Wood of the great forest

Meaning

Wood of the great forest is not one tree but many, a canopy that shelters whatever lives under it. The tradition reads breadth and community, a growth that is strongest in company and lasts for generations.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Wu Chen and Ji Si, the 3rd of the thirty: a sound of Wood. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Wood sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Willow wood, Pine and cypress wood, Wood of the plain, Mulberry wood and Pomegranate wood.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Wu Chen, the Yang Earth Dragon, and Ji Si, the Yin Earth Snake: a Wood sound for two Earth 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: 1808–1809, 1868–1869, 1928–1929, 1988–1989, 2048–2049, 2108–2109 and 2168–2169, 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 5th and the 6th, Wu Chen and Ji Si. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 戊辰 and 己巳, 5 + 5 + 9 + 4 = 23; 49 − 23 = 26, whose 6 gives Water, and Water produces Wood, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences