Water

Sui, water, is the second of the Godai, the five elements of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, the element of fluidity, adaptability and flow, the formless that takes the shape of its container, associated with emotion, flexibility, and the defensive and yielding that overcomes by adapting. In the gorinto, the five-ring stone pagoda, water is the sphere resting on the cube of earth, its rounded form expressing the element's mobility and completeness.

The five elements came to Japan with esoteric Buddhism, transmitted through China from the Indian doctrine of the great elements, and were systematised especially in the Shingon school founded by Kukai in the ninth century. Miyamoto Musashi named the water chapter of his Book of Five Rings for the adaptable, formless quality a swordsman should cultivate. The Godai are an ancient and continuous part of Japanese Buddhist and martial tradition, and water's attributes of adaptability and flow belong to that inherited scheme rather than to any modern invention.

In the gorinto, the five ring stupa raised across Japanese Buddhist grounds since the Heian period, Sui, water, is carved as the second tier from the base: a sphere set atop the cube of Chi, its curve the opposite of earth's flat solidity. The round form is meant to be read directly, water taking the shape of whatever contains it, formless where earth is fixed, and in the bodily mapping used in Shingon meditation on the gorinto, the sphere of Sui corresponds to the region of the lower abdomen.

The element's associated seed syllable is visualised on that sphere in ritual practice, part of a system in which reciting and picturing each of the five syllables in sequence is held to identify the practitioner's own body with the cosmic structure the stupa represents, a practice distinct from the gorinto's more common function as a grave marker or memorial.

Miyamoto Musashi's seventeenth century Book of Five Rings devotes its Water chapter to technique, adaptability and the mind's ability to take the shape of any circumstance, explicitly likening a well trained fighter's spirit to water's formlessness, a martial reading that runs parallel to, rather than directly out of, the element's older place in Shingon cosmology and funerary architecture.

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