Long-flowing water

Meaning

Long-flowing water is the river that runs on without stopping, from the mountains to the sea. The tradition reads persistence and breadth, a patience that gets far by never quite standing still.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Ren Chen and Gui Si, the 15th of the thirty: a sound of Water. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Water sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Water in the ravine, Water from the spring, Water of the Milky Way, Water of the great stream and Water of the great sea.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Ren Chen, the Yang Water Dragon, and Gui Si, the Yin Water Snake: a Water sound for two Water 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: 1832–1833, 1892–1893, 1952–1953, 2012–2013, 2072–2073, 2132–2133 and 2192–2193, 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 29th and the 30th, Ren Chen and Gui Si. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 壬辰 and 癸巳, 6 + 5 + 5 + 4 = 20; 49 − 20 = 29, whose 9 gives Metal, and Metal produces Water, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences