pontios
Well-known member
I just received this from a Chinese friend (and somewhat of an authority) ...
"The earliest references to the visible planets was "wu xing," lit. “five stars” or better “five asters,” since anything in the heavens was called a “star” regardless of whether it moved or not, including comets and meteors. Then the term “five wefts” wu wei was introduced. Meridians were “warp,” so the analogy was with weaving, “weft" referring to the shuttles that passed back and forth through the longitudinal warp trailing differently colored threads behind them.
"Five Pacers" wu bu (lit. “five paces”) was the latest term to emerge. It probably just refers to their stately progress "back and forth" at different rates. I suspect it was a term coined by Daoists because they also had a ritual involving pacing out the pattern formed by the seven stars of the Big Dipper, along with an invocation, which procedure was thought to instill spiritual energy/power on the adept brought down from the Dipper at the apex of the heavens. This ritual was called the Pace of Yu, Yu bu or “Yu’s paces/steps” which is a reference to a quasi legendary culture hero whose exploratory march through the ancient five provinces and quelling of a flood to make the land habitable made him a hero.
None of the terms applies to groupings of the planets, usually called wu xing ju or wu xing huiju, sometimes wu xing cuoxing, the latter meaning "the five planets criss-crossed," which refers to their switching horizons and time of appearance during a brief period as the sun marched through an alignment of the five, in which case they could be considerably farther apart that in a ju “gathering."
"The earliest references to the visible planets was "wu xing," lit. “five stars” or better “five asters,” since anything in the heavens was called a “star” regardless of whether it moved or not, including comets and meteors. Then the term “five wefts” wu wei was introduced. Meridians were “warp,” so the analogy was with weaving, “weft" referring to the shuttles that passed back and forth through the longitudinal warp trailing differently colored threads behind them.
"Five Pacers" wu bu (lit. “five paces”) was the latest term to emerge. It probably just refers to their stately progress "back and forth" at different rates. I suspect it was a term coined by Daoists because they also had a ritual involving pacing out the pattern formed by the seven stars of the Big Dipper, along with an invocation, which procedure was thought to instill spiritual energy/power on the adept brought down from the Dipper at the apex of the heavens. This ritual was called the Pace of Yu, Yu bu or “Yu’s paces/steps” which is a reference to a quasi legendary culture hero whose exploratory march through the ancient five provinces and quelling of a flood to make the land habitable made him a hero.
None of the terms applies to groupings of the planets, usually called wu xing ju or wu xing huiju, sometimes wu xing cuoxing, the latter meaning "the five planets criss-crossed," which refers to their switching horizons and time of appearance during a brief period as the sun marched through an alignment of the five, in which case they could be considerably farther apart that in a ju “gathering."
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