Doesn’t the quote you provided supply the answer that it’s both?
I can think of three different contemporary interpretations I’ve heard of the four elements:
I have heard a recording from Ajahn Brahm (?this one, talk 02, otherwise talk 05 ) in which he dismisses the model as being replaced by modern physics and says the point is that the body consists of disparate elements/components and has no inherent identity.
Patrick Kearney says we can understand the elements in terms of their qualities: hardness, wetness, temperature, movement and that these are relevant internal to the body and outside it. There’s a dhamma talk of his here.
Ven Anālayo (see his two books on the Satipatthāna) suggests (my interpretation after hearing his talks on retreat) that there are basic correspondences between hard parts of our bodies with the earth, wet parts with the water, temperature with fire (heat) and breath with wind. My own simplistic memories of highschool chemistry allow me to accept/extend this with relative ease: like, there’s carbon and H2O in our bodies and in the natural world. His guided meditations are along the lines of “Don’t take your body to be anything permanent or important, it’s just going to dissolve back into the elements.”
With regard to the number of elements, a friend of mine who’s something of a vedic scholar says that in ancient Indian philosophy the number of elements was variously 4, 6, or more, and that the point isn’t to identify them prescisely but to realise that ‘neither the external world nor this body of mine are solid entities, they have shifting, impermanent components’.
Mat
(Elements in the EBTs - noumena or phenomena? - #6 by Mat)
Erik_ODonnell:
body stuff is same as the stuff we find just laying around in the environment around us
Exactly!
Yup, exactly. I have fun from time to time making artworks that try to say this.