Earth of the great road

Meaning

Earth of the great road is the ground of the old post roads that joined the provinces of the empire. The tradition reads breadth and connection, a steadiness that carries others on their way.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Wu Shen and Ji You, the 23rd 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 on the wall and Earth in the sand.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Wu Shen, the Yang Earth Monkey, and Ji You, the Yin Earth Rooster: a Earth 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: 1848–1849, 1908–1909, 1968–1969, 2028–2029, 2088–2089 and 2148–2149, 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 45th and the 46th, Wu Shen and Ji You. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 戊申 and 己酉, 5 + 7 + 9 + 6 = 27; 49 − 27 = 22, whose 2 gives Fire, and Fire produces Earth, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences