YINYANG WUXING. Yinyang (umbral and bright) and wuxing (Five Phases: water, fire, wood, metal, and earth) are the core concepts of traditional Chinese cosmology. This cosmology perceives the universe as an organic whole, in which the spiritual, natural, and human worlds are ordered into a single, infinitely interconnected system. Modern scholars retrospectively call it correlative cosmology, since it is based on "correlative thinking."

Correlative thinking is by no means uniquely Chinese; it has appeared in all civilizations and still underlies the operations of language and serves as one of the building blocks of thought. Chinese cosmology is a distinctive and extraordinary elaboration of such a mode of thinking. It groups phenomena into heuristic or analogistic categories, within and among which relationships are held to be relatively regular and predictable. Eventually, all things in the universe are categorized and correlated, and everything affects everything else. Entities, processes...