Last week I participated in an online event hosted by The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Hồ Chí Minh City called “The Lives of Ngũ Hành.” This event was part of a larger project that The Factory is carrying out called “Re-Aligning the Cosmos.”
Essentially, what The Factory is doing is searching for some kind of alternative way of framing life on earth that can help move people away from their current tendency to deplete natural resources at an unsustainable rate. In doing so they are holding workshops to talk and think about this issue, and they have artists who are working on projects that are meant to address this issue.
For “The Lives of Ngũ Hành,” Dr. Nguyễn Nam of Fulbright University and I presented on Ngũ Hành (the Five Elements/Phases) and answered questions from participants.
I think that there was some hope before this event that there might be some “wisdom” in the belief in Ngũ Hành that can help direct human actions in a positive direction when it comes to the issue of the environment. In our 2+ hour discussion, however, I don’t think we found such wisdom, at least not in any of the many forms that Ngũ Hành belief has taken to date.
What we did agree on, however, is that belief in Ngũ Hành has had many “lives,” as it has been re-interpreted and re-employed countless times. So perhaps then it can now be re-purposed again to address the problems of the Anthropocene. . .
In any case, I’m providing below a script of more or less what I said. The event was recorded, and a video will eventually become available. I’ll share it here when it does.
Finally, I would like to thank The Factory and my colleague Nguyễn Nam for what I found to be a stimulating event.
What is Ngũ hành (Wuxing 五行)? That is not an easy question to answer, and there are two reasons why it is not easy to answer. The first reason is that historically the idea of Ngũ hành has been used in so many different ways that it is difficult to come up with a simple definition of Ngũ hành.
Ngũ hành is in philosophical ideas, it’s in geomancy (phong thủy), it’s in medicine, it’s in fortune-telling, and it’s in many other fields. This makes it difficult to explain what Ngũ hành is because it appears in so many different contexts.
The second reason why Ngũ hành is difficult to explain is that it means different things to different people.
Here I think it might be helpful to think of Ngũ hành as a kind of religion. For “believers,” Ngũ hành can explain everything. However, there are also “non-believers,” that is, people who do not think that Ngũ hành can explain everything, and these two types of people will describe Ngũ hành differently.
For most of us, I think that when we learn that the term “Ngũ hành” refers to wood (mộc), fire (hỏa), earth (thổ), metal (kim), and water (thủy), we imagine that Ngũ hành must be about these physical things.
That, for instance, is exactly what Western scholars assumed when they first learned about Ngũ hành. As such, they referred to Ngũ hành as the “Five Elements” and compared them with a similar concept in ancient Greece, as the ancient Greeks believed that there were four elements that everything was made of: earth, water, air and fire.
In reality, however, Ngũ hành is not really about the physical objects of wood (mộc), fire (hỏa), earth (thổ), metal (kim), and water (thủy). Instead, it is about processes of change, and these five elements are more like symbols that can help explain different types of change.
One type of change is creation (sinh 生).
If we think of these five elements in terms of creation, then one can say that wood can create fire when it burns; fire produces ashes that become earth; metal (or metal ore) comes from the earth (so we can say that the earth creates metal); metal can transform into a liquid form like water when it is heated; and water can lead to the creation of wood because water is necessary for plants to grow.
Then you also have a type of change that is destructive, where one element “overcomes” (khắc 剋) another.
Here wood can overcome earth by growing out of it; earth can overcome water by blocking it; water can overcome fire by putting it out; fire can overcome metal by melting it; and metal can overcome wood by cutting it.
So the five Ngũ hành elements can be used to understand different types of change. However, in ancient times there was another concept that was used to explain change, and that was the concept of âm and dương (or yin and yang, in Chinese).
This is where things get really complex, but essentially, in ancient times the concepts of âm/dương and Ngũ hành were combined together and became part of a very complex system of thought based around a text known as the Kinh Dịch (Yijing).
This is a topic that is too complex to go into in this talk, however this system of thought that developed in ancient times basically was used to explain how everything in the world functioned.
These ideas were very influential, but they were not the only ideas, and for some people, they were not the most important ideas either. We can see this by looking at something that Lê Quý Đôn wrote in the eighteenth century. Lê Quý Đôn had learned about the Four Elements in the West, and a similar concept of Four Elements in India.
He then compared those with the Ngũ hành and said, “Ngũ hành talks about daily matters. The Four Elements [of India and the West] talk about ‘the whole reality and its grand function’ (toàn thể đại dụng 全體大用).”
Ngũ hành là nói sự thường dùng hàng ngày của người ta, tứ hành [của Ấn Độ và phương Tây] là nói toàn thể đại dụng.
為中國之學者，曰五行，金木水火土；為天竺之學者，曰四行，地水火風；為西洋之學者，曰四行，火氣水土。五行舉人生日用言之也。四行舉其全體大用者言之也。
This expression, ‘the whole reality and its grand function’ (toàn thể đại dụng 全體大用), is a Confucian concept. It’s too complex to explain here, but what is important for us here, is to see that it was something that Lê Quý Đôn felt was very important.
By contrast, he did not see Ngũ hành as very important. It was just something that “talks about daily matters.”
So this shows a kind of hierarchy of knowledge. For someone like Lê Quý Đôn, certain Confucian ideas were higher in that hierarchy than Ngũ hành.
Why would he think that way? I think it is because Ngũ hành was something that was common to see people using in their everyday lives, such as when they looked at a calendar to see what they could and could not do on that day.
This image below is from a calendar from 1932, but as you all know, such calendars still exist today, and something like this probably existed in Lê Quý Đôn’s time.
In such a calendar, one of the five Ngũ hành elements is associated with each day, and depending on the Ngũ hành element that was associated with a given day there were certain things that people could or could not do.
