[Buddha-l] five elements

[Kate]

Hi Richard,

> No, it's not a basic question at all. I have no idea what the answer to
> your question is. I was taken by surprise by it, because it had never
> occurred to me that Buddhist scholastics had busied themselves with
> associating the five basic elements with colours.

Well, I don't know about Budhist scholastics, but certainly some Buddhist
sects do, and not only colours but shapes, animals, directions etc - the
primary examples of colours and shapes associated with elements being of
course mandalas and stupas.

 >That sounds very
> Chinese to me. Everything comes in fives for the Chinese, and all sorts
> of associations are made between the groups of five. The five vital
> organs, the five spices, the five fingers of the left hand, the five
> cardinal directions, the fifty ways to leave your lover....

The traditional Chinese method is Daoist and uses different elements and
views them in a different way.  The Chinese Buddhist elements are the same
as the Indian Buddhist elements, though different mikkyo texts allot
different colours (or rather a different order of colours) to the elements.
All systems contain the primary colours of yellow, blue and red.  The other
two colours are usually black and white, but some use green, gold or
transparent instead.

> All this reminds me of an observation that Edward Conze made once about
> abhidharma. Monks did not have enough to do, he said, so they kept
> themselves busy by putting every teaching into a neat category and then
> drawing an infinite number of meaningless correlations between one
> category and another. Better to do that, I guess, than starting wars.

Not "meaningless".  The Elements and their associated properties and symbols
form a very useful tool to make a complex subject easier to understand, and
to clarify many levels of doctrine by utilizing very simple and experiential
principles. Once a Buddhist student understood the Doctrine of Elements, it
was symbolically represented in special patterns that described the
inter-relationship between its different constituent parts and forces.
These special patterns were eventually called mandalas.  In mikkyo sects, a
mandala takes the teachings of a doctrine and presents them in a physical
form, either as a picture, sound, shapes, movement etc. or any combination
of these.  By doing this,  highly technical and intricate Buddhist Mikkyo
teachings could be conveyed in simplified forms through the medium of the
Mandala, preserving the information for future generations.

The elements along with their respective colours and other qualities formed
the subject of the most basic meditations used within early Buddhism to
undover the nature of subjective and objective reality.

Regards
Kate