Wood Element in the Chinese Zodiac

Wood among the five phases

Wood is one of the five terms of wuxing. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains wuxing (“five processes” or “five phases”) as a fivefold scheme found throughout traditional Chinese thought, and names the five as wood (mu), fire, earth, metal and water.

“Element” is one translation of wuxing among many. An Encyclopedia of Religion entry on Encyclopedia.com says wuxing was formerly translated as Five Elements, and that “Five Phases” has gained increasing acceptance.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the Shujing’s Hong Fan chapter, in which each element has its nature more fully explained: wood bends and straightens (qu zhi). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy names wood, earth, fire, water and metal, known as the five phases, among the most common categories, and gives relational examples: to be yin is to have a relationship to something that is yang, and to be wood-like is to stand in certain relationships to fire, metal, earth and water.

Wood in the cycles

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says Han thinkers used the system to account for an ordered sequence or cycle of change. In the mutual production series, wood produced fire and water produced wood. In the mutual conquest series, wood conquered earth and metal conquered wood.

The Encyclopedia of Religion entry gives an image for each step that involves wood: wood generates fire (burning), water generates wood (irrigation), metal conquers wood (chopping) and wood conquers earth (plowing). It also says Zou Yan and his followers used the conquest cycle for a theory of dynastic transmission, in which a dynasty ruled by the power of the wood phase would be conquered by a house associated with metal.

What the sources tie to Wood

The Encyclopedia of Religion entry lists wood with Jupiter, green, spring, east and a sour taste. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy correlates wood with blue-green, the spring season, the direction east and the musical note jue.

According to the lore of Chinese astrology, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy relays it, a person born under the wood sign is said to be strong and self-reliant, with health governed by the condition of the liver and gallbladder, and to favor and prosper under blue and green.

Wood in the sixty-year cycle

A University of Sydney article says each year corresponds to one of five elements, wood among them, and that combining the twelve animals with the five elements forms a sixty-year cycle. National Geographic says the animal changes every year while the element only rotates every two years, and gives the Wood Dragon and the Wood Snake as examples. It adds that each animal and element pairing occurs only once every sixty years.