Bing Shen · Yang Fire Monkey

Meaning

Bing Shen shines the sun on the Monkey’s early autumn Metal, Fire over the phase it controls, in a season that no longer feeds it. The tradition reads brilliance and a competitive wit that do best when they pace their heat.

Bing over Shen: yang Fire over yang Metal, a stem that controls its branch, as Fire controls Metal.

Bing, Yang Fire, is the sun: warm, generous, shining on everyone alike. The Monkey is clever, playful and inventive.

The zodiac reads a Bing Shen year as the Fire Monkey’s. The Fire Monkey is the boldest of the Monkeys: inventive, competitive, full of energy and wit. It loves a challenge, and gains by listening as well as it talks.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ding You, is Fire at the foot of the mountain (山下火 shānxià huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Fire and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1836, 1896, 1956, 2016, 2076, 2136 and 2196, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Monkey month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Start of Autumn, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 22 January, 23 March, 22 May, 21 July, 19 September and 18 November.
• As an hour: the Monkey’s double hour, 15:00–17:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Bing, sitting on Shen, the partner palace: Shen holds Geng, Ren and Wu, Bing’s Indirect Wealth, Seven Killings and Eating God, and Bing stands at its Retreat 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-saru, byeongsin and Bính Thân, with each language’s readings of 丙 and 申.

How Ulune calculates it

Bing Shen is the 33rd of the sixty pillars: the 3rd of the ten stems over the 9th 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 Shen belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Wu to Gui Mao, whose stems meet the branches from Wu to Mao and leave out Chen and Si: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 17th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences