Ding Hai · Yin Fire Pig

Meaning

Ding Hai lights a lamp over the Pig’s early winter water, which presses on the flame, while Hai also holds Jia, the wood that feeds it. The tradition reads a brave heart in a cold season, warmth that knows where its fuel lies.

Ding over Hai: yin Fire over yin Water, a stem its branch controls, as Water controls Fire.

Ding, Yin Fire, is the candle and the lamp: a focused light that shows the way in the dark. The Pig is generous, sincere and good-natured.

The zodiac reads a Ding Hai year as the Fire Pig’s. The Fire Pig is the boldest of the Pigs: passionate, brave, ready to work hard for what it loves. Its heart is big, and it gains by choosing its battles.

Its Na Yin, shared with Bing Xu, is Earth on the roof (屋上土 wūshàng tǔ): a sound of Earth, heard beside the pillar’s Fire and Water.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1827, 1887, 1947, 2007, 2067, 2127 and 2187, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Pig month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Start of Winter, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 13 January, 14 March, 13 May, 12 July, 10 September and 9 November.
• As an hour: the Pig’s double hour, 21:00–23:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ding, sitting on Hai, the partner palace: Hai holds Ren and Jia, Ding’s Direct Officer and Direct Resource, and Ding stands at its Conception 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-i, jeonghae and Đinh Hợi, with each language’s readings of 丁 and 亥.

How Ulune calculates it

Ding Hai is the 24th of the sixty pillars: the 4th of the ten stems over the 12th 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 Hai belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Shen to Gui Si, whose stems meet the branches from Shen to Si and leave out Wu and Wei: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 12th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences