The five elements refer to gold, wood, water, fire and earth. When our ancestors considered what basic substances the world was made of, they concluded that there were five basic substances, namely, Jin Mu, fire, water and earth. Traditional Chinese medicine uses the five elements to explain various physiological and pathological phenomena, and predicts that future people will use the five elements to calculate people's fate.
At the end of the Western Zhou Dynasty in China, there was a simple materialistic "Five Things Theory". The record of "Five Elements: Water, Fire, Wood, Gold, Earth ..." in Shang Shu Hong Fan began to abstract the attributes of the five elements and deduce them to other things, such as combining them with the five flavors to form a fixed combination form. In the late Warring States period, the idea that the five elements win each other (grams) was put forward, which fixed the order of victory (grams) and fate, formed a mode of contradictory unity between things, and embodied the internal structural relationship of things and the idea of overall grasp. During this period, Neijing applied the theory of five elements to medicine, which played an important role in studying and sorting out a large number of clinical experiences accumulated by the ancients and forming a unique theoretical system of traditional Chinese medicine.
The theory of five elements first appeared in Taoism. It emphasizes the whole concept and aims to describe the movement form and transformation relationship of things. If Yin and Yang are the ancient theory of unity of opposites, the five elements can be said to be the original general system theory. The theory of five elements is China's ancient theory of material composition, which is similar to the western theory of four elements: earth, water, fire and wind. However, in modern times, which emphasizes pure science, this theory, which combines philosophy, science (physics, chemistry, biology), sociology and many other sciences, has not received due attention and research, let alone been absorbed and carried forward.
Each of the five elements represents a different performance. "Straight wood is straight" means that wood has the characteristics of growth and rising; "Fire is said to get angry", which means that fire has the characteristics of heating up; "Soil-made crop wall" means that the soil has the characteristics of planting crops and biochemical substances; "Gold says that it changes with leather" is that gold has the characteristic of killing change; "Moisturizing" means moistening downward. Based on this understanding, the ancients classified all kinds of things in the universe into five elements, so conceptually, they are not wood, fire, earth, gold and water, but a large class of abstract attributes that can be compared with various things and phenomena in characteristics.