Wind

Fu, wind or air, is the fourth of the Godai, the five elements of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, the element of movement, breath and expansion, the moving air, associated with growth, freedom, and the mind's liberty and openness, and with things that spread and travel. In the gorinto, the five-ring stone pagoda, wind is the crescent or half-moon form set above the pyramid of fire, near the top of the monument, expressing the element's lightness and its nearness to the formless void above.

The five elements reached Japan through the esoteric Buddhist transmission from India, mediated by China, and were systematised in the Shingon school of Kukai. Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings names its wind chapter for the study of other schools and traditions, the wider air beyond one's own. The Godai are an ancient and continuous part of Japanese Buddhist and martial culture, and wind's attributes of movement and expansion belong to that inherited elemental scheme rather than to any modern system.

In the gorinto, the five ring stupa erected across Japanese Buddhist grounds since the Heian period, Fu, wind, is carved as the fourth tier: a crescent or half moon shape set above the triangle of Ka, open and gestural where the lower three tiers are closed solids. In the bodily mapping used in Shingon meditation on the gorinto, the crescent of Fu corresponds to the region of the face and throat, the seat of breath.

The seed syllable associated with Fu is visualised on that crescent form as part of a ritual sequence uniting the practitioner's body with the five tiered cosmos the gorinto represents, a meditative use distinct from the structure's ordinary role as a memorial raised over a grave.

Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings uses its Wind chapter, unusually, to survey and critique rival schools of swordsmanship rather than to describe his own method directly, a use of the element as breadth of view and openness to what other approaches offer, before circling back to his own school in the book's final, void, chapter. The reading fits Fu's character as the element of movement, expansion and the mind's liberty, turned here toward comparison rather than combat.

Musashi's choice of subject for the Wind chapter, other schools rather than his own, mirrors the element's older association with breath and open air more than with any fixed technique: wind by nature moves through and around whatever it encounters rather than settling into one form, and Musashi treats a survey of rival methods as the mind's equivalent of that same unobstructed movement across a field it does not claim to own.

Sources The Symbolism of the StupaAdrian Snodgrass with A Book of Five RingsMiyamoto Musashi, translated by Victor Harris