地水火風空 chi sui ka fū kū Five Elements

The five are the 五大 (godai), the five great elements of Indian and Buddhist physics, of which everything is made; the first four are the old four, and the fifth, 空, was added to them as the place in which matter exists. It is space, not the sky the character means in ordinary Japanese, and not the Buddhist emptiness written with the same character.

The readings given here are the Sino-Japanese ones; the everyday readings mizu, hi, kaze and sora are the characters' and not the doctrine's. The five-ring stupa, a familiar Japanese grave marker, is the five stacked from the earth up.

空 is void in a 1974 English translation of Musashi and space to the doctrine, and the five here carry both.

The five are a Buddhist doctrine from India; the earliest Japanese example of their name, 五大, that the 日本国語大辞典 gives is Kūkai's dedication of 821, and in 1645 Miyamoto Musashi named the five scrolls of his treatise on strategy for them.

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