The Number Four

Where three tells a story, four describes a space. It is the number of the four directions, the four winds and the four corners of the earth, and many traditions used it to say that the world is stable, complete and well ordered. Temples, cities and gardens were laid out on four sides, and teachings were arranged in fours to show that they covered everything that mattered.

Buddhism begins with four. In his first sermon, tradition holds, the Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths: that life involves suffering, that suffering arises from craving, that it can end, and that there is a path to its ending. The story of his life also turns on four sights. The young prince, kept inside his palace, saw for the first time an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering holy man, and left home to seek a way beyond old age and death. Buddhist meditation cultivates four ‘immeasurable’ states: loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.

Hindu tradition arranges a whole life in fours. Classical law books describe four stages (ashramas): the celibate student, the householder raising a family, the forest dweller who withdraws from worldly affairs, and the renunciant who gives up all ties. They also name four aims of life: duty (dharmadharma Duty, law and the right order of things. For Hindus it is the moral order and one’s duties in life; for Buddhists, the teaching of the Buddha. Glossary), wealth, pleasure and liberation (mokshamoksha Liberation from the cycle of rebirth, the highest goal of life in Hinduism and Jainism. Glossary). There are four Vedas, four ages of the world, of which the present one is the darkest, and the creator Brahma is shown with four faces looking in the four directions.

Christianity has four Gospels, and very early it gave the number meaning. Around 180 CE Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, argued that there could be neither more nor fewer than four, just as there are four zones of the world and four principal winds. He linked them to the four living creatures that the prophet Ezekiel saw around God’s throne, each with the face of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle, and which reappear in the Book of Revelation. Later writers, above all Jerome, fixed the pairing that became standard in Christian art: the man for Matthew, the lion for Mark, the ox for Luke and the eagle for John.

The importance of four almost certainly begins with orientation. Anyone watching the sky can find east, where the sun rises, and west, where it sets, and the line between them gives north and south. Many ancient cultures aligned their temples and tombs to these directions and gave each a guardian. In Egypt the four sons of Horus protected the organs of the dead in four canopic jars. Chinese tradition assigned the four directions to four animals, a dragon in the east, a tiger in the west, a bird in the south and a tortoise in the north.

The year offered a second fourfold pattern. In temperate lands it divides into four seasons, turning at two solstices and two equinoxes. Greek thinkers drew on such patterns when they explained the world. Empedocles taught that all things are mixtures of four roots, earth, water, air and fire, joined by love and separated by strife. Aristotle adopted the four elements and gave each two qualities, hot or cold and wet or dry, and Greek medicine matched them with four humours of the body. This scheme dominated European, Christian and Islamic science until early modern times.

Sacred geography used the same number. Genesis describes a river flowing out of Eden and dividing into four. The Qur’an speaks of rivers in paradise of water, milk, wine and honey, and Persian and Mughal gardens, divided into four by water channels, echo that picture; the gardens of the Taj Mahal are a famous example. In Judaism the divine name is written with four Hebrew letters, YHWH, which observant Jews do not pronounce, and the Passover meal is structured around four cups of wine and four questions.

Four is still built into religious life. Sunni Islam recognises four rightly guided caliphs who followed the Prophet and four main schools of law, the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i and Hanbali. Christian churches show the four evangelists on pulpits, book covers and domes. The cross, with its four arms, is often read as pointing to the four directions of the world, and many medieval churches were built on a cross-shaped plan. In Hindu and Buddhist art, the mandala, a sacred diagram used in ritual and meditation, often shows a square palace with four gates facing the four directions, surrounding a deity at the centre. Buddhist stupas and Hindu temples are frequently laid out the same way, so that worshippers walking around them pass each quarter of the world in turn.

In East Asia, though, four can carry a darker charge. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean the word for four sounds like the word for death, so hospitals and apartment blocks sometimes skip the fourth floor, and gifts in sets of four are avoided. This is a matter of sound and custom rather than religious doctrine. In Buddhist teaching the same number frames the path to the end of suffering, a reminder that the meaning of a number depends on the language and tradition that carries it.