Ordering Time and Space: Chinese Correspondence Arts and Their Cousins

Wu Xing is the base layer here: five phases, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, held in a generating order and an overcoming order. The scheme describes stages of a process rather than substances, which is why phase is a better English word than element.

The I Ching adds the other great axis of change. Its sixty-four hexagrams are stacks of six broken or unbroken lines built from eight trigrams, and a reading uses changing lines to turn one hexagram into a second, mapping a present situation and its tendency.

Chinese astrology puts the correspondences to work on a life. The year, month, day and hour of birth are matched to twelve animal signs and the five agents, and the animals pair with the ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches in a sixty-year cycle.

Ba Zi is the professional core of that astrology. Four pillars give eight characters, each pairing a Heavenly Stem with an Earthly Branch, and the reading weighs the balance of the five agents and times fortune against cycles of luck. Its year turns in early February with the solar terms, not at lunar new year.

Feng Shui carries the same cosmology into space. It arranges homes, graves and gardens in relation to landscape, direction and the five elements so as to harmonise with the flow of qi, using tools such as the compass and the bagua map.

Xuan Kong Fei Xing, or Flying Star, adds time to direction. Nine numbers are flown through a three by three grid in a fixed order, so a building gets a different chart depending on when it was built and which way it faces, within a cycle of nine twenty-year periods.

Onmyodo shows the system travelling. Japanese court diviners and calendar-officials used imported yin and yang and five phases to judge lucky and unlucky days and directions, including the practice of katatagae, avoiding travel toward an unlucky quarter.

Vastu Shastra closes the path with an Indian counterpart that is independent in its sources. Its rules for siting and layout rest on the vastu purusha mandala, a grid laid over a site, and on Sanskrit treatises such as the Manasara and Mayamata.