The five fists of xingyiquan are mapped onto the five phases one to one: splitting to metal, drilling to water, crushing to wood, pounding to fire and crossing to earth. The mapping is not a label attached to a finished technique. The generating and overcoming cycles that bind the five phases together are used to explain how one fist answers another, so that a practitioner is taught the relations between techniques in the vocabulary of a cosmological scheme.
That is why a fighting art belongs in an atlas of religion. The five phases organise Chinese medicine, divination, music and the calendar, and xingyiquan is the clearest surviving case of the same scheme applied to a body practice, worked out in detail rather than gestured at. The art explains itself in these terms; it does not have the terms applied to it from outside.
Alongside the five fists stand the twelve animal forms, which vary somewhat between branches and are organised by resemblance and behaviour rather than by the phases. The two schemes coexist without being reduced to one another, which is characteristic of Chinese classificatory practice generally: more than one grid can be laid over the same material, and the art holds both.