Why so many cultures counted up to just a few

There is a historical fact worth pausing over, because it is rarely noticed.

Three civilisations with no direct contact, in different eras, arrived at the same structure: a small number of ways of being, a key for placing each person, and advice that depends on it.

The three systems

India counts three principles — Vata, Pitta, Kapha — described in the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, with one decisive detail: the constitution is fixed at birth and does not change.

China counts five movements — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water — in the Huangdi Neijing Su Wen, with relationships between them: each nourishes one and tempers another.

The West counts four temperaments, inherited from Hippocrates and systematised by Galen in the second century, which governed thinking about the body until the eighteenth century.

What not to conclude from this

That the convergence proves the truth. It proves nothing at all: three independent errors can resemble one another.

And it should be added that the physiology of the three systems is wrong. The humours do not exist; the correspondences between organs and elements are not anatomical facts.

This framework interests us as a cultural and traditional framework, and it is indeed on that basis that UNESCO inscribed acupuncture and moxibustion, which belong to it, on the list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2010. A recognition of heritage, not of health.

What to conclude from it

Something else, and something sturdier.

Three civilisations observed people for centuries, and all three concluded that it was necessary to classify them before advising them on anything.

That conclusion does not depend on physiology. It comes from observing a stubborn fact: the same remedy does not produce the same effect on everyone, and the variation is not random — it follows families.

That is the observation that survived, and it is the one missing from today’s vocabulary.

The number

Why three, four, or five? No deep reason.

A system with too few categories confuses different logics. A system with too many categories cannot be passed on or learned. Between three and five lies the zone where a framework remains usable by practitioners and fine enough to distinguish.

Five allows something that three does not: describing relationships. Each register nourishes one and tempers another, which explains why an imbalance in one place shows up elsewhere.

The common limit

None of the three had an objective key.

All of them read belonging from what is visible: physical constitution, behaviour, complexion, pulse, response to a questionnaire. But what is visible varies, and a belonging that is supposed to be fixed, read from variable data, produces readings that contradict one another.

That was the only point to correct — not the framework, but the data one starts from.