Earth

The Godai, the "five greats", are the five elements of Japanese esoteric thought, inherited from the Buddhist mahabhuta of India by way of China and given a distinctive form in the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism. Chi, earth, is the first and densest, the element of solidity, stability and resistance, the ground, the body, all that has fixed form and cannot easily be moved, and by extension steadiness, stubbornness and confidence. In the five-element pagoda, the gorinto, that marks graves and reliquaries across Japan, earth is the lowest, cubic stone at the base, supporting the sphere, pyramid, crescent and jewel above it.

The scheme is also famous from Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings of the seventeenth century, whose chapters are named for the five. The Godai are an old and living part of Japanese Buddhist and cultural tradition, descending through the esoteric Buddhist transmission rather than being a modern construction, and earth is their foundation in both the literal and the symbolic sense.

The Godai find their best known physical form in the gorinto, the five ring or five element stupa built across Japanese Buddhist cemeteries and temple grounds from the Heian period onward. Each gorinto stacks five distinct shapes, one for each of the five, and Chi, earth, is carved as the lowest and heaviest: a plain cube, squat and load bearing, the base the other four rest upon. The shape is a direct statement of the element's character, solidity that supports rather than moves.

Earth's associated seed syllable in Shingon ritual is chanted and visualised in meditation on the gorinto form, part of a practice in which the practitioner identifies the layered stupa with the practitioner's own body, the cube of Chi corresponding to the region from the hips down. This bodily mapping is distinct from the architectural gorinto itself, which memorialises the dead by building the whole cosmos, in miniature, over a grave.

The swordsman and strategist Miyamoto Musashi organised his seventeenth century treatise, the Book of Five Rings, around the Godai, devoting a chapter each to Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Void as approaches to combat and to life; his Earth chapter concerns groundwork, foundation and the overall orientation of a school of strategy, a martial reading of the same stability the element carries in its ritual and funerary forms.

Sources The Symbolism of the StupaAdrian Snodgrass with A Book of Five RingsMiyamoto Musashi, translated by Victor Harris