Bing Zi · Yang Fire Rat

Meaning

Bing Zi is the winter sun over the Rat’s still water: the branch controls the fire, yet the light shines on it all the more clearly. The tradition reads brightness under pressure, a warmth that keeps its spirit when the season is against it.

Bing over Zi: yang Fire over yang Water, a stem its branch controls, as Water controls Fire.

Bing, Yang Fire, is the sun: warm, generous, shining on everyone alike. The Rat is quick, alert and resourceful.

The zodiac reads a Bing Zi year as the Fire Rat’s. The Fire Rat is the boldest of the Rats: lively, outspoken, quick to act on a good idea. Its enthusiasm carries others along; its challenge is to finish what it starts with the same heat.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ding Chou, is Water in the ravine (澗下水 jiànxià shuǐ): a sound of Water, heard beside the pillar’s Fire and Water.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1816, 1876, 1936, 1996, 2056, 2116 and 2176, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rat month of every Jia or Ji year, opened by Major Snow, as in the solar years 2024 and 2029.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 2 January, 3 March, 2 May, 1 July, 30 August, 29 October and 28 December.
• As an hour: the Rat’s double hour, 23:00–01:00, of Yi and Geng days, whose first hour it is: by default Ulune’s day begins at 23:00.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Bing, sitting on Zi, the partner palace: Zi holds Gui, Bing’s Direct Officer, and Bing stands at its Conception 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-ne, byeongja and Bính Tý, with each language’s readings of 丙 and 子.

How Ulune calculates it

Bing Zi is the 13th of the sixty pillars: the 3rd of the ten stems over the 1st 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 Zi belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Xu to Gui Wei, whose stems meet the branches from Xu to Wei and leave out Shen and You: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 7th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences