Eastern Systems

This section gathers the cosmological and medical systems of China and East Asia: the five phases of wu xing (wood, fire, earth, metal and water), the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches of the sexagenary cycle, the twenty-four solar terms of the agricultural year, the eight trigrams and their sixty-four combinations, the twenty-eight lunar mansions (xiu), the meridians of Chinese medicine, and the mudras and godai of East Asian Buddhism.

What unifies them is a way of thinking in terms of correspondence and phase rather than substance: the world is read as patterns of relationship (generating and overcoming, yin and yang, the turning of cycles), into which times, directions, organs, colours and events can all be sorted.

These systems are not purely theoretical. The stems and branches number years, months, days and hours and underlie the Chinese zodiac; the solar terms schedule planting and harvest; the meridians organise acupuncture and the pulse; the trigrams and hexagrams are consulted for guidance. The material reaches from the oldest strata of the Chinese canon to systems carried into Japan and Korea, where the godai and the mudras of Shingon and other schools took their own form.

The I Ching itself, whose hexagrams these trigrams build, sits at the border of this section and Tarot, Runes & Number, since it is at once a cosmology and a method of divination.