Five Elements Database

5 entries. Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water — the five phases, what each one describes, and how they generate and overcome one another.

Wu Xing is usually translated as the five elements, and the translation misleads slightly: these are phases of activity rather than substances. Wood is growth and outward movement, Fire is peak and dispersal, Metal is contraction and definition, Water is storage and descent, and Earth is transition and the centre that the other four move around. Nothing here is a material you can hold, which is why a chart can be heavy in Metal without anyone carrying more metal than usual.

Two cycles organise them. The generating cycle runs Wood → Fire → Earth → Metal → Water → Wood, and describes what feeds what. The overcoming cycle runs Wood → Earth → Water → Fire → Metal → Wood, and describes what restrains what. Learning both by heart takes about ten minutes, and every other system on this site assumes both are already known.

This library is also the junction point of the site. Every dream symbol and every cultural symbol carries an element field, so each entry here has hundreds of inbound paths from those two libraries, and each of them in turn reaches toward the BaZi vocabulary. If only one page here gets read, Wood and Water are the two that unlock the most elsewhere.

Balance is a property of a full chart, not of a single entry. Reading one phase alone and drawing conclusions from it is the most common misuse of this system — the five only mean something relative to each other. Real charts can be calculated free with the

BaZi calculator, and the compatibility tool shows how the branch relationships behind the zodiac are worked out.

The five elements are a descriptive system, not a diagnosis. Balance is read from a full chart, and no entry here should be read as advice about health, money or relationships.