Five Elements 五行, Wood 木
Lucky colors of the Wood element
Early Chinese texts place Wood in the east, with the color 青 and the spring
Wood in the Five Elements texts
- Direction
- East
- Season
- Spring
Color in the texts
- Element colorblue-green 青
What the character 青 means
The line 東方青色 in 《素問》 pairs the east with 青 (qīng), a word that covers both green and blue-green. This page says blue-green to keep it apart from 綠 (lǜ), which 《五行大義》 gives to the Earth stem 己.
Court custom in 《禮記·月令》 puts the Son of Heaven in 衣青衣 under 載青旂 in early spring, a robe and a banner of this color. Liu An, in 《淮南子·天文訓》 around 139 BCE, links Wood to 蒼龍.
From Water to Wood to Fire
The creating cycle reads 水生木 and 木生火, so Wood sits between Water and Fire. The overcoming cycle reads 木剋土 and 金剋木: Wood overcomes Earth, and Metal overcomes Wood.
The stems 甲 and 乙
甲 is a yang stem with 青, the same as the element. 乙 is a yin stem with 縹 (piǎo), a pale blue, even though the element itself is blue-green.
- 甲blue-green 青Yang stem, true color
- 乙pale blue 縹Yin stem, mixed color
Stem colors are the colors in the text, not lucky colors of the year.
These colors are traditional belief, not a prediction.