Ding Chou · Yin Fire Ox

Meaning

Ding Chou keeps a lamp burning over the Ox’s cold earth, a fire that feeds the ground it stands on. The tradition reads devotion that works without show, warmth spent on what lasts.

Ding over Chou: yin Fire over yin Earth, a stem that produces its branch, as Fire produces Earth.

Ding, Yin Fire, is the candle and the lamp: a focused light that shows the way in the dark. The Ox is patient, steady and strong.

The zodiac reads a Ding Chou year as the Fire Ox’s. The Fire Ox is the Ox with a fire inside: determined, forthright, a natural organiser who drives a project to its end. Its strength is great; patience with slower people is its lesson.

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

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1817, 1877, 1937, 1997, 2057, 2117 and 2177, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Ox month of every Jia or Ji year, opened by Minor Cold, as in the solar years 2024 and 2029.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 3 January, 4 March, 3 May, 2 July, 31 August, 30 October and 29 December.
• As an hour: the Ox’s double hour, 01:00–03:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ding, sitting on Chou, the partner palace: Chou holds Ji, Gui and Xin, Ding’s Eating God, Seven Killings and Indirect Wealth, and Ding stands at its Storehouse 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 hinoto-ushi, jeongchuk and Đinh Sửu, with each language’s readings of 丁 and 丑.

How Ulune calculates it

Ding Chou is the 14th of the sixty pillars: the 4th of the ten stems over the 2nd 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).

Ding Chou 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