Ding You · Yin Fire Rooster

Meaning

Ding You holds the lamp over the Rooster’s pure Metal, and the yin fire is born in You, the stage where a phase begins. The tradition reads a vivid, organising spirit, a light that brings out the quality of what it touches.

Ding over You: yin Fire over yin Metal, a stem that controls its branch, as Fire controls Metal.

Ding, Yin Fire, is the candle and the lamp: a focused light that shows the way in the dark. The Rooster is observant, frank and hard-working.

The zodiac reads a Ding You year as the Fire Rooster’s. The Fire Rooster is the most spirited of the Roosters: confident, vivid, a born organiser who likes to be seen. Its energy is great, and tact helps its frankness land well.

Its Na Yin, shared with Bing Shen, is Fire at the foot of the mountain (山下火 shānxià huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Fire and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1837, 1897, 1957, 2017, 2077, 2137 and 2197, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rooster month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by White Dew, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 23 January, 24 March, 23 May, 22 July, 20 September and 19 November.
• As an hour: the Rooster’s double hour, 17:00–19:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ding, sitting on You, the partner palace: You holds Xin, Ding’s Indirect Wealth, and Ding stands at its Birth 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-tori, jeongyu and Đinh Dậu, with each language’s readings of 丁 and 酉.

How Ulune calculates it

Ding You is the 34th of the sixty pillars: the 4th of the ten stems over the 10th 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 You belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Wu to Gui Mao, whose stems meet the branches from Wu to Mao and leave out Chen and Si: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 17th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences