Five Elements

What it is

The five elements (五行, o-haeng / wuxing) — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — are the vocabulary East Asian metaphysics uses to describe balance and change. Every heavenly stem, every earthly branch's hidden stems, and every Chinese zodiac animal carries exactly one of the five, in a yin or yang form. The five are not independent — they sit in a fixed loop of two relationships: a generating cycle (相生, each element feeds the next) and an overcoming cycle (相剋, each element restrains another). See generating & overcoming cycles for the full loop.

Worked example

A Four Pillars chart's eight characters (four stems, four branches) each carry an element, and a reading counts how many of the eight fall into each of the five — a chart with five wood characters and none of the other four is "wood-heavy," and the reading discusses what that concentration means rather than treating all five as evenly present by default.

How Mystica computes it

The free Saju reading tallies the element of all eight characters (four stems and four branches) into a five-element count that always sums to eight. The same five elements reappear in the Chinese zodiac (each animal has one fixed element) and in East-West, where a Western sun sign's element (fire, earth, air, or water) is mapped into this five-element system so it can be read against a Chinese zodiac animal's fixed element — see East-West element mapping for how that conversion works.