, our mind, guesses the meaning and applies it to a sort of meaning map we have inside our heads. This position essentially means that we aren’t directly in touch with reality but rather we are living in a processed meta world.

In Chinese thought, this process of making meaning in such a way is considered a sign of pathology. Ancient Daoists would suggest that if we start making meaning and create reality in our heads, that’s when we’re in trouble and that’s when we start to see a dissolution of healthy individual, social, cultural, and environmental structures and systems. In Chinese thought, the real world is out there. All we need to do is learn to tune our senses through correct observation. We do this largely by getting out of our heads. So, in Chinese thought, we are directly in touch with an inherently meaningful reality as long as our minds don’t get in the way!

I’ll finish off with two final high level and important differences which go hand in hand. These are systematic correspondence and function. Systematic correspondence is a totally different way to conceptualise and make sense of the world compared to the deductive reasoning we’re taught in the West.

With systematic correspondence the theoretician or more likely a practitioner, will view patterns of the function of a system through phenomena which which are connected through lines of correspondence. To the uninitiated, these relationships may seem inconsistent, imcompatible, or even incomprehensible – some might completely contradict each other. Getting your head around this aspect of Chinese thought is, like I found, particularly challenging, but also essential in learning how to view the patterns of complex and dynamic systems.

From the perspective of function, when looking at a system using the lense of systematic correspondence, patterns will emerge at different functional levels. For example, in medicine it would involve enquiring about physical, mental, and social patterns a patient is experiencing. So a set of patterns might describe; poor digestion, bloating of the stomach, itchy eyes, dry skin, continuous busy thinking, muzzy head with some headaches, tiredness and poor sleep, feeling sad with angry outbursts. In the social sphere, perhaps there has been a change at work with a missed promotion, unsatisfying repeated tasks are being demanded by a new boss and there’s been a big restructuring, with possible redundancies. At home, they’re feeling isolated from the world. So, we have a mixture of patterns that are in the body, in the mind and they’re emotional, all together with some significant and less significant social aspects.

In the Chinese medicine practitioner’s mind all these phenomena have equal value and would be linked systematically along lines of correspondence according to their underlying functions to produce a pattern differentiation which guides treatment. In the West, the doctor would straight away dismiss lots of these as insignificant, or not even ask the question.

In the coming pages, I’ll describe the systematic correspondences of Five-Phase Theory (Wu Xing) in detail, together with real world examples and how they can help to lead a better and more healthy life.