Bing mountain

Meaning

Bing, 丙 bǐng, is the first mountain of the south (S1): the fifteen degrees from 157.5° to 172.5°, centred on 165°. It takes its name from Bing, the third of the ten Heavenly Stems, yang Fire: one of the eight stems that stand round the compass, while Wu and Ji, the stems of Earth, keep the centre.

Bing carries the image of its stem, the sun at noon, warmth and light given to everything alike. On the compass it opens the south, from the line at 157.5° where the south-east ends, and with Wu and Ding it makes the south Fire three times over, the palace of Li, which the Lo Shu numbers 9, the number of the present period. A home facing Bing looks a little east of south, towards the late-morning sun in the northern hemisphere, and sits in Ren: a Kan house, of the East group.

For the Flying Stars Bing is the south’s Earth dragon and counts as yang, like Ren across from it, and its chart mirrors Ren’s: in every period but the fifth both of the period’s stars meet in one palace, at the front in Periods 2, 4, 7 and 9 and at the back in Periods 1, 3, 6 and 8, and in Periods 1 and 9 a 5 flying forward repeats the Lo Shu. Built in Period 9, a home facing Bing has both of the period’s stars at the front, with a repeated chart.

In practice

• The facing: a home whose front faces between 157.5° and 172.5° faces Bing, and sits in Ren, N1: a Kan house of the East group. The Home lens tints Bing on its dial and draws Ren dashed.
• Near its edges: within 3° of 157.5° or 172.5° many schools read a replacement chart, which Ulune shows beside the main one; within 1.5° the facing is on a void line: at 157.5° the line between the south-east and the south, towards Si; at 172.5° the line towards Wu, inside the south.
• The Flying Stars: built in Period 9, a home facing Bing has the formations Double stars at the facing and Repeated chart; built in Period 8, the formation Double stars at the sitting.
• The year: with its two neighbours Bing holds the Three Killings in some years, such as 2024, 2028 and 2032, which the classics suggest facing rather than having at one’s back. The year’s 5 Yellow visits its palace, the south, in 2026 and 2035.

Across traditions

• The solar terms: on luopan plates that carry a ring of the solar terms, Bing goes with the Grain in Ear, the Sun at 75°, halfway through Gemini in the Western zodiac.
• Facing the sun: in the northern hemisphere a front between south-south-east and south takes the sun from mid-morning to noon, the side builders in many lands give to the rooms where people live.

Origin and history

In his Dream Pool Essays of 1088, Shen Kuo described a needle rubbed on a lodestone that points south, but always a little to the east, towards Bing rather than Wu: the earliest known record of magnetic declination, centuries before European sailors noted it. A luopan reads the needle as it is, magnetic, and so does Ulune: from a map’s true bearing it takes off the declination of the place before it finds the mountain.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds the mountain a home faces from its magnetic facing, among 24 mountains of 15° counted from Ren at 337.5°: Bing takes every facing from 157.5° up to 172.5°, that edge belonging to the next, and the home sits in the mountain opposite, Ren. For the Flying Stars, Bing is the first mountain of a cardinal palace, of the group the classics call the Earth dragon, and so counts as yang: when the stars look to it for their flight, it sends a star forward. Its replacement star, from the classical verse, is 7, which takes the place of the number going to the centre when, near an edge, it is the mountain that decides.

Correspondences