I am slowly making my way through Mark Edward Lewis's The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007) and I have a question regarding what Mark Edward Lewis writes as he identifies as the Five Phases Theory (FPT). He writes in relation to the first King of Qin in his effort to make himself emperor:
This new vision of the ruler was also articulated in a philosophical work sponsored by the king of Qin's first chief minister, Lü Buwei. This text, the Springs and Autumn of Master Lü (Lü shi chun qiu), was structured according to the calendar, and it argued that the ruler followed the pattern of Heaven. In a closely associated move, the First Emperor claimed that a cosmic cycle, the so-called Five Phases Cycle, brought about his rise to power and made it an inevitable part of the divine plan. (pg. 52)
He also "elaborates" on the role of the FPT when it came to the Han:
Finally the Han court followed the Qin's adoption of the Five Phases Theory, claiming their rise to power signaled the ascent of a new cosmic phase. This theory was prefigured in the story that when Gaozu, son of the Red God, first rebelled against Qin he slew a great serpent that turned out to be the son of of the White God. The succession of the god of one color by another marked the conquest of one phase by it's inheritor. pg 62.
Now unfortunately for me, a person whose real first introduction to anything that has to do with Chinese culture before the ascent of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 (anything before that, it's completely non-existent) is this book, I am struggling to understand what he means by the FPT. Prof. Lewis doesn't spend any time explaining what the FPT is beyond what he writes in the two passages that I have cited. I Have looked online for clarification, and the closest thing I can hope to be that is synonymous with the FPT, is the idea of Wu Xing (五行). When Prof. Lewis is talking about the FPT, is he talking about Wu Xing? And if not, what is the FPT?
Thank you for your time. Also as much as this dive of this series is very informative and pretty easy to understand, I do struggle to understand some bits, especially when it comes to early Chinese religion and mythology. When he writes about the Red God and White God, I am left clueless. Would anyone suggest any good texts that help expound the intricacies of early Chinese religion that can help supplement my reading of this series?
You're correct, "five phases" is an alternative and more literal translation of wu xing, which is also translated as "five elements". The term "five phases" comes from the German historian Manfred Porkert's "five evolutive phases". Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen dropped the "evolutive" because of its Darwinian connotations and popularized "five phases" as a translation of wu xing in the Science and Civilisation of China. They explain their reasoning for preferring "five phases" over "five elements" in "Problems of translation and modernisation of ancient Chinese technical terms", Annals of Science 32, no. 5 (1975), 491-502 on 497.
By common consent for many decades, perhaps more than a century, the Chinese doctrine of wu hsing has been translated as that of the ' five elements'. This has long been recognised as unsatisfactory. As we said in Science and Civilisation in China, the term ' element ' has never been adequate for hsing, the very etymology of which had from the beginning the implication of movement. We also said that Chinese thought rather characteristically avoided substance and clung to relation. The conception of the elements was not so much one of a series of five sorts of fundamental matter (particles do not come into the question) as of five sorts of fundamental processes.
And their reasoning for excluding "evolutive" in Porkert's "five evolutive phases":
We can therefore only give "two cheers" to Porkert's 'five evolutive phases', partly because it excludes matter altogether and partly because the word 'evolutive' has too strong undertones of evolution in the Darwinian sense, which is not wanted here at all, or not primarily.
The translation of xing as phase was also adopted by Nathan Sivin in "Chinese Alchemy and the Manipulation of Time", Isis 67, no. 4 (1976), 512-526 on 515. He believed that "phase" was an apt way of describing both wu xing and the notion of yin and yang:
Yin and yang could also be used to distinguish aspects of configurations in space-down and up, back and front, inside and outside. Here too the Oxford English Dictionary sense 2 of "phase" ("any one aspect of a thing of varying aspects; a state or stage of change or development" is not out of place; yin and yang were almost always applied to spatial relations that are either changing or in dynamic equilibrium. The Five Phases (wu hsing, often mistranslated as Five Elements) were a very closely analogous division of cycles or configurations into five functionally distinct parts (not, in scientific explanations, into five types of ultimate constituents).
And since Needham and Sivin were two of the most foremost historians on Chinese science and technology, it's no surprise that other sinologists such as Mark Edward Lewis followed suit.
As for recommendations on the history of Chinese religion, I would suggest taking a look at the /r/AskHistorians book list.