Ngũ hành and dates were also very important when it came to getting married, as a Ngũ hành element was associated with each year, and when people planned a marriage, the Ngũ hành element of the man and women’s birth year was compared to see if the marriage would be successful or not. If it was not, then the marriage could be cancelled.
These are the kinds of “daily matters” (sự thường dùng hàng ngày của người ta) that Lê Quý Đôn was referring to.
Another place where one could find Ngũ hành at a daily level in in the past was in popular religion.
As the members of the audience undoubtedly know, there is a tradition in Vietnam of worshipping the Trần dynasty general, Trần Hưng Đạo. What I have on the screen here is a document that comes from that tradition. It dates from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and it was supposedly written by the spirit of Phạm Ngũ Lão, one of Trần Hựng Đạo’s assistants.
I have here an earlier Hán version and a later quốc ngữ version. This document praises some spirits called the “tiger god officials of the five directions” (ngũ phương hổ thần quan). It mentions Ngũ hành at the beginning, and then mentions many other phenomena or concepts that are based on the number “5”: the five directions (ngũ phương), the five human relationships (ngũ luân), the five constants (ngũ thường), and others.
What was the purpose of this document? The version that is written in Hán, has instructions at the end, which say that a person was supposed to recite this text 5 times on certain days in the lunar calendar, and that if the person could recite it all in at one time without stopping, that doing so would be effective or would bring good luck.
So in this context, Ngu hành is one element in a sacred system of elements that in this case are all based on the number “5.” And simply reciting all of these elements together was believed to bring some kind of benefit to the person who did so.
What is more, this sacred system of elements included much more than Ngũ hành. This is an image from the book that contains the text from the spirit of Phạm Ngũ Lão. In this image we can see Ngũ hành in the center together with many other elements. First, there are the names of the Jade Emperor (Ngọc Hoàng), the Buddha (Phật Thích Ca Mâu Ni ), Amitabha (A Di Đà Phật), Guanyin (Quan Âm), and Trần Hưng Đạo. Then there are the Eight Trigrams (bát quái) from the Yijing (Kinh Dịch). Then there are the names of the sun, moon and stars. And finally, there are sacred Buddhist symbols.
Taken together, we can see that to worshippers of Trần Hựng Đạo in the early 20th century, the Ngũ Hành were part of a holistic system of sacred powers.
In the early twentieth century, a big change came to not only this system of thought but to the Confucian worldview of people like Lê Quý Đôn as well. The arrival of Westerners and their establishment of colonial control over parts of Asia led to a lot of questioning.
As Asian intellectuals looked at the technological power of Western countries, and as they started to learn about Western societies, they became aware that Westerners viewed the world in very different ways than they did, and this led some people to start to argue that Western “science” (khoa học) was a superior form of knowledge.
Other people, however, disagreed and continued to argue that âm/dương, Ngũ hành and the Kinh Dịch could explain everything, and that Western science was in no way superior to the ideas of âm/dương, Ngũ hành and the Kinh Dịch.
So there were big debates about this in Vietnam in the early twentieth, but under French colonial rule, a new generation of people were educated in more Western ways and such people did not see Ngũ hành as important. We can see this in the writings of historian Đào Duy Anh.
In the 1930s Đào Duy Anh wrote a book called An Outline of Vietnamese Culture (Văn hóa Việt Nam sở cương). In this book, Đào Duy Anh tried to explain Vietnamese culture from a “scientific” perspective. In doing so, he viewed Ngũ hành as a form of “superstition,” and referred to it only in talking about things like fortune telling.
Đào Duy Anh and Lê Quý Đôn were therefore very similar. They both saw a hierarchy of knowledge, and in that hierarchy, they both placed Ngũ hành at a low level in that hierarchy.
Where these two men differed, was in what they saw as at the top of that hierarchy of knowledge. To Lê Quý Đôn, Confucian philosophy was the most important type of knowledge, whereas to Đào Duy Anh, Western science was the most important form of knowledge.
If we could bring Lê Quý Đôn and Đào Duy Anh back to life, it would be interesting to see what they think of Vietnam today. That Ngũ hành is still a part of things like fortune-telling and geomancy (phong thủy), would probably not surprise them.
What would surprise them, however, would be to see how Ngũ hành is used to explain Vietnamese culture in books like scholar Trần Ngọc Thêm’s The Foundation of Vietnamese Culture (Cơ sở văn hóa Việt Nam)
The Foundation of Vietnamese Culture (Cơ sở văn hóa Việt Nam) is a textbook that has been widely used in introductory courses in Vietnamese universities since the 1990s. It tries to show that basically everything about Vietnamese culture can be explained in terms of âm and dương and Ngũ hành.
However, the Ngũ hành in this book is not the same as the Ngũ hành that we find in the past. This is not the Ngũ hành that is part of a sacred religious system like it was to the followers of Trần Hưng Đạo, and it is not the Ngũ hành of everyday life that Đào Duy Anh saw as “superstitious”.
Instead, it is a very scientific and mathematical form of Ngũ hành that is used to talk about modern “Western” concepts like “race” (chủng tộc).
So what is Ngũ hành? Well, that depends. . . It depends on whether one is a believer or a non-believer. And it depends on whether one is referring to Ngũ hành as part of a holistic system of thought that tries to explain everything in the world, or if one is referring to Ngũ hành as something that can help people make practical decisions about things like who to marry. And it depends on whether one is talking about Ngũ hành before Vietnamese knew about Western science, or Ngũ hành after Vietnamese came to know about Western science.
In other words, there are many different Ngũ hànhs, as Ngũ hành has had many different lives, and I’m sure that in the future it will have many more lives as well.
