In system of Plato and Aristotle, 4 elements are Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Later, the Aether was added.
In system of Buddhism, Buddha was told to invent 4 elements, which are equal. Later, as well, the Space element, also called Cosmos or Aether, was added.
The descriptions of the properties of elements are also very similar - Plato's view is little bit more intellectual, Buddhist view is a little bit more ..well, Buddhist. But the overall story is the same, by those two systems, you can think about the same 5 conceptions in two different ways or states of mind, but the elements themselves are the same.
In the Witch traditions, like Wikka, pentagon is used to point to the exactly same 5 elements - did they learn from Plato?
I searched a little and asked from MS Copilot AI in different ways, what are the historic relations between east and west in these matters. It mentioned some possible connections, but sticks with the general understanding that the elements were naturally invented, independently, just by observing the nature, and that the connections between those inventors are speculative.
It forms two possible explanations - whether there was some mystical connection between the inventors of the two cultures, for example by students of Hermes Trismegisto, who seemed to build the same kind of roots with mystics of different parts of the world. The second explanation is that there is something deep underlying these elements, and that the "experiment" of inventing them, exactly the same elements, was repeated two times. For me it's not so important, whether one or the other is true - the conclusions about the history and meaning of those mystical systems, they are very similar. In mysticism, I can see more of those correspondences, in fact enough to think that mystics of the world have been connected either physically, by having met and discussed things before we can trace them meeting, in ancient times - or, that there is something deep and underlying in reality, which has been observed several cases and given the same conclusions; the latter is almost like scientific reproducibility. I do not want to decide, which version I believe, but both are stories of deep and underlying connections, where the spiritual schools of the world shared the same views and philosophies long before we can observe their direct connections and meetings - I see more correspondences, for example the principles found in Kybalión very naturally fit some principles found in Buddhist traditions.
So, if we do not speak about the travels and secret meetings of mystery schools some 3-4 thousand years ago, when they did not have many connections we know about, we need to talk about scientific repeatability of the same mind experiments between the cultures. Those two are very interesting theories, and they both talk about deeper, more meaningful connection between the mystery schools, than just becoming friends these days. I think they both contain some elements of truth - maybe some mystician of Egipt managed to travel to India, and back, many years ago, and they had more connections than we know about, maybe even telepathically; but also, from all the possible theories, very similar principles were found the most interesting and fundamental, and settled in different schools. To decide exactly, which history you believe, is speculative, but the case that the 5 elements have the same names and attributes in two cultures, and differ only by some innate difference of thinking, where western mind forms conceptions differently from eastern - this is the fact. Copilot AI said that they both simply observed the nature and concluded in the same results - but this makes up the case where only a scientific experiment is probable to do that, you find the same numbers two times. For 5 elements out of hundreds of possibilities, it's otherwise as improbable as winning a lottery, that they would have made the same systems out of nothing.