Bing Chen · Yang Fire Dragon

Meaning

Bing Chen shines the sun on the Dragon’s damp spring earth, Fire feeding the ground it stands on, which stores Water in turn. The tradition reads ardour and ambition with a big heart, energy that warms whatever it sets out to build.

Bing over Chen: yang Fire over yang Earth, a stem that produces its branch, as Fire produces Earth.

Bing, Yang Fire, is the sun: warm, generous, shining on everyone alike. The Dragon, the only creature of legend among the twelve, stands for vitality and good fortune.

The zodiac reads a Bing Chen year as the Fire Dragon’s. The Fire Dragon is the most commanding of the Dragons: ardent, ambitious, a born leader with a big heart. Its energy moves mountains; humility makes it easier to follow.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ding Si, is Earth in the sand (沙中土 shāzhōng tǔ): a sound of Earth, heard beside the pillar’s Fire and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1856, 1916, 1976, 2036, 2096 and 2156, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Dragon month of every Wu or Gui year, opened by Clear and Bright, as in the solar years 2023 and 2028.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 11 February, 12 April, 11 June, 10 August, 9 October and 8 December.
• As an hour: the Dragon’s double hour, 07:00–09:00, of Wu and Gui days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Bing, sitting on Chen, the partner palace: Chen holds Wu, Yi and Gui, Bing’s Eating God, Direct Resource and Direct Officer, and Bing stands at its Crown stage there.
• As a luck pillar or a year, it brings each Day Master the god of its stem and the god of its branch’s main qi: the Correspondences below give them for all ten.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the same pillar is hinoe-tatsu, byeongjin and Bính Thìn, with each language’s readings of 丙 and 辰.

How Ulune calculates it

Bing Chen is the 53rd of the sixty pillars: the 3rd of the ten stems over the 5th of the twelve branches, which the cycle moves on one step together, so that a stem only ever meets the branches of its polarity. Ulune counts a year’s pillar from Lichun, 1984 being Jia Zi; a month’s twelve a year through the cycle, from Bing Yin in the Tiger month of 1984 (the rule of the five tigers); a day’s by the count of days, 1 January 2000 being Wu Wu; an hour’s twelve a day (the rule of the five rats).

Bing Chen belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Yin to Gui Hai, whose stems meet the branches from Yin to Hai and leave out Zi and Chou: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 27th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences