水 Water

What this phase represents

Water (水 shuǐ) is the phase of stillness, depth and storage — the quiet, downward-flowing counterpart to fire. It stands for what is yielding yet persistent: water takes the shape of any vessel, settles to the lowest place and yet wears away stone, an image classical writers prized for its soft strength. The character 水 pictures a flowing stream and is the radical (often written 氵) in a vast family of characters for rivers, liquids and washing.

Associations

Water corresponds to winter, the season of rest and inwardness; to the north, the cold quarter; and to the colour black (or the very dark blue of deep water and the night sky). Its qualities are cool, descending and conserving — flowing, pooling, holding still — making water the phase of dormancy and reserve, the low point of the year from which growth will begin again.

Cultural use

In the sexagenary calendar, years ending in 2 or 3 are water years, giving the zodiac its "Water Tiger" or "Water Rabbit". Water is the most celebrated of the phases in painting and poetry — rivers, lakes and rain are constant subjects of landscape art — and the north-and-winter pairing anchors one corner of the directional scheme used in fengshui and the bagua, where flowing water is read as a favourable feature. The character 水 is everywhere in vocabulary about liquids and is a gentle, common element in given names.

In the two cycles

In the generating cycle (生) water nourishes wood — rain and rivers make plants grow — so water produces wood and is itself produced by metal, on whose cool surface it gathers. In the overcoming cycle (克) water quenches fire, so water restrains fire and is in turn restrained by earth, which dams and channels it. It closes the ring at 水→木, looping back to the start.

Water years

Each phase colours two consecutive years of the sexagenary calendar. These are the water years in the 1924–2046 window, with the zodiac sign of each.

Further reading

• Wuxing (five phases) — Wikipedia
• Bagua (eight trigrams) — Wikipedia