Earth on the wall

Meaning

Earth on the wall is the plaster on the walls of a house, earth smoothed into a surface that keeps the weather out. The tradition reads usefulness and refinement in everyday things, a support that others lean on without noticing.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Geng Zi and Xin Chou, the 19th of the thirty: a sound of Earth. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Earth sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Earth by the roadside, Earth on the city wall, Earth on the roof, Earth of the great road and Earth in the sand.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Geng Zi, the Yang Metal Rat, and Xin Chou, the Yin Metal Ox: a Earth sound for two Metal stems, the Na Yin being a layer of its own beside the stem and the branch.
• On BaZi’s board, each pillar shows its Na Yin under its column, and its reading says what its phase is to the Day Master: the Correspondences below give it for all five phases.
• Its years, two in a row, each from Lichun: 1840–1841, 1900–1901, 1960–1961, 2020–2021, 2080–2081, 2140–2141 and 2200–2201, in the 1800–2200 table.
• In the zodiac’s table, each of the four places, the year, the month, the day and the hour, gives the Na Yin of its pillar.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads a pillar’s Na Yin from the classical table of thirty (names.ts), one for each two pillars in the cycle’s order: this one for the 37th and the 38th, Geng Zi and Xin Chou. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 庚子 and 辛丑, 8 + 9 + 7 + 8 = 32; 49 − 32 = 17, whose 7 gives Fire, and Fire produces Earth, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences