Heaven Has Six Qi, Earth Has Six Tastes, Humans Have Emotions: How Three Inputs Enter One System

One of the most structurally striking passages in “Tongtian” places three apparently unrelated things side by side: the qi of Heaven, the tastes of Earth, and the intentions-emotions of human beings.

The text says:

The Five Qi of Heaven—wind, heat, dampness, fire, dryness, and cold—are the manifestations of qi transformation. The Five Tastes of Earth—sour, bitter, sweet, bland, pungent, and salty—are the substances of qi transformation. The Five Intentions of humans—joy, anger, grief, thought, fear, and fright—are the ordering principles of qi transformation.

A textual phenomenon must first be preserved faithfully: although the passage calls these “Five Qi,” “Five Tastes,” and “Five Intentions,” it actually lists six items in each case. This article follows the received text and does not delete or rename items merely to force numerical neatness.

Why can these three classes be placed at the same level?

Wind, heat, dampness, fire, dryness, and cold are environmental states. Sour, bitter, sweet, bland, pungent, and salty are taste qualities of substances entering the body. Joy, anger, grief, thought, fear, and fright are human emotional states. If classified only by material category, there is no reason to put them together.

The Mirror Classic juxtaposes them because it is concerned with something else: after entering the human system, all of them can alter the direction, strength, ascent-descent, entry-exit, and zang-fu essence-qi of qi transformation.

In other words, their common classificatory basis is not “what substance are they?” but “how do they change bodily state?”

From nouns to an input-response model

The three can first be understood as three classes of input:

• Heavenly qi: enters through breathing, cold-heat, and the external environment;
• Earthly tastes: enter through food and drink;
• Human emotions: alter qi dynamics and the distribution of essence-qi through internal emotional activity.

After entering, these inputs do not map one-to-one onto a single organ. They must pass through relations such as Zhuan, Sheng, Jian, Bing, Tong, and He before concrete outcomes arise.

This is why “Tongtian” immediately continues: “The transformations of qi—Zhuan, Sheng, Jian, Bing, Tong, and He—are the measures of qi transformation.”

Heaven–Human unity becomes more concrete here

The phrase “unity of Heaven and human beings” can easily be taken as a grand philosophical symbol. Here, however, the Mirror Classic offers a more operational version:

external climate, ingested taste, and internal emotion arise from different sources, yet once they enter the human system they must all pass through the same relational grammar of qi transformation.

What therefore deserves investigation is not only “what does wind belong to?” or “what does sour belong to?” but how the qi-transformational network shifts when the same person receives different combinations of input at different times.

The next article examines the six relational terms at the center of this common grammar: Zhuan, Sheng, Jian, Bing, Tong, and He.