This section gathers the cosmological and medical systems of China and East Asia: the five phases of wu xing (wood, fire, earth, metal and water), the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches of the sexagenary cycle, the twenty-four solar terms of the agricultural year, the eight trigrams and their sixty-four combinations, the twenty-eight lunar mansions (xiu), the meridians of Chinese medicine, and the mudras and godai of East Asian Buddhism.
What unifies them is a way of thinking in terms of correspondence and phase rather than substance: the world is read as patterns of relationship (generating and overcoming, yin and yang, the turning of cycles), into which times, directions, organs, colours and events can all be sorted.