The crosswalk

One wheel, many names

Almost every culture named the elements. They do not agree. Fire, Water, and Earth turn up nearly everywhere; Wood and Metal are China's alone; Air and Ether belong to Greece and India. This page lines them up and, more usefully, marks exactly where the seams are.

Tap a phase

The elements, system by system

Start from the Chinese phase you know and follow it sideways. Watch which columns hold, and which say "approx."

Chinese phase 五行GreekIndian mahābhūtaChakraBījaAyurvedic dosha
These are interpretive bridges, not equivalences. The chakra and dosha rows are yogic correspondences laid beside Wu Xing as a thinking aid. No tradition ever taught that Metal "is" Ether. Where a mapping is a stretch, the table says so.

The systems themselves

Four ways to count the world

🜂🜁🜄🜃

The Greek four

Empedocles named four roots: fire, air, water, and earth. Aristotle set them from two pairs of qualities: hot or cold, wet or dry. A fifth, aether, was the incorruptible stuff of the heavens.

पञ्च

Pancha mahābhūta

India's five great elements: Prithvi (earth), Jala (water), Agni (fire), Vayu (air), Akasha (ether/space). They combine into the three doshas that Ayurveda reads in body and mind.

五大

The Japanese Godai

Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void (Ku). The Buddhist five, carried into Japan. The Void is not "nothing" but the open space in which the others can arise.

五行

The Chinese five phases

Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. The only system built on motion, with two cycles that say how the phases feed and check each other. This is the spine this hub turns on.

Where the wheel climbs the body

The doors this hub opens next

In yoga, the first five chakras carry the five elements up the spine: earth at the root, ether at the throat. That is where the Chakra and Yoga hubs attach to this one.