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).
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